Earth Avoids Collisions With Pair of Asteroids 256
Hugh Pickens writes "According to NASA, a pair of asteroids — one just over three miles wide — passed Earth Tuesday and early Wednesday, avoiding a potentially cataclysmic impact with our home planet. 2012 XE5, estimated at 50-165 feet across, was discovered just days earlier, missing our planet by only 139,500 miles, or slightly more than half the distance to the moon. 4179 Toutatis, just over three miles wide, put on an amazing show for astronomers early Wednesday, missing Earth by 18 lunar lengths, while allowing scientists to observe the massive asteroid in detail. Asteroid Toutatis is well known to astronomers. It passes by Earth's orbit every four years and astronomers say its unique orbit means it is unlikely to impact Earth for at least 600 years. It is one of the largest known potentially hazardous asteroids, and its orbit is inclined less than half-a-degree from Earth's. 'We already know that Toutatis will not hit Earth for hundreds of years,' says Lance Benner of NASA's Near Earth Object Program. 'These new observations will allow us to predict the asteroid's trajectory even farther into the future.' Toutatis would inflict devastating damage if it slammed into Earth, perhaps extinguishing human civilization. The asteroid thought to have killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was about 6 miles wide, researchers say. The fact that 2012 XE5 was discovered only a few days before the encounter prompted Minnesota Public Radio to poll its listeners with the following question: If an asteroid were to strike Earth within an hour, would you want to know?"
What did we do, the Lambada? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know writing headlines is hard, but this one seems to imply that earth took evasive action. The less exciting "earth does not collide with pair of asteroids" would be a touch less misleading.
Re:What did we do, the Lambada? (Score:5, Funny)
barrel roll.
Satellite fly-by to asteroid 4179 Toutatis (Score:5, Informative)
There will be a human-made satellite that will engage in a fly-by to asteroid 4179 Toutatis
The satellite is China's Chang'e 2 and it will rendezvous with 4179 Toutatis.
There are two conflicting reports of the rendezvous date -
According to wikipedia the rendezvous date will be 13th December 2012 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4179_Toutatis [wikipedia.org]
According to another source - http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/20120614-change-2-toutatis.html [planetary.org] - the rendezvous date will fall on 6th, January, 2013.
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Philadelphia Roll
(And now I'm hungry for sushi.)
Re:What did we do, the Lambada? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What did we do, the Lambada? (Score:5, Insightful)
we are NOT taking it seriously enough.
Actually, we are. A 50-165 foot asteroid can sneak up on us, but that isn't going to do much. It has less energy than the 9.0 Fukushima Earthquake, which killed ~10,000 people. If you count up all the people that die everywhere on Earth, that is about two hours worth of deaths. It just isn't worth worrying about anything that small. For big ELE asteroids, we have those tracked well enough that we would likely have years of warning, more than enough time to interdict.
We are seating ducks unless we "diversify our investments", meaning going out there and colonize other planets.
Once we get off this rock, the dumbest thing we could do is establish colonies in another planet's gravity well. It would be much smarter to build the colonies on ... near earth asteroids. We could even use some nukes to brake one of them enough to bring it into Earth orbit. Then we could disassemble it and use it as raw material to construct O'Neill Cylinders [wikipedia.org]. An asteroid three miles in diameter could provide about 50 billion tons of iron that could be forged into structural steel using focused sunlight.
Re:What did we do, the Lambada? (Score:4, Interesting)
We'd be better off setting up a train of a couple dozen colonized asteroids shifting between Earth and Mars orbits using them and a continuous conveyor belt for people, materials and critical resources to and from a Mars Colony. Terraforming Mars then building colonies on icy moons with liquid oceans would scatter us around sufficiently that only a really nasty event might threaten us.
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It's called a Mars Cycler [wikipedia.org]. More generally a "free return trajectory".
AND the trajectory is sufficiently short that people would tolerate travelling in such a fashion
You can tunnel out a pair of rings inside the asteroid, each a couple of hundred metres across, create a ring of habitats and counter-spin them for gravity. A bit of maglev to stabilise the spins. Gravity from the habs, radiation and thermal shielding from the asteroid. Pick the right asteroid and you've also got fuel, air and water. Add sunlight and you've got fresh food. People could live comfortably for years, gradually expanding throug
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the dumbest thing we could do is establish colonies in another planet's gravity well. It would be much smarter to build the colonies on ... near earth asteroids
Slight disagreement, but mostly in agreement. It would however be even dumber to establish colonies outside of a planetary magnetic field, given the rather cheap protection from radiation these provide. At least until we can create habitats that are large enough to them selves protect us from radiation, which is a ways away yet :-)
Tunguska? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, we are. A 50-165 foot asteroid can sneak up on us, but that isn't going to do much. It has less energy than the 9.0 Fukushima Earthquake, which killed ~10,000 people.
And how much energy from earthquake goes into actual surface damage? I was under impression that vast majority of it is used to shake rocks up and down, which is quite different from releasing same energy in something similar to surface nuclear strike.
I think we should be comparing it to Tunguska event rather than earthquakes. Imagine Tunguska happening over one of densly populated areas. I don't think that it would end up being 2-hours news.
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Fair point, but O'Neill cylinders have artificial gravity via centrifugal force on their inner surfaces. Research point for someone there to see how much that changes things, but even setting up a workable environment for, say mice, to investigate the effects will probably cost quite a bit.
Re:What did we do, the Lambada? (Score:4, Funny)
We are seating ducks
Not quite as good as "escape goat" but still amusing.
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Whatever flashy headline was used to attract readers to the fact that there are potentially *a lot* of undetected large objects that could wipe us out was worth it. I mean, this is serious shit, and we are NOT taking it seriously enough
If a big rock was headed this way, what exactly could we do about it? More advance warning just means more days of fighting/looting/burning.
Re:What did we do, the Lambada? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, no. We've been looking pretty closely at the skies for a while now, and the odds that there is an undetected object large enough to threaten extinction are now pretty low. It's the one's in the "oh, crap, we hope this doesn't hit a populated area" that are a problem, but they're pretty rare objects and even rarer events. Such flashy headlines mostly serve to excite the excitable and panic those easily panicked and those who really don't understand the situation at all. The popular press has significantly overstated the threat.
We, as a species, are taking in about as seriously as we can. We're looking for and cataloging the objects and predicting their tracks, and that's about the best we can do for the near future.
Absent a Manhattan or Apollo level project, we simply can't usefully colonize other planets. With such "waste anything but time"/"near blank check" level projects, we're a century or more away from being able to do so - there's simply too many "unknown unknowns" in creating a colony or system of colonies that can survive if the Earth is wiped out. The odds are far too low to justify to cost.
Understanding the implications is one thing - objectively understanding the overall issues is another.
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Ever heard about lottery? We could win!
This fact still does not justify wasting your money on a lottery ticket.
What if we spent all of our efforts building an astroid shield and a GRB goes off nearby and cooks the planet? If we happen to have won that lottery you would look pretty stupid worrying about asteroids when you should have been building a gamma shield.
Resources are finite. We must all choose our battles carefully based on evidence rather than arbitrary fears or hopes.
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Incorrect
No, it isn't really. It is in fact quite correct. The chance of getting hit by an asteroid is infinitesimally small. Chances of getting killed by one is a lot higher. According to Alan Harris, any persons lifetime odds of being killed by an asteroid is about 1:700 000. Not high, but higher than getting killed by a terrorist.
History doesn't really matter. What is relevant is future. Remember, if a big one hits, that is about 6 billion people dead. So, that drives the odds up quite significantly.
http://blogs [discovermagazine.com]
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"As I said before"? Whoever you are, log in or get an account.
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Ever heard about lottery? We could win!
This fact still does not justify wasting your money on a lottery ticket.
It depends how much the lottery ticket costs. A couple of euros a week is no more silly than buying a couple of chocolate bars.
What is definitely not a good idea is spending 90% of your annual salary on lottery tickets, and impoverishing yourself on the remote chance of striking lucky.
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It depends not just on how much the lottery ticket costs, but also the odds of winning and the payoff.
For instance, in the recent big Powerball jackpot on this side of the pond, a $2 ticket had a 1 in 165 million odds of winning a jackpot worth $550 million. That means that, on average, your $2 ticket is worth 550/165=$3.33. Which means it's not really a losing proposition to have one.
Now, I wouldn't give up something essential to get one or even a bunch of them, but taking a shot at it is not necessarily a
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Ah, sorry, the lottery is a serious long-shot compared to death by asteroid. The reason is, given the right asteroid, when someone wins, everybody wins. it's a little bit as if, as the mega jackpot gets bigger and bigger, the number of people who will win the entire thing when the numbers go right increases each time. So, what is the chance? About 1:700K. Doesn't sound like a lot.
You are more likely to die in a fireworks accident, but you are less likely to die by terrorist attack than you are to die by ast
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Earth's next trick is to move 3 million miles farther out from sun to stop that pesky overheating problem
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I know writing headlines is hard, but this one seems to imply that earth took evasive action. The less exciting "earth does not collide with pair of asteroids" would be a touch less misleading.
Only if you're an absolutely literal type with no glimmer of subtlety or imagination in your response to the external world.
So, yes, I can see it would be a problem for a lot of slashdotters.
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I was thinking the same thing. Did someone jam the breaks, or swerve out of the way?
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It's a common use of the word avoid. Why would you even bring it up? Nothing implies the Earth did anything.
Because the common use of the word avoid implies it WAS going to collide, but then something changed and it did not. While mixing units is MUCH more commonly done, and not technically wrong just a pain to do the conversions.
Not really. If you say "the child ran out into the road without looking and narrowly avoided being run down by an eighteen wheel truck" it doesn't imply that the child or the truck did anything to avoid the collision, it was just lucky their paths didn't cross, as here with Earth and the asteroids.
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would I want to know? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course! Time for a quick trip to the whorehouse, then a quicker trip to church to get saved.
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For the love of Pete! Where's your towel? You can't go anywhere without a bloody towel.
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I'm not into the whole church thing. Too irrational and I think sci-fi is better story telling.
An hour is not enough to get the whorehouse from where I am, but plenty of time to get on the net, pants around my ankles, and hell to rationing the lube....
Re:would I want to know? (Score:5, Funny)
Of course! Time for a quick trip to the whorehouse, then a quicker trip to church to get saved.
After what that priest did to me, I'm gonna have to pray with the hooker...
Re:would I want to know? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually knowing could be very useful, depending on the size of the object and the impact site. You might be able to get to high ground to avoid a tsunami. You might be able to hang out in a cavern to avoid debris fall. You could even renting a plane or catching a quick flight if any were still available. This all presumes an impact significantly smaller than an ELE.
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Or, you know: Just use the opportunity to finally call up Dude to buy some smack, bang it with whatever filthy apparatus is available, and the
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I'm not sure the prostitutes would bother staying "open" for business
So, go to the sauna instead. You do have your towel with you, do you?
If an asteroid were to strike Earth within an hour (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If an asteroid were to strike Earth within an h (Score:4, Funny)
And that is diffrent than any other friday, how?
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Did you write that sig especially for TFA?
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Re:If an asteroid were to strike Earth within an h (Score:5, Interesting)
I would definitely want to know. I would leave work, buy booze and party like there is no tomorrow.
But there would almost certainly be a tomorrow. The asteroid was only 50-165 feet in diameter. That is about the estimated size of the Tunguska asteroid/comet, which killed zero people. Even if an asteroid that size hit the ocean or a major city, 99.9% of the people on Earth would survive.
If we were hit by the bigger (three mile diameter) asteroid, it would only have 1/8th the energy of the Yucatan asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Unlike the dinos, we have the ability to eat canned food and stored grain, so many if not most people would likely survive.
Re:If an asteroid were to strike Earth within an h (Score:5, Insightful)
Also keep in mind, that all the dried dead plants from lack of sunlight will give rise to plenty of inflammable carbon fuel lying around. We are talking about a world wide wildfire. It is interesting how some people think of meteorite as something like a huge nuke, that will kill everything directly/instantly.
Close calls like these do need to be made as sensational as possible, to remind people how important it is to not put all your eggs in one basket, and why cutting NASA's budget is like deciding to do away with life jackets on a ship, so as to "not waste money".
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Actually, a small remainder of civilisation could probably survive even if the sun got blotted out for years. There would be massive starvation and conflict, but bear in mind we have the technology to generate our own sunlight. It wouldn't be too hard to rig up some floodlights that provide crop-friendly wavelengths and shine them over some fields. Obviously not enough to feed the entire world, or even an entire country (hence starvation and conflict) but almost certainly enough to keep a sizeable populatio
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Your rosie outlook rather depends on humanity acting logically and collectively after the impact. What's more likely is mass panic, murderous conflict over extreme shortages, and a large part of the global damage done being self-inflicted.
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Arbitrary Rule of Thumb (Score:2)
Re:Arbitrary Rule of Thumb (Score:4, Funny)
I'm worried that if you tell Republicans there's oil in asteroids, they'd try to have them delivered to Texas.
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Soon as you can convince the Republicans there's oil on asteroids, of course.And as long as democrats can milk a few million out of it by "saving the asteroid", you betcha.
It is our kill switch (Score:2)
Obligatory Mayan apocalypse (Score:2)
Fearmongering much? (Score:5, Informative)
I guess "Asteroid Misses Earth, Just Like It's Done Every 4 Years For Millennia" just wasn't catchy enough
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I guess "Asteroid Misses Earth, Just Like It's Done Every 4 Years For Millennia" just wasn't catchy enough.
What I find interesting is the helpful picture of what an asteroid "50-165 feet across" might look like hitting the Earth. Boy, the size of a foot sure has changed since I last checked...
Surprising number (Score:4, Interesting)
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Just looking at the numbers I'd place the odds at high of an impact. We're coming up on a hundred year anniversary of Tunguska so I'd say we're due for a similar impact any day now. It could be tomorrow or a hundred years from now but statistically we're due now.
We're not 'due' for anything. The fact that a devastating impact didn't happen yesterday does not increase the odds that it will happen today, it's not as if somebody decides to send an astroid in our direction because he looks on his impact calendar and decides it's been quiet for too long. If every day has an equal likelyhood of a devastating impact happening the average outcome will reflect that likelyhood without days or impacts infuencing each other.
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The fact that a devastating impact didn't happen yesterday does not increase the odds that it will happen today
No, but the point is that the odds of a devestating impact not happening in the next X years are very low if there has been on average a devestating impact every X years in the past.
If I toss a coin, whether I got a head the last time has no influence on whether I get heads or tails on my next throw. But I can still say that the odds of my not getting a head in the next hundred throws are vanishingly small.
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Seriously dude, learn how statistics and probability work.
Consider this a jar problem with black and white marbles.
This isn't a jar problem where you're taking out a white marble everyday (no asteroid impact) and tossing it away which increases the chance you'll eventually pull the one black marble in the jar (doomsday).
This is a replacement problem. That white marble you pulled goes right back in and the probability you draw the one black one is equally likely on any given day.
Re:Surprising number (Score:5, Informative)
No he's not wrong. You don't understand statistics and probability.
An ordinary coin has a 50% chance of landing heads.
If I toss it, and it lands tails. The next time it is no more likely to land heads. It's still 50%.
If I toss it 3 times and it lands on tails each time, the next time it's still 50% chance it'll land on heads.
If I toss it 100 times and every single time it lands on tails, guess what the probability of it landing on heads the next time is? Yup, it's still 50%.
They are independent events. The coin has no memory.
Likewise if there is an X% chance of a asteroid hitting the earth on and particular day, the fact that one has not hit the earth today does not in any way affect the chances of it hitting tomorrow.
They are independent events. One asteroid doesn't know what another asteroid did or did not do yesterday.
Likewise similar myths about choosing lottery numbers based on previous numbers are all wrong. Despite this, the mathematically ignorant nearly all think they are right.
This bears on your pro-gun arguments. You don't understand statistics. You just google and copy from pro-gun sites, anything you think sounds like it supports guns, ignoring the ones that don't sound like they support guns. You have no basis on which to judge their veracity.
You honestly think copying and pasting data for which you don't understand the stats will somehow progress your particular passion. It doesn't.
And you don't even have the manners to attribute the source of your copy and pasting. Which lowers to point of engaging with you even more.
Re:Surprising number (Score:5, Insightful)
You're just digging yourself deeper.
On Sunday you receive the following information: Uncle Bob will be dropping by this week.
Unlike the coin or the asteroids or the lottery, Uncle Bob DOES have a memory, and he has specified a window in which he will appear. (dependent events vs independent events, and time constrained rather than probabilistic.)
That you don't realise this isn't even the same class of problem shows you have even less understanding of prob and stats than was clear before.
You use statistics the same way Creationists use it, not understanding the simple process of "selection".
Selection? Related to the problem of asteroid hit probability? You *are* a moron.
The game show/door problem is the classic Monty Hall problem. It DOES involve selection. Unlike asteroid hits. Again showing you don't understand the class of problem.
If there is an event that is inevitable within a certain time frame, each day it doesn't happen chances are it will increase the following day.
Repeating again, because you are a moron, asteroid strikes are not that kind of problem. There is no particular time frame in which a strike is inevitable. (And furthermore, unlike the problems you brought up, there is no limit to the number of strikes in any particular time frame.) Asteroid strikes are a pure probability per unit time problem.
Again, this reflects on your pro-gun arguments, in that for example you are unable to differentiate between stiffness of gun control legislation stats, and guns per person stats.
You try to pretend you are more intelligent than you are by googling and copy/pasting. It doesn't work. You have to actually understand the stuff Google finds.
Have you never heard the maxim it's better for people to think you;re stupid, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt? You're parading your ignorance like you were walking around with your pants round your ankles.
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You are essentially claiming that asteroid hits are random events in the same way that coin tosses are.
They are. You're probably confused because it occurs to you that the asteroids and planets are in particular points in space, with particular velocities, and follow the rules of physics.
What you're missing is that this also applies to the coins.
The date for the impact is well known and pre determined. It is just not known by us.
Then who is it "well known" by? The aliens that have been abducting you?
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Well, as much as I probably agree with your general point, the fact is that we've had far more people killed by "Arab Rednecks" over the last 50 years than we have had by meteorites.
Considering that the modern world was pretty much born after 1945, and historical memory is short, our spending priorities make rough sense - not to mention that really it's only been the last 30 years or so that we've had the tech to (maybe) make a difference to an inbound meteorite anyway.
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Earth's cat-like reflexes never fail to impress.
Pretty remarkable how many there are (Score:3)
I figured objects getting so close would be a very infrequent occurrence and at that range gravity would surely pull the object into us. I'm not sure if it's good news that objects have to get much closer to get sucked in or bad news that we're seeing so many near misses.
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Gravity is a very weak force, it also gets weaker in an inverse square relationship with distance.
Consider that on the very surface of Earth, the entire planet is pulling on you with... what? 150-200 lbs of force? Jump into the air, and you have literally applied more force as you jumped than the entire planet pulled back on you due to gravity. Of course, you came back down, but that's because gravity was pulling on you the whole time, but you still could outpace it during the time when you were in conta
8 Days Early (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:8 Days Early (Score:5, Funny)
Be thankful for the rounding error.
WWIII (Score:3)
It sounds like if there is a World War 3 and any humanity manages to survive, we will be extinct in 600 years since WWIII will probably set us back far enough that we will not have the means to stop the 4179 Toutatis when it comes around for the last time.
Asterix and Obelix (Score:5, Interesting)
You know that the Gauls in Asterix are only afraid of the sky falling on their head. And their favorite exclamation is 'By Toutatis!'.
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WOW! 25 years after reading the entire book series (several times over)... you point out this astonishing fact I had never before realized!
Re:Asterix and Obelix (Score:5, Interesting)
You know that the Gauls in Asterix are only afraid of the sky falling on their head. And their favorite exclamation is 'By Toutatis!'.
That's because Toutatis was a major Celtic god [wikipedia.org]. The naming of the asteroid happened in 1989 [wikipedia.org] i.e. after the Asterix books had been using it for a while.
So the naming was presumably a deliberate reference to the Asterix books, or at the very least it used the same god as its basis.
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And I learnt about Orgies, very messy orgies.
Ask the Magic 8 Ball. (Score:2)
The fact that 2012 XE5 was discovered only a few days before the encounter prompted Minnesota Public Radio to poll its listeners with the following question: If an asteroid were to strike Earth within an hour, would you want to know?"
Seriously, would it really matter? That said, assuming that were to happen, yes--I would personally like to know, so if I am one of the only few remaining survivors I would at least know what just happened and what the fuck is going on. But if you end up dying in an hour with everyone else, it's not like it matters much.
We need an urban Tunguska to wake us up (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously over your city, not mine.
Sadly, it's essentially career ending for a politician to support funding for "crazy stuff" like asteroid detection or diversion. Perhaps if they claimed they'd received it as a revelation from their favourite brand of Invisible Sky Giant it might be considered rational though.
Re:We need an urban Tunguska to wake us up (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't work: The US has had several major cities completely wrecked by hurricanes and flooding in the past decade, and still doesn't seem to think that this might be a problem we should look into addressing more thoroughly.
How is this news? (Score:4, Funny)
Earth Avoids Collisions With Pair of Asteroids
This has been happening every day for years.
Correction: "We already HOPE that Toutatis ... (Score:3)
Neglecting to consider that Toutatis could easily hit another (or pass very near another) reasonably sized object, thereby modifying it's course enough to hit us on its next pass.
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Neglecting to consider that Toutatis could easily hit another (or pass very near another) reasonably sized object
Yes, I'm sure Lance Benner of NASA's Near Earth Object Program forgot to check whether there are any such objects in the vicinity. Better tell him quick.
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Jeezus, NASA (and others) find new objects of Toutatis's size nearly on a daily basis, how many smaller objects do you think there are , most of which are uncharted - for the obvious reason that they haven't been detected yet?
But, you're confident that some guy at NASA (trying to sound important) "knows" that none of them are going to affect Toutatis's path without telegraphing that information to him first.
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But, you're confident that some guy at NASA (trying to sound important)
(doing his job)
"knows" that none of them are going to affect Toutatis's path
I'm confident that the guys at NASA know better than any of us how large and how close an asteroid would have to be to have such an effect, and the probability of such an asteroid remaining undetected at this time. If they're doing their jobs properly, they probably have a very good handle on those numbers, and it seems reasonable to assume that such an event is too improbable to mention.
Or do you want p-values to be specified whenever someone abuses the word "know" in such a heinous fashion?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
"Looking For a Friend," the home game (Score:2)
Sure! Keira Knightley is smokin' hot!
And we missed it again (Score:3)
Early in slashdot's life, at a previous passage of toutitis, I tried to get people interested in forming a group to push a mission to it, to shove it into orbit around Earth, say, around geosync, so we'd have something for a *real* space station, but noooo, you guys blew me off. Just wait till it hits, then you'll be sorry....
mark
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We'd be told. Stuff big enough to wipe us out is easily visible to amateur astronomers. Just one of those having a moral system that dictates he must tell, or one that will enjoy kicking off the worldwide orgy of sex and murder, and it's out there. The government would have the choice between telling themselves before the amateurs get it out there, in a way they choose, or making it a failed coverup attempt.
What do you suppose they'll pick?
Re:I'd want to know... (Score:4, Interesting)
I would dare say that I don't think there are very many extinction-level type events could plausibly happen anytime in the foreseeable future which could also wipe out the human race unless the incident were also actually detrimental to the entire physiology of the planet. I do not think that a collision of the magnitude that led to the wiping out the dinosaurs, for instance, would have the same effect on us. Certainly no small number of people would die, but I do believe humanity itself would endure.
My reasoning is simply this. We have intellect. Dinosaurs did not.
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I would dare say that I don't think there are very many extinction-level type events could plausibly happen anytime in the foreseeable future which could also wipe out the human race unless the incident were also actually detrimental to the entire physiology of the planet. I do not think that a collision of the magnitude that led to the wiping out the dinosaurs, for instance, would have the same effect on us. Certainly no small number of people would die, but I do believe humanity itself would endure.
My reasoning is simply this. We have intellect. Dinosaurs did not.
That's only worth something if you can apply it. We're not so good at that when our civilization support structures become non-functional. You might note that for most of our history, our intellect was enormously repressed because our civilization was primitive.
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Who said anything about civilization?
I was talking about humanity, not civilization. Evolution has gifted us with an unrivaled (on this planet) ability to adapt to all kinds of circumstances through judicious application of intellect alone far faster than physiological evolution could hope to achieve. This ability is entirely orthogonal to the support structures that you are referring to which are largely derived from technology.
Humanity would survive. Civilization? Maybe, maybe not.
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Which is my point: you're overvaluing human intelligence as a survival trait sans civilization.
There's nothing humans can do to survive a global event, much like there's nothing the dinosaurs were able to do. An asteroid impact of that scale ignites a global firestorm - a whole region of the Earth catches fire over the next 24 hours as the superheated air is rolled over the landscape. There isn't a way to think your way out of that problem - you either get out of the way (which you can only do if you have s
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Re:I'd want to know... (Score:4, Insightful)
If it was known that an Extinction Level Event was headed our way and had a fair to high chance of actually happening, I'd want to know... however, I fully understand WHY we wouldn't be told.
It wasn't. It's crappy journalism, that's all. There was a small asteroid that we didn't know about that got pretty close and that wouldn't have done anything serious had it hit us, and then there was Toutatis with its horse-shoe orbit that gets it close to Earth, but nowhere near enough to hit us, and we know that at least for several centuries, it shouldn't. You know, celestial mechanics is, after all, one of the exactest sciences that we've ever had. Someone simply mixed these two things in their mind, and many readers still do, it seems. Even here, which is a shame.
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I'd want to know if the knowledge would allow for sufficient preparation. If scientists found out about the impactor only hours before impact, I'd treat it as an unexpectedly massive earthquake. Neither would I want to know if the astral body is a wandering black hole and cannot be deflected even if its approach was known years in advance. Better die in peace.
I'd want to know if the asteroid is of manageable size and there's a rat's ass chance that we can petition our respective governments to stop all thei
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Prior art: Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
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Heck yes I would! I need to go pick up more ammo from academy.
Whatever your survivalist fantasies may be, if you can't breathe the air you're going to be in trouble.