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Space

How To Handle A Killer Asteroid 159

Posted by timothy from the liv-tyler's-turn dept.
SEWilco writes: "This Nando/AP article points out that there's a discussion under way of how to proceed when an Earth-impacting asteroid is discovered. The focus is the proposal "The Comet/Asteroid Impact Hazard: A Systems Approach" (Chapman, Durda, Gold) which has been circulating for several months. It's a summary of what is known, what is undecided, and what needs to be done to prepare. I do note that the discussion is assuming that all of the human population remains on Earth, except for the possibility of off-planet planetary defense facilities." I thought we were well-prepared for this already, thanks to the flurry of asteroid movies of a few summers ago. We send Bruce Willis, or possibly William J. Clinton, with a handpicked suicide crew equipped with drills and nukes, right?
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How To Handle A Killer Asteroid More

How To Handle A Killer Asteroid

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  • Re:A real threat? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was told that the telescope could clearly identify a car, allowing you to determine the model and year if it were floating in the asteroid belt . You could alternatively read the label and judge the depth of the dimples on a golf ball if it were sitting on the summit of Mt. Fuji (the telescope is in Hilo, Hawaii).

    This is all very cool, but I have to wonder if anyone has actually done this - like read a newspaper in space through a telescope on earth.

  • Project Icarus (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The first, and in fact, only serious and complete study of this question was the Icarus project done at MIT in the late 60's. Their final conclusion? You load a Saturn V up with as many nukes as you can and hope it works!

  • Re:What would Ayn Rand do about this? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "This provides a perfect example of why libertarian govenrments do absolutely none of the tasks a real government should do!"

    ...Like spending money destroying asteroids...I wondered where all my tax money was going...Dumbass

    Govt:"We spent your money on this contraption to keep asteroids away"
    You:"How's that work?"
    Govt:"Well...You don't see any asteroids do you?"
    You:"I'll take a dozen"

  • Re:A real threat? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @04:51AM (#238692)
    of large stellar objects 50 billon lightyears away

    This is one of these things where you cannot exagerate TOO much, because the estimated age of the universe is in the range 12-15 billion years.

    I was told that the telescope could clearly identify a car, allowing you to determine the model and year if it were floating in the asteroid belt.

    When Hubble looked at Asteroid Vesta [solarviews.com], it had a resolution of about 5km/pixel. So you're basically claiming your telescope has 100,000x more resolution than Hubble? Come on.

    I interned at the Subaru telescope,

    And it looks like the astronomers there had a lot of fun with you.

  • >It always amazes me that people think these guys will box by Marquis of
    >Queensbury rules instead of punching for the balls without gloves,


    Wait a minute--when you nuke someone, it's M of Q as long as youuse a missle? :)>P>

    >I don't like the idea, either, but it's the only useful thing the military industrial complex can do

    The Pax Americana (or Pax Atomica; take your pick) is the longest period of general peace (yes,there were exceptions) in europe since the Roman empire fell. That's a serious benefit (at least for Europe. But we got good trading partners and avoiding yet another war over there out of the deal).


    Today, though, there's no serious threat of a massive European war; just a few skirmishes here and there. But I'd still rather spend money on being to big to fight than havingt to fight . . .


    hawk

  • In this day and age, it would have to be a coed crew, and it would be at least a couple of weeks to get there--and in very close quarters. Do you *really* think he'd make it past the moon before someone killed him for messing with his wife? :)


    hawk


  • > Wouldn't said diety just send his giant cow


    nah, a deity might send a giant cow, but a diety would only have skinny cows . . .
    :)

  • > This is all very cool, but I have to wonder if anyone has actually
    > done this - like read a newspaper in space through a telescope on earth.


    And I thought *I* was cheap. Some folks will do *anything* to sa ve a quarter . . .


    hawk, not the master cheapskate any more

  • Actually, I'd trust a randomly selected group of Randites to be able to better run an asteroid deflection program than today's NASA. Their inability to accomplish anything remotely resembling cheap launch (considering the twin fiascos of the shuttle and X-33) really gives me the creeps in situations like this. The pretend-private-corporations/ cost-plus contractors aren't making the situation any better.

  • Because trying to get something like that into a stable orbit would be very hard and require a lot of fine control. Just nudging it a bit so that it would miss the earth would require that much control. After all the total number of paths that *DON'T* hit us is rather large.

  • No...McGuyver would use dirt, gun, the tag from his shirt, and the glow-in-the-dark part of the watch.

    The A-Team was always finding the old cars and powertools whereever they were.
  • fully equipped workshop come asteroid-destroying-nuclear-bomb-factory

    No...there would be some rusty pipes, a transmission and muffler, and an air compressor. From that they would develop the asteroid-destroying-nuclear-bomb-factory.

    Sorry - TVLand had an A-Team marathon recently.
  • We don't have enough nukes to blow the Earth into space dust. We have enough to wipe out human civilization, and, if we used them carefully, probably enough to wipe out human life (and most othger large animals with us). I doubt we have enough to wipe out all life on land, and I'm sure we don't have enough to seriously damage the structure of the planet.

    Also, delivering them to an asteroid is significantly more difficult than delivering them to another spot on Earth
  • I think you're being rather pessimistic. If we get a few years warning, say 10^8 seconds, plausible even now, and almost guaranteed with a quite affordable SpaceGuard type project, then a velocity change now of even a meter per second would be enough to change a hit to a near-miss.

    Now suppose we could use nukes to split off a 100m cube of rock and shove it away. To get the desired 1 m^s-1 for a 1km^3 asteroid (a big one) we need about 1000 m^s-1 for the other chunk, representing an energy of 2.5 * 10^15 J, or the equivalent of about 30g of matter, which, if I recall correctly is about 3 Megatons.

    Now, any such system is going to be hugely inefficient, but if even 1% of the energy of some nukes can be used to split off such a "chunk "of rock, we only need a handful of standard warheads.

    Getting them in-place and dug in within a few months of detection would be hard, but not necessarily impossible, and 10 years and a few billion $ would build the infrastructure to make it fairly routine if necessary.


  • When a killer (be it a mad man, a bunch of bees, or an asteroid) is coming after you, what'd you do?

    For me, I'd run like hell.

    As for WHERE to run... I dunno !!

  • You forgot about the laser reflectors. At least one was placed on the moon by the Apollo programme; carefully shaped chunks of glass with corner-reflectors. You shine a laser at the moon, time how long it takes for the pulse to come back, and you can work out the distance to staggering accuracy. They're getting a little dusty by now, but as they require no power they're still working fine...

  • Evaporate the oceans? I think you're overestimating the power of nuclear weapons as well... You might succeed in irradiating and heating up the oceans a bit, enough to seriously effect marine life, and vaporizing a few million gallons. Certainly, you would cause some kind of "nuclear winter" or "nuclear greenhouse" depending on which theory turns out to be right, and probably succeed in killing off most of the higher life forms on Earth. But I suspect the oceans themselves would be largely unchanged.

  • Most of the blast of a nuclear bomb exploding in the atmosphere comes from heated air. The actual vaporized mass of the bomb is not that large. A bomb detonating in space will result in a big flash and not much more. The radiation energy will not be efficiently converted to kinetic energy. You need to send some really big tanks of water or other working mass along with the bomb.

    According to some back-of-the-envelope calculations I did with a friend it would take tens of thousands of tonnes of working mass and the biggest f**ing nukes currently available to deflect a 1km body even if it is discovered more than a year before impact.

    -

  • Why not use the technology mentioned here [slashdot.org] and build a huge NanoNet to catch it.

    Before you catch it you attach a large mass, say some of the old satellites/space junk, at the end of a long NanoBungi attached to the NanoNet and set it off towards the sun.

    Time this so that the asteroid is captured in the NanoNet just before the tension takes in the NanoBungi and leave the rest up to gravity and the sun.

    NanoCatapult

    Stupid idea! Just wait and see!

  • I think the problem is that if you target the actual "rock", you wind up with lots of smaller fragments. Each of which is excedingly lethal. The trick is, if I'm not mistaken, to blast to the side/front to deflect it or slow it down enough that it will miss earth.

    That... and do we even know what happens when you set off a nuke in space?? has that been studied/thought out?? Anybody??

    -Andy

  • Unfortunately, we're just at the beginning... (Score:5)

    by trims ( 10010 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:12AM (#238709) Homepage

    ...everyone likes to say "Now, for the first time in History, there exists a species on Earth that can do something about a earth-impact"

    Unfortunately, that's just not true. Currently, even if we had bought the proper equipment, there is very little we could do to stop a 1km+ rock (or, esp. a comet) from coliding with the Earth. Basically, we've got the technology right now to see the hit coming, but not really do anything about it. Nukes and other missile-like interceptors aren't good enough, we don't have good enough energy weapons, and our space-flight technology isn't up to the task. So, basically, if we see something coming in the next century, we're fucked.

    So if we can't stop it, can we prepare for it? Unfortunately, I'm going to have to say no to this is too. There's no way we could put away enough food and supplies to feed even 0.1% of the populance for the required decade or so after a major earth-impact. Most likely, the best we could do would be provide for 10,000 or so. And a modern Democracy simply isn't going to be able to sustain this kind of project - it would run hundreds of millions, and that's not going to fly with the voters. Sorry. And, honestly, is that money well spent? To spend perhaps billions over the years on something that has a 0.0001% of happening, or use the money to stop ozone depletion/polution/pick your favorite Earth Day project.

    So, what's our best bet? Work like hell to get to the point where we can defend ourselves. The good news here is that spending on this kind of thing has all sorts of other uses, besides "impact defense". We need to spend lots on making spaceflight cheap to get orbital (and preferably Moon-based) stations going on a large scale. Faster and more practical space propulsion (ion engines? Space Sails?) Advances in energy and kinetic weapons that could allow us to pulverize a potential threat while still several AU away. Multiple large Hubble-like detectors scanning the heavens.

    The point here is that realistically, there is very little we can do right now. However, given the proper schedules, funding, and willpower, we could have the defence capability by the 22nd century. And along the way, invent a whole lots of other stuff that we can really use. Think of it as the Moon Project for the 21st century.

    -Erik

  • "Lemonade Solution" (Score:3)

    by RayChuang ( 10181 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:08AM (#238710)
    I can't believe that everybody here on /. thinks that the best way to stop a very small asteroid on a collision course with Earth is to blow it up.

    I'm surprised NOBODY here has thought of this solution: use a braking rocket or solar sail to slow the asteroid and nudge it into the L1 zone of equal gravitational pull between the Earth and the Moon.

    Crazy? Not when you look at what composes an asteroid--a list of strategically-important minerals out of the wazoo, often of higher quality than even minerals on the Moon. It could become the base material to build space colonies between the Earth and the Moon.
  • would be enough to change a hit to a near-miss

    Well that doesn't sound so great -- why would we spend all that time and effort just to have it NEARLY miss us?

    ---------------------------------------------

  • Just Move Out Of The Way (Score:3)

    by PRickard ( 16563 ) <pr&ms-bc,com> on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @12:17AM (#238712) Homepage
    If everybody will jump up and down at the same time, Earth's orbit will shift and the asteroid will miss us by miles. We could at least jump enough so the thing only lands in a place nobody cares about - like France or Seattle.
  • I don't think starvation is as big an issue as you make it out to be. Human's have many forms of energy that can be used to power full-spectrum bulbs to grow plants and heaters to keep us cozy and warm. As long as people can remain civil in a time of disaster, we can likely survive another ice age at this point in human development.
  • Well, having recently rewatched Superman II: the blast wave breaks the Phantom Zone prison that has drifted into Earth's solar system and releases General Zod and cronies to come and plague a powerless man of steel and the rest of Earth with horribly bad acting and worse dialog...
  • been done,
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/28/0172 57 &mode=thread
  • The problem with nuking them is that it's not predictable how they'll break apart, and thus, rather than having one big asteroid that may or may not hit, you'll have lots of smaller, more radioactive ones, some of which would hit, some of which wouldn't.

    Which would be bad. Maybe not as bad as getting hit by the whole thing, but for a sufficently large asteroid, it wouldn't make much of a difference to us.
  • Let's assume a rocket weighs 1000tons (I don't really know, I'm just guessing). The force to move it just to get it out of earths orbit would consume near 700 tons of fuel (70% of the fuel to a rocket is consumed in the first 11 minutes, and that's just to get out of orbit). 700 tons to move an average of 500 tons of rocket for 11 minutes.. A relatively small asteroid (that might be oh, say, the size of 4 to 5 football fields), which is probably the smallest we'd be concerned with, would weigh about 1.6 million tons. To push on it hard enough even to make it start spinning would take (by the calculations above) 1600000*700/500 or 2.2 million tons of fuel.. And that's just for 11 minutes of burn time without considering getting that much INTO space (did I mention the rocket would have to weigh far more than the asteroid?). Though, it does have valid upsides:

    1) Usage of all available fuel, ever, makes cars instant antiques. No more 2 bucks a gallon fuel, that's for sure.

    2) One large ass firecracker.

    3) We could use redmond as a launching pad. That would probably sanitize the area nicely.
  • Well said. This is why I say that Republicans are right for the wrong reason about SDI ("Star Wars") missile defense. The truth is, if I were (insert bad guy with a nuke) I'd NOT want to shoot the still armed-to-the-teeth with nukes USA with a missile. Missiles leave trails back to me, and I'd like to survive to be a dictator tomorrow if I can.

    I'd use diplomatic pouches (sorry Customs! Can't search this!) to bring in the components needed for a car-trunk nuke, or just smuggle them in -- perhaps with some coke! It always amazes me that people think these guys will box by Marquis of Queensbury rules instead of punching for the balls without gloves, but the fact is that missiles aren't the dangerous part, it's WARHEADS. Warheads are small (and getting smaller) and missiles are delivery systems only, just like rental-cars or freighters. In all my scenarios where I'm the bad guy, Washington DC ALWAYS becomes a few square miles of glass as fancy-schmancy "Brilliant Pebbles" orbit above, impotent. (This subject & line of argument makes me very unpopular in debates, needless to say, because I'm so obviously-right! Kinda like debating the tax-&-spend war on (some) drugs, it's easier to avoid me than to face me.)

    Anyway, with proper sensing technology, properly-far-out in space, an intercept can veer an asteroid off-course and prevent humans from becoming dinosaur-extinct, IF! we can get over the idea of having weapons (probably nukes, but possibly others if they have sufficient kinetic energy) in space. I don't like the idea, either, but it's the only useful thing the military industrial complex can do (and they and the politicians they own are determined to spend my money). There was even an early (James T. Kirk era) Star Trek episode about this subject, only they used a (less realistic, IMO) ground based directed energy weapon to divert the big rock.
    JMR

  • "What's all this asteroid jibba-jabba?!"

    "I pity the foo who tried to set up us the asteroid!"

    "1-800, then Colle.." oh, never mind...
    --
  • As George Carlin says - it isn't a near miss, it's a near HIT! [WHOCK!] Look... it nearly missed.
    --
  • In regards to 4) and 5)...

    You could work up some even better conspiracy theory about how the US and Soviet governments were in cahoots about the whole Cold War, and are nothing but puppets of [pick your favorite supervillan, big corporation, oil conglomerate, or alien civilization]. Hey, it's just as likely as most of the other theories...
    --
  • I saw something on I believe Discovery about him and his efforts. He's a brilliant guy. I hope he can get support he needs to really watch the heavens as intently as we need to be. If anyone is interested in that sort of thing, that special on Discovery is sure to repeat so keep your eyes out for it.

    --

  • We have enough nukes to blast the surface of this planet to pieces a couple who knows how many times over. But destorying a planet is tough, this isn't Star Wars, if you placed every working nuke on this planet, over the entire surface, evenly spread, and blew em all off simmoltaneously, the diameter of the earth wouldn't change all that much. Might knock a few steep mountains down, vaporize all organic material, and maybe even evaporate the oceans, but the rock would be largely uneffected...... it might liquify a lot of it for a short period of time, but you'd at best be left with a very igneous rock based shell.

    People tend to think of nuclear weapons as just big conventional bombs. Nukes are thermonuclear fireballs, they have enough concussive force to blast buildings down, but not much else, and rock is pretty resistant to heat. Regular bombs rely a lot more on the concussive forces, which is why they leave big craters, and blast rocks apart.

    Don't get me wrong, nukes have concussive force, but their big claim to fame is the heat and range, not the "knock down" capabilities. those are just handy side effects.
  • Yeah, your probobly right. Even if it did..... what's gonna hold the temperature high enough to keep it as vapor? Anything that vaporized would probobly recondense after the bifg fireworks display was all done.

    Now ya got me curious, let's do it! Nothing to lose but our lives!
  • Didn't he say that in a bar sometime?
    ------
    I'm an assembly guru ... What's a stack?
  • > A hundred years ago, oil bubbled up out of the ground. You could dig up coal with a hand shovel. Nowadays, it takes so much technology just to extract fuel and ores that, if the technology were unusable, there would be no way to get the fuel and raw materials needed to build the technology.

    A hundred years from Judgement Day, oil will still be diggable with a shovel - just head for the ruins of the cities and throw the plastic, styrofoam, and polyethelene over a fire to make oil. Metals will also be widely available where the cities once were, and in many cases, already refined.

    IIRC, this type of "mining" (most valuable commodity: copper wire) is already taking place in the mostly-abandoned military complexes of Siberia.

  • Re:What cracks me up is...... (Score:3)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @08:16AM (#238727)
    > Fatalities would probably be much higher than 50% per city in the event of a global war; the complete breakdown of almost all social supports means that not only do the injured or buried have just about no chance of getting aid, but anyone in a big city is going to start getting really hungry pretty soon

    This is a self-limiting situation. If there's enough food for 3 million survivors for three days, and 90% of them starve, the 10% remaining have a month's worth of food.

    That month is long enough for the clued survivors to leave the cities for the farms on the countryside. The unclued ones, well... I guess it's self-selecting as well as self-limited.

    With a lack of infrastructure (particularly fuel), modern factory farms will be starved of production capacity. That's where the urban survivors come in - to haul tractors, combines, etc, and/or use their skills at repairing equipment.

    You end up with a much smaller economy, but it's still a functional economy. Land is valuable, as are mechanical/electrical skills. Those without such skills can trade labor for food.

    Everything I just said applies just as well in the event of asteroid impact (i.e., multiple fragment impact, not K/T-boundary impact!), and better, because you don't have the issue of fallout affecting crop yields and the health of the laborers.

    Bottom line: It (be it global thermonuclear war or a series of asteroid fragment impacts) would majorly suck. But homo sapiens would, in all likelihood, survive - not just as a species, but as a technologically-advanced species. I would conservatively estimate time to restoration at 50-100 years.

    Think my 50-year figure is nuts? Look at the major cities of Europe. Better yet, Japan. 55 years ago, most of those cities were little more than smoking craters.

    Think my 100-year figure is nuts? We didn't have electricity 100 years ago. (Oh, wait a minute, California still doesn't! ;-) But we did make the transition - from an agrarian society with a small urban component into a nearly completely-urbanized techno-society - in the past 100 years.

    Moreover, the first time around, we had to derive all the science from first principles before we could even think about building the technology. This time around, we'd have the science stored in books everywhere, and working prototypes for damn near everything we need, stored in the attics and basements of damn near every home that was unaffected by the blast and/or looting. My 100-year estimate is probably woefully pessimistic.

  • General realativity, wormholes, space-time warping, etc. http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/warps.html [hawking.org.uk].

    -sd
  • >We send Bruce Willis, or possibly William J. Clinton, with a handpicked suicide crew equipped with drills and nukes, right?

    almost.. this time, dennis tito gets to watch from close by..

    //rdj
  • Yep, and I'm puttin it on my American Express card too!
  • First off, it would be complete luck if we happened to see it with warning any longer than about a year. Those things move fast and we don't cover most of the sky in a good time period. Sure, we might see the one thats the size of north america with 30 years warning, but something a kilometer across (enough to be very destructive if it has an iron core) could easily slip by till a months warning or so. Doesn't leave much time for ideas other than move everyone in China to the US underground to save them.
  • But I was thinking if an astroid hit the earth and the dust blocked the sun...

    The ICE age that followed wouldn't mean the end of life on earth, it would just mean few things woudl survive.

    For starters, most of the lower plants would die. That would then in turn kill the lower ends of the life cycle. Creatures that don't mind turning vile and canabalistic will live on as it eats the weaker, and the ones dying off of starvation.

    Eventually we would get down to the last few humans.

    Most would die of starvation, but some would turn to eating just about anything, even if it meant canabalism.

    If you think about it, the population of China alone is enough to keep the strong over there fed for quite a long time.

    Only the strong stomached will survive.

    "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

  • I have an idea (Score:4)

    by Jailbrekr ( 73837 ) <jailbrekr@digitaladdiction.net> on Monday May 07, 2001 @11:59PM (#238733) Homepage
    Declare the asteroid to be in violation of the REcording Industries Copyright, and send all the RIAA lawyers after it.

    I'm sure they could litigate the asteroid out of existance.....
  • As long as people can remain civil in a time of disaster

    Hahahaha. For a moment there, I thought you were serious.
  • Um.

    Look at the averages of impacts through the fossil record, far back beyond the KT boundary. There have been quiet periods before. Suddenly an asteroid or a comet gets nudged or bumped in the outer solar system, and Earth has an exctinction event.

    Do you forget that recently we watched a previously uncharted comet smack into Jupiter, Shoemaker-Levy 9? Less than 2.5 million years ago the crater Tycho was carved out of the lunar surface. There's always Tunguska [geocities.com] to think about.

    Statistically speaking it is a very safe bet that something already *is* on a collision course with the Earth, we just haven't noticed it yet. Just because no cataclysmic impact has happened within the incredibly brief space of time encompassed by recent human history, you make a very dangerous assumption that this somehow makes such an event less probable.

    That's like someone who lived on the slopes of Mount Saint Helens' om May 17th, 1980 saying "it hasn't erupted in my lifetime, so this means it won't erupt in the future." The next day a gentleman named Harry Truman was proved fatally wrong and buried under several thousand feet of mountainside.

    I for one feel it is safer (and more sensible) to err on the side of caution than to be unprepared.
  • Heh, regardless of whether or not the asteroid struck near us, if we look at it streaking through the sky it would be the last thing we saw.

    Hint, as we learned from nuclear explosions, very energetic events can radiate significantly brighter than the sun. To keep your eye's lenses from frying your retinas, look away and cover your face with your hands.

    If you manage to save your eyesight, when the brightness fades you may be in for quite a show. The problem is that if you are too close, by the time you see the oncoming shockwave it's way too late to do anything. And this doesn't take into consideration the ejecta thrown into the atmosphere or even into low orbit by the blast.

    Search "tectites, rain of mud, rain of fire" on Yahoo. I suspect the environment gets really biblical after an asteroid impact unleashes a few times the combined total of the world's nuclear arsenals in a fraction of a second (it has happened several times in prehistory.)
  • Certainly, we should deflect an asteroid that is headed for earth impact. But why not park the thing in a high earth orbit and mine it or use it as a base for a large space station?
  • which has been circulating for several months

    Oh dear god, for a moment I thought he was talking about an asteroid.

  • Wouldn't said diety just send his giant cow over to eat them or throw them in the ocean or something? An asteroid is such a crude way of dealing with the problem...

  • Re:What cracks me up is...... (Score:3)

    by RevRigel ( 90335 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:05AM (#238740)
    There are only a few thousand functional nuclear weapons on the planet (8-10 thousand at the upper limit, less if you don't consider most nukes in Russia 'functional', especially since a lot of fusion weapons have shelf lives of a few years). If you airburst all of them over cities, you might kill half the people in cities on the planet, which, since about half the population of the Earth resides in cities, means that you'll kill perhaps 25% of the people on Earth as a maximum. Less because not all those nukes will work. When was the last time anyone actually fired off an ICBM and had it detonate a nuke on target on the other side of the world? That's right, never. No one's ever tested them in their full operational capability, since it would result in World War III. That's probably one reason we never got that far: everyone was too afraid the systems wouldn't actually work, and their bluff would be called.

    In any event, that's just people, to say nothing of blowing the /planet/ to dust. Even if you buried all of them in the core of the planet and set them off, it'd produce at most some slight indigestion. Compared to the thermal, kinetic, and magnetic energy contained in the Earth's core and mantle, nukes are nothing.

    You don't need to 'take out' a small rock, anyway. Just deflect it ahead of time, which depending on how much advance warning you have, may entail strapping some ion engines to it, or detonating a bunch of fusion bombs next to it to nudge it away.

  • This is a self-limiting situation. If there's enough food for 3 million survivors for three days, and 90% of them starve, the 10% remaining have a month's worth of food.

    Perhaps for dry foods (sugar, meal etc.) and cans. Fresh food will quickly spoil and as electricity disappears refrigerated and frozen food will become unedible fast too.

    With a lack of infrastructure (particularly fuel), modern factory farms will be starved of production capacity. That's where the urban survivors come in - to haul tractors, combines, etc, and/or use their skills at repairing equipment.

    Hardly. There will be an acute shortage of fertilizer, pesticides and fuel. People will have to plow with horses (if such can be found), or pull it themselves. Furthermore, after an impact or nuclear war, the climate will very likely be much worse (nuclear winter, anyone?). Food yields are likely to be perhaps a tenth of what it used to be, if you are lucky.

    Bottom line: It (be it global thermonuclear war or a series of asteroid fragment impacts) would majorly suck. But homo sapiens would, in all likelihood, survive

    Yes.

    - not just as a species, but as a technologically-advanced species.

    No.

    Of course it depends on the magnitude of the catastrophe, but were all nukes used we can say goodbye to technological civilization for at least several hundred years, perhaps forever.

    Think my 100-year figure is nuts? We didn't have electricity 100 years ago. (Oh, wait a minute, California still doesn't! ;-) But we did make the transition - from an agrarian society with a small urban component into a nearly completely-urbanized techno-society - in the past 100 years.

    You forget that during that time there were at all time, even during war, a functioning society. And most important of all - then we had access to easy, cheap-to-extract deposits of ore and energy (oil etc.). They are consumed now, and the only reason we can use lower-grade deposits is our more advanced technology now. But after a nuclear war, that doesn't exist anymore. So a new technological society would be much harder to build up again than it was in the 20th century.

    It is more likely than not that the first 20 years or so would be chaos, with people scavenging supplies of fuel, spare parts and food as long as they can, with gangs of bandits preying upon them. In that time the Earth's population falls to 10-20% of the current.

    As more and more ancient high-tech breaks down and there is no one who knows how to repair it anymore, and as the stores run out, people are more and more forced to live of the land, using older technology. Probably mostly 19th century tech with some 20th century parts. There might be some reintroduction of higher tech, like electricity from, say, hydro or wind power. At least some 80% of the people are farmers, possibly under bondage to earlier bandit leaders turned warlords.

    In a few hundred years some more advanced, somewhat technological society might arise, but it will never approach today. The resources needed are already gone.

    /Dervak

  • I generally agree with your line of reasoning, but I just wanted to point out that an object "several AU away" wouldn't reach us any time soon... at the very least not in the next few centuries.

    I have to disagree with this, and will use the following well know example to illustrate why:

    Halley's Comet has an orbital period of approx 76 years. It's perihelion is 88 million kilometers, and it's aphelion is 5.2 billion kilometers [aspsky.org].

    An astronomical unit [encyclopedia.com] (AU) is 149,604,970 km.

    That means that Halley's Comet is at it's furthest distance from the sun (aphelion) is about 34.75 AU away from the sun, and 33.75 AU from us (assuming both the Earth and Halley's Comet are on the same side of the sun).

    Now, I think that 34 counts as 'several', and it only takes half of Halley's orbital period to travel that distance, or 38 years... not centuries as you stated.

  • I mean, enough other species will keep on going. Wait a minute, probably more than are likely to survive with humans about...

  • ... we just pick a select few, leave and watch all the lusers go from a distance!

    hc

    Policy: a common substitute for good management

  • Re:A real threat? (Score:3)

    by ralmeida ( 106461 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @04:35AM (#238745) Homepage

    the telescope can take clear pictures (I have one, but it was given to me on the condition that I not distribute it) of large stellar objects 50 billon lightyears away

    Please explain this to me. It would take 50 billion years to the light to travel from that object to Earth. IIRC, the universe is only 15 billion years old, so how can you have a picture of one of these objects?

    --

  • We have enough nukes to blow the earth into space dust x000 times over, but we don't have enough nukes to take out a small rock.

    WTF?

    Someone explain that to me.
    ========================
    63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
    ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
  • So out of curiosity - if you evaporate all 'higher' life forms on earth would the human race evolve again? If evolution is indeed correct would this be true?

  • AOL cds? (Score:4)

    by small_dick ( 127697 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @12:36AM (#238748)
    If everyone stood outside with their AOL cds, and reflected the sun toward the meteor, maybe that would burn it up before it got into the solar system.

  • All we need to do is strape a bomb to RocketGuy and the rest should just work itself all out in the end. I'm the OOP in Moop.
  • How is this possibly anymore offtopic than the original post which is currently modded up? I guess it's hard for some to realize there is actually a place called the real world where everything doesn't revolve around DECSS, the RIAA, and the MPAA.
  • Now, just a little while ago we had an article about the use of an asteroid as an offensive weapon. The article went on to describe how they could maneuver it to hit the Earth and obliterate the country's enemys. Today we have one on how to get the asteroid to avoid Earth.

    Couldn't someone put the two together and instead of redirecting it to HIT, maybe how to redirect it to MISS? or is that asking too much.

    DanH
    Cav Pilot's Reference Page [cavalrypilot.com]

  • nah (Score:1)

    by hazard- ( 147868 )
    I think an astroid on a course for the earth is the universe's way of sending a SIGTERM to us humans.

    when you gotta go... you gotta go.
  • Let's send B. Willis to blow up the damn thing. We'll get rid of both...
  • The impact has very little to do with me, I can't predict it or stop it. What does concern me is what OTHER people will do. Mass panic,even if for only a day or two would teach us alot about ourselves but would set us back as far as stoping a large fast moving rock. I live in Florida and Even something as simple as a moderet size storm will clear out food ( funny thing, no one every buys cangoods or fruit, lots and lots of breed and milk, go figure) and create lines at the gas station. The important thing is I guess is to plan ahead.

    list ;gun, ammo, can goods, can opener,bread, milk.....


    ________

  • Dr. Gene Shoemaker died Friday, July 18 (Australian Time) in Alice Springs, Australia in a car accident. He was in the field, pursuing his lifelong passion of geologic studies to help understand impact craters with his wife and science partner, Carolyn Shoemaker. Carolyn survived the accident sustaining various injuries.

    Do note that this happend in 1997, damn assie drivers, I told you that thouse convict s couldn't be trusted. ;-)


    ________

  • That is what I meant. I can't do much about it so let me plan for that something I can fix. it is only responsable to plan for what I can do, not what I can't


    ________

  • you miss understand, I can't look for them, I can't stop them. and in the event of an actual hit I can't just drive down to the airport and hop on a plane. If a large wave comes down on Florida I can't stop it. My concern is the reaction of the people. The only thing I really have control over it the time before and afer an impact. if I can survive that time, before and after, then I would be happy. As a member of Earth i would say we have to do somehting as far as planing to stop it, but as me I can only actully help my self before and after.


    ________

  • Hell, yes! This PDF paper [llnl.gov] was written by some Russian scientists. It's maybe too technical but it serves as an example as to the types of studies that have been carried out. There are probably more examples but this one popped up first on the Google search.

    It is worthy to note that virtually all the work done up until now has happened in the United States.
  • I saw that too somewhere. This page [nasa.gov] is a NASA site that lists the various projects currently going on to detect and catalog NEOs (Near Earth Objects). I'm fairly certain that one or more of the links from that page will find the exact quote. It's like a few dozen people at the most IIRC.

    For a pretty good wow factor, this site [umd.edu] has an online calculator that gives you the destructive force for impacts of different sizes and compositions of asteroids/comets/other BNRs (Big Nasty Rocks).

  • The LoonyToons Solution (Score:3)

    by derrickh ( 157646 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:15AM (#238760) Homepage
    How about painting a giant arrow on the moon that says 'Detour to Uranus'.

    D
    (As long as Liv Tyler is in the movie adaption, I don't care how they stop the asteroid.)

    Mad Scientists with too much time on thier hands

  • Times [time.com]

    The only reason for including is the amusing difference in the way Time makes it seem *exciting* in a way the others didn't.

    mick

    ...woooo, killer asteroid

  • A better idea.

    Put all the above mentioned parties (although there may be a few people on tv I'd leave out) on a rocket and tell them there's an asteroid coming.

    Then start the countdown and ensure that the firing mechanism requires they all learn to act.

    Then watch the fireworks.

    mick
    ...particularly Chuck Norris.


  • You could always make the asteroid itself a story on slashdot and let the millions of hits pulverize it.

    mick
  • Duck and cover!!
  • In a few hundred years some more advanced, somewhat technological society might arise, but it will never approach today. The resources needed are already gone.

    Precisely. A hundred years ago, oil bubbled up out of the ground. You could dig up coal with a hand shovel. Nowadays, it takes so much technology just to extract fuel and ores that, if the technology were unusable, there would be no way to get the fuel and raw materials needed to build the technology. Catch-22.
  • Can we keep Katie Holmes?

    MG

  • "Deploy giant solar sails"

    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.

  • Suddenly there's a high demand for a spot on the next trip up. I think this is the point where everybody realizes that $20 million is a small price to pay to get a bird's eye view of the biggest *boom* in human history. And as an added bonus, you get to live! Until supplies run out anyway.
  • or possibly William J. Clinton,

    My favorite scene is where Bill draws the short straw and Dubya accompanies him to the asteroid's surface. Once they get there, Bill yanks the Bush/Cheney patch off of Dubya's pressure suit, kicks him out the hatch, re-enters the ship, and dusts off. I never get tired of Dubya nuking himself as he tries to dictate a memo into the detonator.

  • Re:Unfortunately, we're just at the beginning... (Score:3)

    by YKnot ( 181580 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @02:24AM (#238773)
    Sending a huge asteroid to destroy a planet inhabited by a civilization almost ready to defend itself against such a thing probably earns you +5, Funny on Slashdot-o-Gods and you'd happily ignore comments about how destroying something can be funny.
  • I dont know exactly, however thanks to the wonderness of the atmosphere, there is a maximum resolution you can get - light is refracted and reflected, merged and diverged, by different temperatures and water content at different layers in the atmosphere.

    This is one of the main reasons hubble is a success - no atmosphere == unrivaled view. The only problem is with steller dust.
  • An asteroid might be some form of divine vengeance. I don't think anything woulld piss of a deity more than the RIAA.
  • about the next large asteroid to hit the earth as we looked up and saw it streaking across the sky. So any effort at prevention should start with stepped up methods to detect earth crossing asteroids first. With funding being cut at NASA so we all can get a tax cut, this is not likely.

    I was sorry to learn that Gene Shoemaker had passed away [usgs.gov]

  • Oh, good lord... (Score:5)

    by wrinkledshirt ( 228541 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @12:31AM (#238789) Homepage

    We send Bruce Willis ... with a handpicked suicide crew equipped with drills and nukes, right?

    Good god I hope not. If I have to sit through that again, I think I'll welcome the asteroid.

  • What to do... (Score:3)

    by Xibby ( 232218 ) <zibby+slashdot@ringworld.org> on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:55AM (#238792) Homepage Journal
    It doesn't take a rocket scientest to figure this one out...the thing that will save our collective asses is time. The sooner we detect something on a collision course with Earth, the better. A small force applied over a long time (rockets, thrusters, whatever...) has a better chance of succeeding than a big force over a short time (nuke). Kinda like compounding interest...once you get the thing moving in one direction it will keep moving in that direction, and keep accelerating in that direction as long as you apply the force. Given enough time, you could send the offending object anywhere.

    So invest in early detection. When you do find something on a collision course, well, certin death has a way of motivating those who control spending. Then again, there's that time thing. We still have 30 years before this thing hits, we have time to budjet it in later...

    So we end up at the big force over a short time, when there's only a few months left before the thing hits...

    After all, if those who control the money understood basic physics (or could even get a basic understanding with the compounding interest analogy) they wouldn't be in politics. :)

  • The real trick... (Score:3)

    by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @05:18AM (#238798) Homepage
    Is to spot the thing as far away from us as possible. That way, besides the obvious time benefit, is the much more significant benefit of only having to deflect it my a much lesser amount. A suitably large nuclear blast, or more likely, a series of them, in proximity, but not in contact with the object, in order to create a sufficient sheer effect to get it to miss.

    Of course, goverments assign this long range detection a huge budget to enable us to take these steps. Let's see it's... well, not much more than quite a few people earn in a year actually. What's wrong with this picture?

  • There are 3 main ways if dealing with a killer asteroid.

    1) Stand Still. Look at the asteriod getting closer. Get squished.

    2) Run around, panic and scream. Observe the asterioid getting closer. Get squished.

    3) Jump up and down, scream at everyone for not being able to think of anything. Get squished.

  • Did you notice that each time it is announced that such-and-such asteroid has a one-in-so-many-hundreds of hitting the Earth, the advisory usually mentions that the probability is lower than being hit by another yet-undiscovered asteroid?

    We are at the first step: we know of the possibility of being in the way of a celestial body big enough to cause enormous harm. But if we are to do something about it, we have to know where they all are; and that means all of them! All the most as it is critical that we know of any possible impact years or decades in advance.

    Hence the importance of Spaceguard-like projects to perform systematic surveys of near-Earth objects. That's where the priority has to lie at the beginning (and the easiest thing to do). The steps after that being to study them at close quarters, and maybe an actual deflection test, which could even prove useful if we also are to extract construction materials from them for space installations...

  • > For a pretty good wow factor, this site has an
    > online calculator

    Bah! I tried to calculate how fast a testicle would have to be going to wipe out the earth. At 4cm diameter, I found out the calculator only goes up to about 72km/s as a speed. Stupid artificial limitation by the programmer. A testical going at 99.999% the speed of light might be able to disrupt a star.

  • The chance that any object will collide with the Earth, however, is not calculable given the amount of data we possess about intrasolar/near extrasolar objects.

    We can't predict specifically when these things will hit, but we have enough data to know the odds.

    What do we know? There have been many millions of years between the big ones, and the rate continues to drop off as the millions of years pass, as there are a limited number of rocks and they can only fall on a planet once.

    Consider where the technology will be in even a hundred years, and it doesn't look like there's much point in hurrying to figure out how to stop these things with current technology.
    --
  • we cannot determine exact odds. All we can say is that is it very unlikely

    Since interplanetary ballistics is completely deterministic, if we had them catalogued, we could predict if and when they'd strike. Since we don't, we have to settle for calculating odds from the past and a relatively small sample of current data. In a deterministic system, either we have exact information, or we have probability based on sample data, we can't have exact probability.
    --
  • While we're saying exactly what we mean...

    I believe that current probabilities that a strike will hit in the next decade or century are accurate for practical purposes. We calculate that there is well under a 0.1% chance of a catastrophic meteor strike in the next century. That's plenty good enough for me.

    Since the odds are that viable human colonies will be created off-Earth, and technology will advance to the point of making asteroid defense simple, within the next century, I see little point in emphasizing immediate development of asteroid defense.

    We're like a 6-year-old boy who has just realized that the oak tree next to his house might fall on it, and realized the possibility of figuring out when it will fall and cutting it down so it falls the other way. He isn't really capable of doing it yet, and when he grows up a little more, he'll take such problems in stride. If he's a halfway bright boy, he'll realize this is a problem for later, and from what he knows about oak trees, probably not an immediate threat, and he won't worry about it.
    --

  • Those bad asteroid movies (Score:3)

    by novas007 ( 411673 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @12:11AM (#238822) Homepage
    This dude checks out the movies and rates them based on science.. check it out.. some of those asteroid movies are really bad...
    http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/index.htm l
  • Whether nukes would fragment the asteroid or not depends on the nature of the rock. A highly fragmented asteroid would probably be preferable to a single large impact, because each piece will lose part of its mass in the atmosphere. An iron-rich asteroid might not fragment at all. As for blasting it sideways with a nuke, I think that's agreed to be a pretty sketchy, last-resort kind of idea; if you don't know the geology of the asteroid, and you can't guarantee the targeting of the nuke... besides which, that's a very inefficient way to change an orbit even in the best-case.

    What you want to be able to do is get a good bit of early warning, then land your favorite kind of large engine on the asteroid- ion-drive, Orion-type, solar sail (okay, that's not an engine, I know, I know) or whatever. Then you can alter the orbit in a controlled fashion. Landing on an asteroid isn't incredibly hard; it's in several current mission plans and proposals; so the bigger worry is really getting detection up to snuff.

    For a really good detection system, we want scopes in a couple of positions, not just on earth; as it is right now, it's far too much of a pain to work out orbits...

  • Re:What cracks me up is...... (Score:4)

    by pavonis ( 415389 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:30AM (#238825)
    If you airburst all of them over cities, you might kill half the people in cities on the planet, which, since about half the population of the Earth resides in cities, means that you'll kill perhaps 25% of the people on Earth as a maximum

    I agree with everything else you said, but... the area a modern, 50-100 megaton H-bomb takes out is considerable. I'm posting in Philadelphia; if someone did an airburst of a major nuke in the middle of New Jersey, they'd take out Philly, New York, and all the suburbanites around; New Haven would probably be an uncomfortable place to be, too. A bomb targeted at a city is going to take out much more than just that city.

    Fatalities would probably be much higher than 50% per city in the event of a global war; the complete breakdown of almost all social supports means that not only do the injured or buried have just about no chance of getting aid, but anyone in a big city is going to start getting really hungry pretty soon. Few big cities have as much as three day's food supplies or a day's water in stock; with the electricity out, bridges down, roads a mess, things on fire, water pipes wrecked, and the like, the basic tools of survival are going to get pretty rare. FEMA isn't going to be much help as they've been blown up too, so...

    As for missiles working... well, the missiles have certainly been tested a lot with no payload, and they seem pretty reliable. Many are the same ones used for space launches- the Titan series, for instance- and they launch on target about 95% of the time. The bombs have been tested quite a bit on deserted islands and such. Admittedly, the bombs and the missiles haven't been tested in concert, but that seems like a pretty simple rig-up to me.

  • This is a job for the A-team (Score:5)

    by Mantis69 ( 446522 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @01:08AM (#238832)
    The A-team vs Asteroid would have provided more entertainment than Bruce and the boys. With Murdoch as pilot, Hannibal smoking his cigar in close proximity to a few thousand tons of LOX, Mr T 'I ain't flyin' in no rocket' and finally Face chatting up the attractive female scientist.

    However, for the A-team scenario to work, they would need to land on the asteroid, get into a gunfight with drug dealers who live there. In the ensuing firefight they expend 5000 rounds of ammunition with no casualties, and then get captured.

    The fate of the world would then rest on the fact that they villains conveniently lock up our heroes in a fully equipped workshop come asteroid-destroying-nuclear-bomb-factory. The team escape (another 500 rounds ammo: no casualties), blow up the asteroid (villains tied up in the back of the spaceship so no casualties there).

    The story ends with Hannibal saying: 'I like it when a plan comes together' followed by the predictable 'Shut up fool ' from Mr T. No wait a minute I forgot, they'll also have to knock Mr T out for the return journey, I pity the fool who has to do that.

  • A real threat? (Score:3)

    by factor-C ( 448252 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @12:57AM (#238841)
    The article really plays down the chances of a sizeable celestial object colliding with the Earth. The chance that any specific object will collide with the Earth is astronomically small to say the least. The chance that any object will collide with the Earth, however, is not calculable given the amount of data we possess about intrasolar/near extrasolar objects. I interned at the Subaru telescope [naoj.org], and someone in control of that organization must feel that the threat of an Earth impact is significant because although the telescope can take clear pictures (I have one, but it was given to me on the condition that I not distribute it) of large stellar objects 50 billon lightyears away (while only halfway calibrated!), it is being used primarily for near-solar and intrasolar observation. To put that kind of magnification power into perspective, I was told that the telescope could clearly identify a car, allowing you to determine the model and year if it were floating in the asteroid belt. You could alternatively read the label and judge the depth of the dimples on a golf ball if it were sitting on the summit of Mt. Fuji (the telescope is in Hilo, Hawaii). The only reason you need something that powerful for near-solar and closer distances is if you looking for medium/small (1km diam. objs easily fit into the small category) objects that possess a very low albedo (reflectivity). An asteroid with the right composition, for instance, can reflect so little sunlight that it would be invisible to nearly all means of passive detection except when you have the power of massive magnification of the Subaru telescope type. Such an asteroid would easily be able to approach earth undetected until much too late. If I remember correctly, a fairly large low-albedo asteroid passed near the earth just a few years ago, and remained undetected until it was inside the moon's orbital path.

  • Re:OTP:Re:A real threat? (Score:4)

    by factor-C ( 448252 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @02:33AM (#238842)
    Because the moon hoax is not even considered worthy of consideration by any astronomer worthy of the title.

    1) In a vacuum, or near vacuum, stars cannot appear in the same picture as a high-albedo object in direct sunlight unless they are edited in later. The film would have been instantly identified as a hoax if there actually were stars in the background.

    2) The flag waves because of the kinetic energy imparted to the material when the astronauts are putting it in the ground.

    3) The flag is held upright by a metal rod. Using the metal rod to hold the flag up was actually a controversial issue for a while, but it was decided that a sagging American flag would look pretty sad.

    4) Most importantly, you don't need the Subaru telescope to see if the flag is on the surface of the moon. The Russian government would have jumped at the chance to point out such an obvious hoax, and the Cold War ended long after telescopes powerful enough to verify (or not!) the landing site were easily available to a large government. If it were all a hoax, we would have found out a long time ago.

    5) It would have been a fairly easy and straightforward task to detect the origin of the video/radio signals being broadcast. Even if the Russians didn't have decent telescopes in their posession, they would have been able to triangulate the origin of the signals, just as America verified that Sputnik was actually sending out radio signals from orbit.

    Anything I missed? I didn't pay any attention to the stuff they aired on TV, and I responded to the things I keep hearing people talk about.

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