Wow. Just a slight change in that thing's trajectory, and we'd be looking at a sizable crater over there.
Why? Why waste money on this? Do we have the technology to destroy or divert rocks like this yet in any sort of feasible way? If not there's no point in detecting them then.
People watch too many damn movies, just like the initial reaction that somehow those backwards ass Russians shot it down. Holy shit people. 🙄
So I guess if a problem's eventual conclusion isn't already known, there's no point in even starting?
Huh.
My job would be pretty damn simple if that was the case - I'd mostly just sit and stare at a wall all day, waiting for problems to come in that were already effectively solved.
I just wish we could have done everything like that. Don't bother figuring out how to use or refine crude oil until you know how to build an entire car. Don't bother researching explosives until you know how to build a rocket. Don't bother sending spy planes over enemy territory until you've already devised and completed your attack strategy.
Or hell, we can't change the weather, so why do we bother monitoring it?
You can't do a real threat assessment without finding them first. You can't hope to deflect them in time if you don't find them first.
The basic technology to deflect them exists, we've done flybys of comets, the radar tech is good enough. But it's a long way from happening, both in funding and just designing and building stuff.
Agreed. If we do a thorough analysis and find that there's no
big threat for the next 150 years, but we
do find a few smaller things that are easy to deal with, we can do that.
That's just it, until there's even a remotely feasible way of diverting these rocks any sort of detection is pointless.
Not only that but we're going to take telescope time away from real scientific research for this pie in the sky bullshit. Unless the intent is to fund the construction of more telescopes...
Flipside: If we
do find something big that's 75 years away, I think there'd be a pretty significant push to get something figured out, rather than the alternative of, 74.9 years from now, seeing a
very significant problem that's now too close to solve.
One step at a time.
The observation and threat analysis is something that's feasible to do now. Let's focus on that then. The deflection can come later on, once we have an idea of what's out there, and how urgent it may be.
Short-sighted approaches can lead to serious problems later on.
Nukes are a perfectly feasible way of diverting asteroids. If you have years of warning it doesn't take much delta-v to alter their course enough so that they don't hit the Earth.
Not to mention that it also helps to have even more years to characterize its orbit more accurately. Then if it
is a threat, allow more time to determine what it would do if it was deflected.
I think that nukes would only be effective on smaller objects though. That's just a quick little burst of energy, especially if it's a big chunk of iron and nickel.
(...then wait for the military superpowers of the world to try to figure out how to deflect it to hit a specific part of the planet. You know that someone out there would love to be able to do that.)
46% of Americans believe in creationism and 80% believe in angels.
36% of Americans believe in UFO's and that aliens have visited Earth, 10% say they've seen one, and 65% say that Obama would better handle an alien invasion than Mitt Romney.
This can lead to the potentially dangerous view of opposing this sort of thing, because "God won't let that sort of thing happen to us."
Uh huh. Okay then.
What was this then, just a playful whipping for the fun of it?
We're in a Universe that is quite indifferent about our presence in it. If physics says a space rock is heading this way, physics will get what it wants, unless we are able to wield the tools of physics ourselves.
I don't think so (it being because of the temperature.) I believe it's from the massive pressure/shock of it hitting the Earth's atmosphere. The temperature only changes at the surface, or very near to the surface. There simply isn't enough time for thermal conduction to significantly heat the interior.
For a similar problem:
http://whatif.xkcd.com/28/
It describes in good enough detail & is fun to read.
Interesting.
It is definitely being subjected to a very different loading scenario than it's seen during its life of floating in interplanetary space.
