BF2S Forums An Asteroid will destroy us all

(HUN)Rudebwoy wrote:

It has very small chance that an asteroid will kill us all. First of all, noone knows what kind of technology we'll have at that given time. Second: the numbers that astronomists are working with are very very great and the chance of miscalculation is very high. If they wrong by just lets say 0.000000000000001 than chances are that the asteroid will miss Earth by thousands of kilometers. Third: there are many things that even the astronomists cant see. Maybe that asteroid will pass by another asteroid or planet so close that the gravity of that asteroid/planet would change the course of the asteroid, and so on.
IMO we should concentrate on the problems at hand and not on some asteroid that will probably hit the earth in 200 years.

It will happen, it is a fact. True it's more probable that something else will wipe us off the planet before said events. A potato almost wiped out Ireland and the Bird flu was serious business in Asia. But again someone else believes you have to abandon other research in order to pursue this. It is possible to pay more attention to NEO's without giving up on other projects. The A or B only line of thinking is not practical. Your description of how high the rate of miscalculation should only promote the need for more research.

We get hit much more than you think. We are not only talking about global killers.

US DOD FIREBALL RELEASE

Fireball Detection
On 9 December 1997, sensors aboard DOD satellites detected the impact of a meteoroid at 08:15:55 UTC roughly midway between Nuuk and Qaqortoq, Greenland. The object broke into at least 4 pieces. One piece detonated at an altitude of about 46 km at 62.9 degrees North Latitude, 50.9 degrees West Longitude.

The remaining 3 pieces detonated in close proximity to one another at altitudes between 28 km, at 62.9 degrees North Latitude, 50.1 degrees West Longitude and 25 km at 62.9 degrees North Latitude, 50.0 degrees West Longitude.

Fireball Detection
On 11 January 1998, sensors aboard DOD satellites detected the impact of a meteoroid at 07:11:13 UTC roughly midway between Denver and Grand Junction, Colorado. The object was detected at 39.4 degrees North Latitude, 106.4 degrees West Longitude.

Last edited by Kmarion (2006-12-29 01:52:02)

stryyker wrote:

Truth of the matter is Physics.

Its impossible to stop a 1,000,000,000 ton rock from smashing into the earth at 181,000 Miles an hour.

--All that "landing on the asteroid" Armageddon bullshit will never work

Stop? Impossible. Deflect? Very possible.

There are already methods to deflect asteroidsof any sort. No, it doesn't involve nukes. Sending nukes into space is stupid - what if the nuke blew on the launchpad (a very strong possiblity given what it is subjected to)? Then you're screwed.

No, this plan involves a satellite with a giant mirror, using a very nifty little trick of physics. It will work with ANY type of asteroid - another advantage over nukes. It is based on sound physics, it doesn't require any radically new technology (the type of craft required is already up there in decent numbers). The only thing is you need to give it about a decade for it to deflect the asteroid safely - so long period comets will be a bit of a problem - but we're talking about asteroids, aren't we?

Finding asteroids, however, ain't easy. If you illuminated all the asteroids in the sky at night so they looked like stars - night would be unbearably bright, much brighter than day. There are a lot of asteroids out there. But most are tiny - even the big ones (I'm talking about the 100m+ ones) are practically invisible - like looking for a grain of black sand on a white beach. I mean, there just isn't words to describe how amazingly small an asteroid is in the amazingly large space. However, they DO find them - one of the ones they found is on a definite collision course for earth - in 2880 (so we don't really need to worry about that one). One more comment on the size of space - the likeliness of an asteroid hitting is incredibly low. Near misses happen all the time (the closest one has come is about 150 000km I believe). But the earth is a sphere about 15000km in diameter (I can't remember the exat figure but a few thousand k doesn't make a difference in this scenario). Tiny. Tinier than tiny. I mean, the chances of it happening... no words to describe.

In all likelihood, the first you'll know of an approaching asteroid is probably a few weeks from impact, in which case it's too late to do anything about it. Asteroids are unreflective and therefore kinda hard to detect - and the chances of anyone looking at the right patch o sky at the right time, let alone seeing it, are lower than low.

If it DOES happen, the chances of anything - anything at all - dying off is quite small. Anyone heard of the Manson impact? I doubt you have. Just a few million years from the KT impact (the dinosaur-killing one - and I can't remember if it's a few million years before it or after it ) a sizeable asteroid (100m, maybe?) hit the earth at Manson, Iowa. The amount of devestation would've been apocalyptic. Global climate would've altered for years, if not decades, following the period of intense destruction from the blast, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and hte like. But not ONE known extinction resulted from the Manson impact (that says a lot about us, too - we've done exponentially more damage to the biosphere than a 100m asteroid impacting at several hundered kilometres a seond - though the fossil record is not to be trusted as an accurate account of the number of species - or anything else, really). Though if a mass extinction DOES occur, it'll be overall, over time, good for the planet. Mass extinctions are the most effective way to drive evolution foward. Cambrian explosion? came after a mass extinction. Dinosaurs? After a mass extinction. Mammals came after a mass extinction, and then grew to an almost unrealistic degree. You had 'guinea pigs the size of rhinos and rhinos the size of a two-storey house'.

So no, I don't think we need to be worried.

I read it somewhere that an asteroid flying in a direct course towards the Earth would simply burn up in the atmosphere and would at least half its size before it were to hit the Earth, it would make a crater the size of a couple of kilometers in diameter and would barely harm the inhabitants of the Earth unless, of course, it hit the ocean and made some crazy arsed tsunami which engulfed the world and killed off 5 billion people or it hit a major city like Tokyo or something, which is self explanatory. There are plenty of craters of that size 'round the Earth.

The same occurs with space shuttles, entering Earth's orbit after a space mission or the like. They have to enter orbit at certain angles and certain, low, speeds so as not burn up.

See, if I had the ability to run at the speed of a comet, around your average sporting field, I'd burn up. It's pretty logical, because air, in fact, does provide some form of friction. Much like getting a piece of wood, and putting up against a sander. After some time, it just reduces it to nothing.

I don't know where you read that, but I think stryyker's got an answer for you to your asteroid-angle problem. I don't think any amount of air provides enough friction to stop a 500m chunk of iron travelling at several hundred k's a second. Space shuttles worry about this because they aren't iron behemoths several hundred metres across, they're plastic capsules about 20m across. What WILL happen in an asteroid impact is that the air underneath the point of entry (to the atmosphere) will not be able to get out, and pressurized air gets hot. Anything below the point of entry or the flightpath will be not so much fried - well, imagine what an atomic bomb would do to someone when they're within walking distance of the blast.

However, asteroids to blow in midair, so to speak, causing immense devestation in the vicinity of the blast. Tunguska was a good example of this. Though if it did explode over water - then you've basically got a nice big tsunami, yes. But it won't 'kill 5 billion people', not if tsunami dynamics are anything to go by. Generally islands and reefs make good blocks against tsunamis. And they generally don't get into multiple oceans with any kind of force, unless it's the kind of impact where it hits around the boundry of the oceans.

The heat caused by the asteroid generally does burn it up. That's where meteor showers come from. But at this size and speed... you're talking burning up several million tonnes of iron in a single second (which is about the time which the asteroid is in the atmosphere)

Blow the fucker up with a couple nukes. I think the US can spare a few.A few problems.

1. How do you get it off the ground? We don't have a rocket big enough to launch it. The last one was Saturn V - and tha plans for that were thrown out years and years ago. Plus there's the small problem of stopping it blowing the launch pad to kingdom come.

2. The most likely outcome of directly blasting it would be to turn it into a string of radioactive meteors. So, you send up a few nukes to blow it, and in return you get (the equivalent) of several thousand nukes raining all over the globe.

3. Trying to deflect the meteor with a well-timed blast is a clever idea (once you get around problem 1) but there's a small problem. Most asteroids are iron, very solid. Those will be deflected, and you'll be OK. But some asteroids are different in composition, and you might as well attack it with a sledgehammer for all the good it'll do.

So nukes should remain on the ground, I think.

The one that ended the Jurassic period was the size of Texas

The size of texas?! Are you kidding me? There's only one asteroid the size of texas, thanks, and that's one called Ceres. An asteroid of that size would breach the upper mantle and give the earth a totally new atmosphere (one without oxygen) and give it a lava coating. Plus there never was an asteroid impact at the end of the Jurassic. The KT impact (Cretaceous-tertiary) was only about 1 km in diameter. The worst extinction ever (the permian extinction, killed off 95% of species) was nothing to do with an impact.

Spark wrote:

The one that ended the Jurassic period was the size of Texas

The size of texas?! Are you kidding me? There's only one asteroid the size of texas, thanks, and that's one called Ceres. An asteroid of that size would breach the upper mantle and give the earth a totally new atmosphere (one without oxygen) and give it a lava coating. Plus there never was an asteroid impact at the end of the Jurassic. The KT impact (Cretaceous-tertiary) was only about 1 km in diameter. The worst extinction ever (the permian extinction, killed off 95% of species) was nothing to do with an impact.

Is Pluto (or what was Pluto) bigger than Texas? That's at least one (134340) . Dwarf planet a ball of rock and ice, same difference .

BTW the Texas size info came from a history channel special that inspired this post. It's Armageddon week.
I think I was confused as to the location. (The yucatan is near Texas). But most estimates I have seen say the size was about 6 miles in diameter.

Last edited by Kmarion (2006-12-29 02:43:04)

stryyker wrote:

Truth of the matter is Physics.

Its impossible to stop a 1,000,000,000 ton rock from smashing into the earth at 181,000 Miles an hour.

--All that "landing on the asteroid" Armageddon bullshit will never work

its possible using nukes to divert it. simply blowing it up would actually be worse than letting it hit us lol.

I watched a program on tv that the entire life span of our solar system based on the age of the sun and when it will burn out, If compared on the timeline of a day, we are currently at 10:45 a.m., hopefully humans will be around till midnight when the sun blows up, but by then, we will probably have colonized other star systems... that is, if a giant asteroid doesnt wipe us out like it did to the dinosaurs

on a second note, you wouldnt need a massive explosion to destroy an asteroid, the further away you detect the asteroid the easier it is to deflect because all you need to do is slightly alter its flight path, of course, that is if you could detect it from far away. The closer it gets the more massive the explosion you would need

Last edited by Locoloki (2006-12-29 10:36:31)

Kmarion wrote:

CommieChipmunk wrote:

cyborg_ninja-117 wrote:

But maybe some military equipment may help destroy the asteroid lol... Well if the US even put 10% of the military budget into that space program I think that will be enough.

It's so fucking immature.  I wish people in politics were a little more intelligent and would realize that killing people does nothing... fuck there is a really annoying high pitched sound coming from my computer right now.. I can't hear myself think!

It makes you wonder what we could have accomplished if we all worked together. I can imagine an alien species keeping a watchful eye over us and seeing our determination to start wars and kill each other throughout our existence. They are surley saying "WTF?".

I would be crusing around in my flying car right now if everyone would just "get along"..lol

I agree. However its during times of war that scientific discovery is enhanced as the governments pump tons of cash into research.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2006-152

Now that is cool. They have been there 3 years and havent fucked up. They should build some kind of repairing robot to go to the other robots just incase they decide to fuck up now as they should of ages ago.

IRONCHEF wrote:

Haha, somebody's been watching "Armageddon Week" on the History Channel! lol  I've been watching it too.  Loved that Siberian one.

Yeah, I was thinking that while it's likely that something big could hit and kill us all, or many of us..i don't even worry about it.  If it happens, it happens.  And knowing what I know about life (this one and the next), I'm definately not worried...it'd just be nice if the whole family goes at once.  Further, because of religious knowledge, I'm quite certain that won't be the way the world will be destroyed, so I don't put stock in it.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Damn I love religious nut jobs. They make the world a funnier place, if a bit more dangerous too.

Alot of us here in the U.S. grew up playing Asteroids. The government planted that game for a reason. We are already trained to handle this should the need arise....

arson wrote:

Alot of us here in the U.S. grew up playing Asteroids. The government planted that game for a reason. We are already trained to handle this should the need arise....

ahahahaha good

arson wrote:

Alot of us here in the U.S. grew up playing Asteroids. The government planted that game for a reason. We are already trained to handle this should the need arise....

God help us all, I would always panic and teleport my space ship only to reappear 1/10th of a second infront of another astroid and be destroyed.

Good thing the government planted Defender for plan B, so we would be trained to evacuate people after impact. 

And PacMan is to train us in manuvering through the after life with evil spirits lurking.  Plan C.  Whomp Whomp. GAME OVER

Dezerteagal5 wrote:

CommieChipmunk wrote:

cyborg_ninja-117 wrote:

But maybe some military equipment may help destroy the asteroid lol... Well if the US even put 10% of the military budget into that space program I think that will be enough.

It's so fucking immature.  I wish people in politics were a little more intelligent and would realize that killing people does nothing... fuck there is a really annoying high pitched sound coming from my computer right now.. I can't hear myself think!

So your telling me that killing Osama Binladen and Sadam Husain those terrorist leaders does nothing??

Oh no, it does something, it makes them a hell of a lot more angry.  It's like throwing rocks and a hornets nest.

Would you be pissed if someone came in and started taking over and killing your leaders?