BF2S Forums An Asteroid will destroy us all

i think you've been watching to much armageddon week on discovery lol

but i agree this will happen eventually, may happe in 20 years , or a 1000 years who knows honestly.



but ya the goverment doesnt give a shit that's plain and simple, and most of the general public is to wrapped up in there moot lives to care , until that boulder is right over there backyard

ryan_14 wrote:

Comets are just water and ice, so the smaller ones will just melt when they enter the atmosphere. As for the asteroids... well that's a different story.

The common belief now is that it was a comet that put the smack down on Tunguska. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
Due to the lights in the sky after the event. The believe it was a result of the tail.

Scary shit..

    * Testimony of S. Semenov, as recorded by Leonid Kulik's expedition in 1930.

    At breakfast time I was sitting by the house at Vanavara trading post (65 kilometres [40 miles] south of the explosion), facing North. [...] I suddenly saw that directly to the North, over Onkoul's Tunguska road, the sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest (as Semenov showed, about 50 degrees up - expedition note). The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire Northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn't bear it, as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat. I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards. I lost my senses for a moment, but then my wife ran out and led me to the house. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing, the earth shook, and when I was on the ground, I pressed my head down, fearing rocks would smash it. When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops. Later we saw that many windows were shattered, and in the barn a part of the iron lock snapped.

Last edited by Kmarion (2006-12-29 14:38:58)

Then you get smaller radioactive meteors instead....way to go!

Major_Spittle wrote:

Spark wrote:

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.

Dude, ICBMs are shot into space.  Even if it is not shot to "outter space" they still go through a launch process.

As long as you design the Nuke with safety measures, I think you would just risk releasing radioactivity and not an nuke explosion if rocket launch fails.

Any way, I would think if you deflected or slowed an astroid to pretty much any degree weeks before impact, you would likely cause it to miss earth considering how fast the earth is moving and the need for an astroid to hit the atmosphere at just the right angle to prevent it from burning up/skipping out of a real good impact with earth.  Therefore I am for shooting a shit ton of Nukes at it early and often.  Of course this is just my ass talking, and it has been wrong before.

Hmm... while a nuke has immense power it is nothing in comparison to the asteroid's momentum. Remember that if you don't deflect it enough it may miss if it kept travelling straight - but earth's gravity will cause it to go on a collision course, and that's why you need a decent period of time.

ICBM's are shot into space - 100km into space. 100km is not the same as a million km. You have to radically redesign the rocket. Again, the angle argument isn't applicable in this situation - the asteroid has far too much momentum.

This strategy involves a trick of physics whereby you can reflect the sun's light at the asteroid and it will change course (I don't know the exact details). It sounds crackpot but it's much better than a nuke - remember that some asteroids won't be deflected at all by the nuke (they're too porous, the energy will dissipate into space.)

The odds of our planet being hit with a cataclysmic meteor impact are considerably lower than the growing possibility of disaster from global warming.

QFT. In most cases by the time you see it it's probably going to be too late.

Oh, and on global warming - if we disrupt the long term cycle enough the oceans, forests and 'chalk cliffs' which store most of the world's carbon will begin to release that carbon - doing more damage than we could ever do - but we have to tip it over the edge first. But if it does happen nature will eventually fix itself and return to a state of normality. Last time, it only took sixty thousand years.

Current studies reveal that such explosions may happen every couple of centuries; however, six out of seven happen over the ocean, and few happen over populated land. We have been lucky in a sense that explosions such as the Tunguska event has not happened over populated areas. Like I said before I am not only talking about global destroyers. Had the Tunguska impact occurred over a European capital, hundreds of thousands would have perished.

Here is something ironic
Tunguska Event Responsible For Warming Climate?
It’s enough to give you a migraine, trying to reconcile all the possible factors that might contribute to climate change. But what if they’re all inconsequential, and there’s only a single event causing the warming trend? The 1908 Tunguska meteor’s explosion over Siberia is what one Russian scientist believes could be behind current global temperature rises. His paper on the subject, which claims that climate change is not the result of man-made greenhouse gases at all, is currently being considered for publication in the journal Science First Hand (published by the Russian Academy of Sciences).
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/tunguska.shtml

Dersmikner wrote:

There's no protecting ourselves (or more correctly "Earth civilization) from it. We've got to get off this shitty little rock. It's fine to stay here, but at some point we need humans to be elsewhere to lessen the chance that one damned rock could wipe out everything we've accomplished.

The answer: Spend more money on technology programs that will allow us to get to and populate other planetary bodies instead of wasting money, time, and other precious resources on AIDS patients in Africa who are too stupid to use the free condoms we give them, and the like.

For that matter, cut welfare off at one child per family and if momma can't keep her pants on, well tough shit, let em starve.

The truth is that we should have a base on Mars by now, or at the very least the Moon. Instead we're pissing away a good chunk of our resources on making sure the slowest folks in the herd are still comfortable.

That might assuage your guilt, but it ain't good for the long-term survivability of the herd.

Shitty little rock..lol . You know of something better?

Hurricane wrote:

I say we just fire some hundred thousand anti-titan missiles at the asteroid.

Turns out, however, the NASA NEO study group had received secret input that can’t be discussed, making the nuclear option doable, the NASA report relates, for deflecting even the smallest NEOs.
http://www.livescience.com/blogs/author/leonarddavid

http://www.space.com/adastra/070527_isdc_asteroids.html

Schweickart reported that by 2019 asteroid watchers will have on the books upwards of 10,000 objects with a non-zero probability of impacting Earth. "The bottom line," he said, "is that in the next 10 to 12 years, we are going to, in all likelihood, have to make decisions...not because one of these things is going to hit us...but because several of them look as though they might hit us."

cyborg_ninja-117 wrote:

Kmarion wrote:

Sgt_Sieg wrote:

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

The one that ended the Jurassic period was the size of Texas. It would take much more than a couple to move something like that coming at you at 6 miles per second. The worst case NEO we have found is 1950DA. The odds are one in three hundred right now but the numbers seem to be decreasing. It is expected to be closest in 2088 and it is over 1 km in size. That would cause large scale and possibly global damage.

I remind you that we have only mapped a small fraction. The image that is in the opening post was not detected until 3 days before it's near miss.

I think someone should tell the government that we need a solution before it's too late.

Ah. And the scientist who does will be told off by the vice-president in a military meeting, and drug off kicking, screaming and gesturing about how it'll be regretted when it does happen. Oh, the VP has to be an old, balding white man with glasses, or it isn't Hollywood.

Are we really sure that a 5 megaton nuke would not be enough to deflect an asteroid 1 km in size?  Remember, in space you only need a small deflection to keep an asteroid from hitting you.  In fact, the folks over at ESA want to shoot the Apophis asteroid with a kinetic object to make sure it is deflected safely out of harm's way.  I think they better do their homework first and make absolutely sure that the asteroid has the structural integrity to keep from breaking up when impacted by this projectile.  The fact of the matter is that the world is a little retarded.  We now know the danger of NEO's, and we do nothing special about it.  If it were up to me, I would have the space program funded to the teeth here in America, but then again I'd also have a much higher GDP and a growing CNP.  All I know is that since starting my internship in the space industry I've come to realize just how poorly managed satellite programs are let alone manned space programs or extraplanetary probes.  People just don't give a crap anymore about space.  They should, but they don't.   And what a lot of people don't realize is that the major players have been fighting a cold war in space for years.  If you want some really interesting albeit boring reading material, I suggest you visit the DoD website and look at the 2007 annual report on china.  More appropriately on topic, I suggest you all go to GAO and take a look at some of the risk assessments for satellite programs military and otherwise.  It's an eye opener.

I revived this post because the latest buzz now seems to say that we don't have a snowballs chance in hell of tracking these NEO's. At least thats what's being debated. (See previous links)

my answer to this D&ST is more along the lines of JD.

NEO heading over? gimme at least a few days warning b4 the rest of the world knows. i'll take out a huge ass bank loan and live the high life till kingdom come!

This is not one of the subjects Im well informed in at all, but seriously, if you could manage to blow a asteroid into small pieces of say 10m around then wouldnt the piece burn up in the atmosphere? Now I'm not ever sure we have the capability to do that. Actually, I think a nuclear weapon going off on the surface of a asteroid would have no effect at all. I mean whats the nuke gonna push against? On one side you have the asteroid, the other you have.....nothing. Wouldn't that just direct all of the energy towards the area with "nothing" negating the purpose of nuking the asteroid at all?