posted
Forgot to say welcome to the forum, Spektyr.
Ok, we agree on increasing funds for the NEO search. Cool. And an increasing human presence in cis-Lunar space, which would have numerous unrelated benefits.
I partially agree on the God question regarding this issue--some would feel fatalistic, some would agree with you that God wouldn't destroy the Earth (but not Christians), and some would feel that God would want us to save ourselves with the tools at hand, ie our present technology.
I don't think ak's motive is invoking terror, just fighting the inevitable apathy such an eye-glazing topic as statistical modeling of NEO collisions by talking about the jackpot--a collision. And she has mentioned both the stats and consequences of a major collision in an attempt to be balenced. Also, regardless of the odds of a global-killer asteroid, if one is on a collision course, it would be the worst disaster in over 10,000 years of recorded history, not counting the geological record. The subject is inherently terror-inducing.
Could you criticise a cancer or AIDS research fund-raiser for invoking terror, if she was using honest mortality and morbidity statistics of the diseases at hand?
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Perhaps it's only my perception of the way she's presented the information - I could certainly be flawed in my viewpoint. But it does seem to be strongly comprised of sensationalism.
Giving the odds of death by meteor strike - inaccurate for the topic as this figure is based on non-global-killer meteors. It's essentially impossible to give accurate odds without data about how often it has happened, how many there are, and so on.
Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that without this data it is more or less likely for such a strike to occur. The odds of something happening are entirely independant from our ability to do the math.
Since as you've said the most effective way to get people "awake" to the possible problem is to get them to fear it, fear tactics are certainly a viable option.
My point is that even that tact won't work. Even if you could calmly get the entire world to look at the data and agree that statistically speaking the problem does exist and should be dealt with, it won't acheive the goal. Why? Because no one wants to pay for it. Doing the end job would cost an enormous amount of money, none of which exists in any government budget without serious cuts to other things or without significant increases in tax rates. It's money no one wants taken out of their paycheck.
So instead of focusing on getting the asteroid-killer gun (or whatever) built, it makes better sense to focusing on getting the foundation for it laid.
Getting better NEO detection. Getting a better space program. In short, getting the eyes, ears, and bodies of the human race more effectively and efficiently into space. If there were hundreds of astronauts in space at any given time and we reduced the cost of moving men and women and the things they need to live in and out of space, then the prospect of moving a powerful weapon or engine far away from the Earth's solar orbit would not only be more feasible, but more politically and socially palatable.
Our space program hasn't proven it can reliably put a machine on Mars - arguably a very easy target to hit in celestial terms. Is it surprising that people are wary about spending their hard-earned money on the idea of building a device that's supposed to hit an object a mere 5 miles or so in diameter?
Get the programs going to build the space program up, refine the skills and science of putting things into space. Killing asteroids is the goal, don't focus so all-consumingly on that. Work on the in-between steps - the steps that seem more easily acheivable and affordable.
Heck, if we started working on Lunar colonies there would be a very real focus on asteroid collision avoidance. Those colonies have no protection against asteroids of any kind - no atmosphere. They would actually provide an amazing test-bed for the anti-global-killer device we'd need to protect Earth. By working on the smaller rocks we'd have more information about what is needed to stop the big ones.
While it's important to know what your intended end result is, often times the best results are found by temporarily ignoring it and focusing on the individual steps. To use OSC's books as an example - Peter didn't start posting on the net that he thought he should rule the world. He never would have gotten there if he did that. Instead he focused on the individual steps he needed to take to reach the goal.
Posts: 55 | Registered: Nov 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I am certainly not fear mongering, for any reason whatsoever. I am trying to warn people of the existence of a very real threat, which has only come to the attention of scientists in the past 10 or 15 years. The 1 in 5000 (by some calculations) to 1 in 25,000 (the very lowest anyone comes up with by using extremely conservative figures) chance of any individual being killed by an asteroid strike factors in both the large and the small strikes. The large strikes are the ones that, rare as they are, actually put the probability of death up as high as it is. The reason for this is that they kill everybody. Meaning every single last person alive. Also, incidentally, all the cows, pigs, rabbits, birds, moose, deer, tigers, horses, elephants, etc. etc. All the species we love.
Okay, now the way these things usually work is that even if individual risk is higher, large catastrophes get more public attention and effort to prevent than small ones. The classic example is automobile crash deaths vs. those for commercial airlines. Even though your chance of dying in a commercial airliner is far less, when a crash occurs, more people die at once, so it's a bigger tragedy, so we work a lot harder to prevent it.
If that holds true for asteroid impact, we should be devoting far MORE resources to preventing this than to air safety, which causes about the same average number of deaths per year (in the ballpark) but far fewer AT A TIME. Instead, we are spending far LESS.
And in my own feelings, too, I find that a tragedy in which even hundreds of millions of people die is a far smaller tragedy than one in which our entire species is wiped out at a single blow. The first one is tragic, but at least there will be someone to remember how tragic it was. At least there will be stories told, again, and songs sung, and symphonies composed. After a big asteroid strike.... nothing. That is far more tragic than any smaller catastrophe.
Also, this is entirely preventable. We have the technology to do this, or very close. Only a few years or decades of developmental work would it take to be safe from these forever. We really really ought to do it. If we wait until it's too late, we will have no excuse. We will have to say our own stupidity is why we are going to all die. I just have this belief that my species is not that stupid. <laughs> I'm not sure on what that belief is based, but I cling to it.
[ November 26, 2003, 02:52 AM: Message edited by: ana kata ]
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Tresopax, you say that the whole world's forests can't burn at once? On what do you base that? In fact, that's pretty much what they believe happened when the one that killed the dinosaurs hit. They found a whole layer of soot particles like the kind left behind by fires, only it's nearly everywhere all over the earth. There's a map in the article in SciAm that shows how much of the world's forests caught fire. It's most of it. This map represents, again, one model, depending on exactly how much stuff was blown back up into space, etc., and this was the most conservative one. Other models had shown much more of the world was burned. And the K-T impactor was small compared to some of them. The one that ended the Permian would have been a lot bigger.
In mill safety we say "Close calls mean something is wrong. Fix the problem before the real one occurs." The same is true in everything. We see that it's happened here in the past. We saw it happen a few years back to Jupiter while we were watching. Since then we've seen several of them whiz by very close to the earth. Close calls mean something needs to be done differently. We need to look again and figure out what. We need to fix this problem.
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
But why are you trying to stir up some sense that the race as a whole is aware of the problem and is taking steps, as a whole, to fix it?
Why does it matter that everyone believes the same way you do about this particular problem, especially if it's easier to lead them to the solution instead of trying to make them believe in the problem and thereby the solution?
Set the clock back a few hundred years. Claiming the Earth was round was likely to earn nothing but ridicule, hate, and probably even "vigorous censorship" by the church.
What was to be gained by trying to cram the truth down the throats of the people, especially if you could gradually feed them the math, bit by bit until it became obvious to everyone that the Earth could be nothing but round?
(I'm not saying that's the way it happened, just giving a hypothetical situation.)
An asteroid killing device (or an asteroid deflecting device) is not a singular piece of technology. It's not some magical machine for which there is no other purpose and is built from no existing concepts.
First we need better monitoring of NEO's. Who gives a flying rip if we can blast an asteroid no one can see?
Next we need reliable vehicles to deliver the payload - whatever it may be - to a distant location with extreme precision. Sure, we can put a bomb through an Iraqi window, but these are two very different things.
Finally we need something of much greater destructive power than a three-stage nuclear device, or of far greater thrust than any current rocket engine (or greater endurance, either way). In effect, we need a solution to move or destroy an asteroid.
These are three things we don't have that at a minimum must exist to stop an asteroid from hitting the Earth (assuming a conventional approach to the problem). Two of the three things are important for the space program as it is.
So why is your focus on getting the end product instead of advancing the platform for the two things that we still don't have, have many uses for, and can be much more easily supported by the human race as a whole? Once we've got those parts, the third wouldn't seem all that hard to do. Nor would it seem particularly expensive.
On one hand you've got "The sky is falling! Quick, give me 100 billion dollars to hold it up!"
On the other you've got "Hey, let's spend 25 billion to learn more about the heavens, and another 25 billion to study ways to get there safer, more efficiently, and more effectively." And then a couple years later when that's done, "By the way, using the current detection system and that new rocket sled we could build us a tool for stopping asteroids for a mere 50 billion."
It's Las Vegas baby. While you're focus on how good the entertainment is and how cheap the food and hotels are, they're draining your wallets at the table. Not exactly the same concept, but the basis is there.
If one approach isn't working, you've got the people looking at the wrong thing.
A Yugo salesman doesn't expound on the differences between his product and a new Mercedes Benz. He focuses on the economy of his product.
Divide the concept up into more popular and more digestible parts. It's not like you're lying to people to get some evil plan to fruition. You're leading a herd of stubborn donkeys to water by letting them think they're not being driven.
Posts: 55 | Registered: Nov 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:Tresopax, you say that the whole world's forests can't burn at once? On what do you base that? In fact, that's pretty much what they believe happened when the one that killed the dinosaurs hit. They found a whole layer of soot particles like the kind left behind by fires, only it's nearly everywhere all over the earth. There's a map in the article in SciAm that shows how much of the world's forests caught fire. It's most of it. This map represents, again, one model, depending on exactly how much stuff was blown back up into space, etc., and this was the most conservative one. Other models had shown much more of the world was burned.
I am basing it on the fact that it just doesn't seem like it could pass the common sense test, once you take some basic science into account. We're talking about an object one millionth of the size of the earth - it's just not going to have enough energy, given that a huge percentage of the energy would be sent back into space, the upper levels of the atmosphere, and the oceans.
As for layers of soot, that's pretty weak evidence for such a bold claim, considering you are looking back millions of years to a layer that's probably less than a millimeter thick and assuming it couldn't be caused by any of a number of other things that might create similar soot. Scientists have been known to wildly speculate about the past and future. This, I think, would have to be one of those cases.
Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Have you taken kinetic energy into account? KE = 1/2mv^2. Nearly all of that energy ends up as heat in the atmosphere. The stuff that's ejected into space mostly reenters over the next day, all over the globe. The amount of heat generated is enough to heat the whole atmosphere to oven temperatures. Even the swampy areas, with soggy vegetation, aren't spared because the heat is high enough and persists long enough to dry out the wood and leaves and so on and then combust them.
In addition, "in the sediments deposited immediately after the impact is a classic biological signature of fire; an anomalously high concentration of fern spores."
quote: As it hit, the asteroid or comet disintegrated and vaporized a chunk of Earth's crust, creating a plume of debris. WIth increasing speed, the fiery plume rose out of the crater and rocketed through the atmosphere, carrying crystals of quartz that, only moments before, had been as deep as 10 kilometers below the surface.
The plume swelled to a diameter of 100 to 200 kilometers, punching its way into space and expanding until it enveloped the entire Earth. Material then began to fall back under the influence of gravity, plowing into the atmosphere with nearly all the energy with which it had been launched from Chicxulub [the impact site]. Moving at speeds of 7,000 to 40,000 kilometers an hour, the particles lit up the sky like trillions of meteors and heated a large volume of the atmosphere to several hundred degrees, before slowly settling to the ground and forming the layer we see today.
Melosh's team calculated that the reentering debris could have ignited vegetation over a huge fraction of the globe. But nobody in 1990 knew the location or precise size of the impact, so the team could not determine the total amount of heating or the distribution of the fires. Although soot had been found throughout the world, fires need not have erupted everywhere, becasue soot could have been blown to some sites by the wind.
quote: To dry out plants and set them on fire takes 12,500 watts of heating per square meter for at least 20 minutes. These conditions were reached in two main areas, centered on Chicxulub and its antipode in India. From these regions, corridors of fire stretched westward as Earth rotated beneath the hail of reentereing debris. This computer simulation [showing the burning covering about half the landmass of the world outside the arctic areas] assumes a certain impact configuration; other scenarios incinerated even larger areas.
The study is in a peer reviewed journal. If their calculations were off, the people who repeated their work would catch it. There are papers cited from Journal of Geophysical Research and others. Scientific American has always been very sound and staid in its science. I urge you to go back to the original sources if you doubt the validity of the work. I feel a high confidence level that these figures are quite reasonable.
We also have the known fact that 75% of the species died off then. Because if even 5% of the individual members of a species survives, the species will survive, then this means that probably something like 90% or more of the individual animals alive on earth at the time were killed by this. It surely had to have been an immense global catastrophe.
[ November 26, 2003, 01:53 PM: Message edited by: ana kata ]
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Spektyr, I'm just telling people the true state of things, pointing out an actual risk of which we have been unaware until recently, and which is comparable to other risks in some ways, and in other ways incomparably worse. I don't wish to coddle people or trick them into anything. I want to tell them the true state of things.
Those other risks we devote much effort and many resources toward combating. This risk is totally preventable, unlike volcanic eruptions or earthquakes or tornadoes. It would seem wise to devote significant resources to countering this risk as well.
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
The scientific community hasn't even been able to accurately predict the influence of increased CO2 levels 10 years in advance. I'm certainly not going to believe they can accurately predict what effect an asteroid striking had millions of years ago, without ever seeing any asteroid of anywhere near that size strike the earth, based solely on hypothetical models and soot samples.
Several things...
quote:Nearly all of that energy ends up as heat in the atmosphere.
This isn't true. Most of that energy would exit the atmosphere into space. Increased heating of the upper atmosphere causes particles there to move more rapidly, which results in the atmosphere expanding into space rather than shifting all that heat back downward, based on the Ideal Gas Law. The heat would then be radiated out into space over time and the atmosphere would shift back to normal.
Even among the heat that remains in the atmosphere, the amount at the surface (where forests are) would be disproportionately small. Atmospheric dynamics cause heated air to rise from the surface, while colder air shifts down and in to replace it. Thus the "plume" of heat would be mushroom-shaped, with the vast majority of the heat spreading out higher in the atmosphere and cooler air flowing along the surface at the surface towards the impact site. This hot air above would eventually shift back down, but it would be much more gradual, and it would be absorbed by evaporating water long before any oven temperatures were reached. All this would probably mean tons of rain everywhere around the impact area, as water would evaporate quickly and as it rose, would cool and pour down on the region.
But there's a thousand other things that could also effect the situation. Atmospheric dynamics are not simple. That's why I think one could hardly predict anything at all with any sense of accuracy, much less something as bold as saying the whole world would be on fire.
Secondly... This article clearly is not implying all the forests would be on fire. The implication is that there'd be "corridors" of fire. That's not nearly as troubling, particularly considering there's a good chance much of those corridors would be water.
Thirdly... The heat created in this article seems to be due mainly to the massive impact with the crust vaporizing a huge segment of it. In my plan, blowing the asteroid into many smaller pieces would not result in this. It would result in many small impacts which I suspect, when summed, would be much less troublesome than a single massive impact.
Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Hey AK where did you get those quotes from? Is there an online link or did you hand type them from a peer reviewed Journal. I want to know if the "Melosh team" mentioned is the same Melosh that I think it is. If so I have a friend who has done some work for him.
posted
Tres, that just isn't true. The soot particles are found in a layer at the K-T boundary all over the world. The corridors are thousands of miles wide. You should read the article and look at the map. The anomalously high fern spore counts in the post impact years show that after the devastation, and once the sun began to shine again, ferns were the first things to recolonize the wastelands.
After the fire came the near total obscuration of the sun for a number of years. The "year with no summer" in 1700 something which resulted from a volcanic explosion putting dust into the upper atmosphere is a tiny tiny example of that.
The totally abrupt change of the fossil record at that time shows that 75% of species went extinct, including all land animals with a body mass over about 20 pounds. Shrews and things survived by eating seeds. Things from way up north, where the fires didn't reach, and who managed to survive the deep freeze and acid rain and all the other devastating environmental effects, gradually moved back across the ravaged continents in the decades or centuries after the impact. For a while the diversity of life was very limited. Then the shrews and things diversified to fill all the vacated niches. They became deer and elephants and people. It has happened again and again in the history of earth. It can happen again any time. We can prevent it if we want to.
[ November 26, 2003, 04:46 PM: Message edited by: ana kata ]
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
AJ, they are from the Scientific American article in this latest issue, Dec 2003 that I linked to in my very first post.
quote: In 1990 University of Arizona planetary scientist H. Jay Melosh and his colleages described how an impact could have set off fires around the world.
Unfortunately, the whole article isn't online. You can download it for a charge. I am typing this stuff in from my print copy. <quaint, neh?>
[ November 26, 2003, 04:53 PM: Message edited by: ana kata ]
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Try here. I'm sure you'll find other interesting stuff too. And yes it is the same Jay Melosh. He is my friend's PhD advisor, though her name isn't up on his site yet since she recently changed advisors.
posted
By the way, let me put in a plug here for Scientific American. It's absolutely my favorite magazine ever. I've been reading it since the 60s. It's much more readable and accesible to the layman than, say, Nature, who will discuss hymenoptera for a whole page and never tell you they mean bees and ants. Scientific American is not dumbed down at all, but it's accessible. They will say (the order of insects which includes bees and ants) the first time they use the word hymenoptera in an article, for instance.
I started out for the physics and astronomy and math articles, but gradually I read more and more of the biological ones (cause biology has been so hot during all these last decades) until I was fully up to speed. Now I try to read it all, cover to cover, every month.
Isaac Asimov made the same discovery, I found out. He read the whole issue every month for many years of his life too. He was sort of the dude who taught me about science so I grinned when I read that. Martin Gardner introduced me to many ideas of game theory, number theory and other cool stuff like that. It's just a great magazine. I have to rave about it sometimes.
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Oh yes, AJ, that's a good link! He's got some great stuff there about impact studies.
Looks like he also was involved in the understanding which we've really just recently come to that the moon was formed from the collision of a Mars sized body with the proto Earth. We've always known the Moon was a weird sattelite. It's way too big, almost a binary planet with us. But only in the past, I dunno, six year or so have they come to understand how it must have come about.
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Has the 536 AD event been mentioned yet? I think it is the clearest example of a truly disasterous impact in recorded history.
Posts: 1769 | Registered: Feb 2000
| IP: Logged |
Ana - stay on target with me here. You have expressed exasperation because "Four years later - still no asteroid defense project". I'm assuming you've either got a job where you feel you have influence over this sort of thing or you've been spearheading a grass roots campaign for this development. Apparently it isn't working and you're frustrated about that.
So why is it that every time I ask you why you haven't changed tactics you answer back with another explanation of your current tactics? Why not change course if you've spent four years going that direction and not achieved the goal?
One other thing I wanted to point out: the Jupiter strike. First, Jupiter is obscenely bigger than the Earth, and therefore astronomically more likely to be hit by an asteroid than us. It's like firing a tennis ball launcher into a parking lot. Is the ball more likely to hit the skateboard or the charter bus? Second, it's a gas giant so an asteroid impact means something very different for Jupiter. Without a better understanding of exactly what is beneath the clouds it's hard to compare the visual record of that asteroid strike to what we think would happen on this planet in similar circumstances.
Posts: 55 | Registered: Nov 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:The scientific community hasn't even been able to accurately predict the influence of increased CO2 levels 10 years in advance. I'm certainly not going to believe they can accurately predict what effect an asteroid striking had millions of years ago, without ever seeing any asteroid of anywhere near that size strike the earth, based solely on hypothetical models and soot samples.
Tres, it seems to me that your argument is basically "I don't believe it, and nothing you say is going to change my mind". Is that the case? Is there anything, short of an asteroid slamming into Earth and causing a repeat of the two known asteroid-caused mass extinctions, that would convince you of the possibility of this?
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Chaeron, I just looked up the 536 AD event after your post. I had not been aware of that one. They know about it from tree ring evidence. It's quite interesting and also had global effects, it seems.
I also came across something that mentioned that if the Tunguska event of 1905 had hit New York City instead of a remote part of Siberia, that millions of people would have died from that one. It certainly gives you something to think about.
[ December 01, 2003, 09:52 AM: Message edited by: ana kata ]
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Interesting. I almost missed this latest! The jury is still out, it seems, on the global wildfires. This is the first time I've heard 1000 degrees C, though! That would sterilize the place, wouldn't it? I heard hundreds of degrees F. Some say 400, some as high as 700. The Scientific American article said only "hundreds". This is really interesting.
For the purpose of the question at hand, I suppose it doesn't really matter how exactly an asteroid impact kills off species. But I still would like to know.
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Yes! It's at least comforting to see that someone besides me is thinking about these things. I hope we get a detailed report of what the conference comes up with, if anything.
Posts: 5509 | Registered: May 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
Off-topic: Did anybody else think this was going to be a quirky Landmark thread, judging from the title?
Posts: 2292 | Registered: Aug 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Thought I would resurrect this thread by Ana Kata in honor of Today's CNN Report
quote: Dangerous space rocks under watch Asteroid protection plan proposed
A large asteroid survey is nearing completion.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- They are out there, ready to smack into the Earth and wipe out human civilization, but astronomers said on Wednesday they are well on their way to finding every asteroid that poses a threat.
The next task will be to look for smaller objects that might just destroy, say, a city, the experts told the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space.......
posted
Looks like OSC is advocating that we construct a system to stop meteor impacts. No suggestions on how to do it, just that we should.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
It was 1999AN10, the one that made me realize what we should do. Now, five years later, finally some things are starting to stir around about this.
Will be very nice when one of you is president and I can just say, "hey, we need an asteroid defense!" and it will be done. You guys get busy on that, okay? I'm not one who can convince people and get huge movements going. I just can see what we need to do. The rest must be up to ye other jatraqueros.
[ September 07, 2004, 03:05 PM: Message edited by: ak ]
Posts: 2843 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
| IP: Logged |
(See, I think I'm up to the job of being President. I'm just not up to the job of campaigning to be President.)
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
After seeing all those movies where asteriods roughly the size of the moon come hurdling towards Earth to kill all life on the planet, I have finally come up with a suitable solution. My solution doesn't call for finese. There will be no drill team that will lower a bomb deep into the crust of the asteroid. No my method is much simpler. We grab any asteriods that come by Earth with manned shuttles or some sort of machine that can slow down the asteroid. Then we graft all of our asteroids together into one big hunk of asteroid. We finish the project by installing an engine on one end of the hunk of rock and a camera on the other end. Then when ever an asteroid that will certainly strike Earth comes by we send our huge hunk of mobile rock at a collision course with the incoming asteroid. This would either change its trajectory or result in a break up of the asteroid. One question you might be asking is why the camera on one end? We can easily use satelittes to track our flying piece of rock. Who needs a camera? The answer is simple. The footage from the camera can be used in driver's ed courses. "Imagine this is you, you're drunk and somehow you don't see the 600 mile wide asteriod you are about to collide with. What kind of fool would you have had to be to get so drunk and then drive." See, by using my method we avert the end of life on the planet, plus we convince .000001% of all drunk drivers that drinking and driving is bad thing. (The whole drinking and driving bit was meant entirely in jest, my views on drinking and driving are firm in that it should never be allowed to occur. Although the diatribe was purely a joke I would surely back any plan that would stop even one drunk driver.) The second question one might present is that it would be extremely difficult to halt an asteroid no matter what the size. My answer is this: If somehow I can control nuclear weapons with my PS2, then surely you can stop a rock from moving.
p.s.- I wrote this post after doing economics homework for about six hours straight. Thus, because of the nature of economics my sense of reality is screwed up.
Posts: 129 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
LockeT, I like that idea. But if we did have the technology to 'grab' astreroids and put them into orbit around Earth, I would personally use them as colonies. We then should be able to not hurdle those colony-laden-asteroids at another asteroid, but rather into deep space. Of course it would be hard for us to avoid this asteroid from colliding with anything else, and from the acceleration due to the 'hurdling' from killing the colonists. This is just an idea, created in the darkest parts of my brain and placed here, on Hatrack. -Liz
posted
Oh, Noemon, this is awesome! I love how they named the spacecraft, too. <laughs> So appropriate! Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Hey, look! They named MN4 (the one they were looking at last December because they thought it might hit the earth in about 25 years) Apophis! A fitting name for a potential threat to the earth. I wonder if the astronomer was a Stargate fan, or if the name was simply picked from Egyptian mythology.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
I am leaning towards mythology, they get a lot of their namess for things that way...although I would imagine NASA geeks like Stargate as well. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Here is a fantastic Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) showing what our neighborhood in the solar system looks like, just the ones we've identified and are tracking so far. I thought it was a great illustration of why we might want to keep our eyes peeled and develop some form of defense. Earth is on the third blue circle from the middle.
APODs are usually awesome! Click on the links at the bottom for the archive of all of them for a long time back. It's a cool site I check every day.
posted
ANOTHER COOL APOD animation of the asteroids in Earth's near vicinity over a two month period. All these were found within the last year, I think it said. It's a shooting gallery out there!
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Here is a very cool time lapse video of 73P / Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 as it approaches earth. Don't worry, this one poses no danger to us. I just thought this video was very cool, and this seemed like the right thread in which to post it. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Wave]](graemlins/wave.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
