Asteroid 2004 MN4 May Hit Earth After All

ControlFreal writes "Asteroid 2004 MN4 was introduced earlier on Slashdot, and although scientists are now fairly certain that is will miss earth on April 13th, 2029, the modification to its orbit caused by Earth's gravity may still cause an impact one or a couple of orbits further down the road, the Times reports; the impact probabilities in 2035, 2036 of 2037 will not be known until the exact modification to its orbit is known; in 2029, that is. By then it may be too late for effective counter-measures. An impact would cause an energy release equivalent to about 1 Gigaton of TNT (~4e+18 Joule), and while that won't cause a massive extinction event, it causes widespread devastation. More info on 2004 MN4 can be found here and here."

Date of impact

[thewiz]

My bet is it will hit Earth on April 13, 2029. After all, it's a Friday!
I wonder if Jason http://www.fridaythe13thfilms.com/ [fridaythe13thfilms.com] will show up.

yikes!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's it. I'm moving. This neighborhood is really starting to suck.

Bummer

[pfizzle]

So...let's party like it's 1999?

*cue music*

[blew_fantom]

~~Don't wanna close my eyes. Don't wanna fall asleep. 'Cause I'd miss you, baby. And I don't wanna miss a thing. Cause even when I dream of you The sweetest dream would never do. I'd still miss you, baby. And I don't wanna miss a thing~~~

oohh shit...

[charon_1]

**puts on tin foil hat**

2037...

[athakur999]

I'll be 59 in 2037 which is when I can start withdrawing from some of my retirement accounts.

I guess I should go ahead and blow my money on a car or something instead since how big my 401k is isn't gonna matter when the monkeys take over the Earth.

Let's make an Ark B

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a list of politicians and patent lawyers all ready and waiting for it.

The only problem is, I'm not sure whether we should be on it or they.

Re:Date of impact

[superpulpsicle]

Not to worry. As I learned from the movie Armageddon, we can just sent a couple construction workers to the asteroid, plant a dynamite on the asteroid itself.... blow it up before it hits earth. They'll have no problem volunteering as long as they never have to pay taxes again.

2035

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew the Republicans were lying about there being a Social Security crisis in 75 years. Now I don't have to worry about it. Whew.

I know what to do, are you with me?

[Tibor the Hun]

I reckon if we gather up as much lead and place it by the Oval Office, we might just be able to alter the asteroid's trajectory and save ourselves from self-anihilation.

So let's start collecting lead! Who's with me?

Ha!

[Sairret]

I knew my Y2K shelter would come in handy. Who has all the Spam now!?

so we can forget about the 32bit Unixtime thing?:)

[NekoXP]

19th January 2038 half of us will be dead! Who needs to count the seconds after
that? :)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Lets solve this problem the American Way!

[Daravon]

Lets have Microsoft patent asteriod collisons and then we'll send all the lawyers after the asteriod to deliver a cease and desist order. Worst case scenario is that we're out a few lawyers.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.
- Larry Niven

Wouldn't it be funny if they did have a space program and just haven't bothered coming back?

Re:oohh shit...

[LiquidCoooled]

That won't protect you.

However, for $699 per head, we can protect you.

Sincerely,

Darl Mcbride.

Lets put them

[www.sorehands.com]

Lets put them on the same ship as the hairdressers and telephone sanitizers.

Re:oohh shit...

[TrippTDF]

I'd like to know what a piece of tin foil is going to do against a meteor impact.

Re:Asteroids 2k4

[TripMaster Monkey]

That game was actually written by NASA, in order to train the nation's children for just such an eventuality.

ah what difference does it make?

[Bananatree3]

I am probably more apt to be hit by an African Swallow then be killed by this asteroid.

Simpsons obligatory quote..

[Man in Spandex]

Homer: It's times like this I wish I were a religious man.
Reverend Lovejoy: Run for your lives people We don't have a prayer!

Re:Good!

[darkstar949]

More likely is that people will ignore it until a week before it hits because they would treat it the same way as global warming - it doesn't exist until it begins to affect them, and then it sits in committee for awhile while people decide what to do about it.

Stop f*cking with my homeowner's insurance!

[IronChefMorimoto]

For Christ's sake, scientists -- MAKE UP YOUR FRIGGIN' MIND ABOUT THESE GLOBAL KILLER ASTEROIDS!

I just went through paperwork HELL getting the "Asteroids, Meteorites, and Other Heaven-to-Earth Bodies" coverage removed from my AllState homeowners insurance. This after I put it on there when you FIRST told us it was going to hit us!

Then I had to call Jean, my agent, and f*cking tell her to shred that whole contract and contact my mortage lender when you f*cking scientists said, "Whoa -- wait -- it might NOT hit after all. Our bad." But, of course, the fax machine at my office was on the fritz that week (screw all-in-one concepts, HP!), so I had to take a 2 hour ride through traffic BACK to my house to get the paperwork and OVER TO Jean's office.

Now, after FINALLY getting the signature pages right, 'cause Jean's assistant can't friggin' spell "interplanetary" for sh*t, I gotta do the whole g'damn thing again.

Christ -- I'm going to just leave it on there this time and pay the extra 20% on my homeowners insurance premiums this year. It's not friggin' worth going through all that hassle, having to take time off, explaining to my boss what why I'm having to factor "global extinction" into my homeowner savings plan, etc. Dammit.

I guess, now, that those f*ckers from Homeland Security are going to change the f*cking color of the alert this week too. Then I'll have to go back and talk with Jean about that "Dirty Bombs, Biological/Chemical Agents, and Other WMDs" clause. Dammit.

IronChefMorimoto

Re:Other effects

[Cymage]

You don't have to imagine a Near miss scenario [wikipedia.org].

What about ineffective preparations?

[cbiffle]

If we don't have time for effective preparations, where do I donate toward the ineffective preparations?

I, for one, want a massive Wile E. Coyote-style flag to pop out of the Earth immediately before the asteroid hits. Preferably reading "Yipe!"

Re:Lets solve this problem the American Way!

[LordNor]

Worst case scenario is that we're out a few lawyers.

Wouldn't that be the best case?

Re:so we can forget about the 32bit Unixtime thing

[dlZ]

Way to make my 59th birthday seem grim!

Re:Curious about gravitational pull claim

[stuffduff]

Let's see, if it were made of Swiss cheese and landed on Switzerland it may result in an open faced toasted swiss sandwich. However this situation could be prevented if we deliver massive quantities of ham, milk and eggs to the area before and erected a gigantic dam made of flaky pastry. Emperor George Herbert Dubah Bush the III may respond to their request for aid bay saying...

Let Them Eat Quiche!

Re:so we can forget about the 32bit Unixtime thing

[Hogwash McFly]

Yeah, there's no way it will hit Earth, otherwise John Titor would have mentioned it...

Re:Other effects

[Profane MuthaFucka]

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space."

As a geek, you ought to be ashamed that you even suggested that a tiny little rock would take out dozens of satellites. I can see how an English major or a Journalist could make that mistake, but you are on SLASHDOT here, and you should know some basic things about the space and how big it is.

Re:Good!

[0racle]

That was done on Voyager. It wasn't funny at all.

Re:Let's make an Ark B

[ericdano]

Hope it hits LA, we could whip out the RIAA and MPAA in one hit!

Re:Date of impact

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly shouldn't be hard to find people willing to blow things up in order to never pay taxes again.

Re:so we can forget about the 32bit Unixtime thing

[dkone]

The half of us who are still living would. Sheesh, for some people, it is all about me, me, me.

Re:Other effects

[maotx]

I don't know about you but with these numbers from NASA [nasa.gov] I'm getting ready to move to Mars.

Re:Orion Project

[0xABADC0DA]

Sure we could build a giant nuke and send it up there, but why not instead build a giant pyramid with a laser to alter the orbit? Then it's reusable for the next asteroid.

I mean isn't that the founding fathers were trying to tell us when they designed the $1 bill? Isn't that what Kirk and Miramonte(sp) did to save her planet? Maybe our eulogy will be, "they didn't learn from their historical records"; a berrylium sphere should be enough to power the laser.

Re:Bunkers?

[brewer13210]

"(Back in the 70's and early 80's the drill for a nuclear strike was to climb under the desk in the school).

Actually, that was the "Duck and Cover" campaign with Bert the Turtle, from the federal government, and it was run in the '50s, not the 70s and 80s. By then we pretty much knew that if a nuke went off in a nearby local, jumping under a desk wasn't going to do much for you besides skin you knees before you were vaporized.

Funniest single panel cartoon I ever saw...

[refactored]

...had a huge dinosaur stepping out of a flying saucer looking out unseeingly over the heads of tiny scurrying humans. The caption was, "Hello! Hello Everybody! Hullooo! We're home!"

I can't remember who the artist was. Sad.

Re:Orion Project

[stlhawkeye]

We not only have the technology, it's hard to predict what our situation will be as 2030 approaches.

We all could be gone by then.

For all we know, the United States of Arabia, formed in 2013, will be the world's lone superpower, we will be driving around in our fuel efficient hydorgen-powered Sayyarrah Ansar 4-doors, created by the Sayyarrah Motor Co in response to rising fuel costs after the world's industrial nations burned through most of the cheaply-accessible Arabian oil, leaving the United States sitting on top of the largest intact oil reserves in the world, which it stubbornly refuses to share. The USA (the Arabian states, I mean) will work with the Brazilians space program and the Federal Chinese States (formed after the Chinese Civil War in 2018) to launch an "asteroid-killer" probe at this thing from the secondary pad at Artemis International Station [asi.org] in the north polar region of the moon.

Or it'll just, like, Africa, or Canada, or some other place nobody cares about, and we'll just live with it. Or the environmentalists will protest that it likely contains spaceborne elementary life forms and that it's an immoral sin of human arrogance to attempt to save our species by eliminating theirs.

Print this post out now and re-read it in 20 years, it'll be fun!

Re:Orion Project

[Anonymous Coward]

Elections are in 2036.

Let's all make sure we elect a new president in 2032 that will want to go up for re-election.

Them's fightin words!

[uberjoe]

Watch what you say, or you'll end up in Gitmo for threating the president with all the other freedom haters, you freedom hating hater of freedom.

Re:Date of impact

[AviLazar]

Just put a Liv Tyler type girl on the trip and you will have the smartest - geekiest minds of our time volunteering for that trip - tax free or no tax free

Re:I Bet a case of BEER...

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet a case of beer that you are an idiot.

They'd find the toilets

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget where I first heard this, but ceramic toilets are both ubiquitous (thus the probability of at least one being found is quite high) and long-lived in the extreme. Even millions of years down the road, they'll be able to find our toilets. Won't they be impressed?

Duck And Cover.

[jrivar59]

This stuff is way over hyped. All you need to know to deal with such an event I learned in elementry school.

Just watch the vid.

Duck and Cover [archive.org]

Bush's space program will save all of us.

[rice_burners_suck]

I can already see cold war style nucular* shelter companies going around and installing shelters underneath folks' houses.

But what the U.S. government is already doing may be the very same safety measure that is needed: The renewed interest in a moon base, missions to Mars, etc. This exact same space program, I believe, is being put into effect to install a gigantic weapons system in orbit, very similar to the Death Star in Star Wars. This type of weapons system will be sufficient to blow up this silly little asteroid.

There are about twenty years left to prepare. NASA, you can rest assured, will come up with all kinds of devices to blow this thing out of the sky. And I'd bet you that the government, with all its supercomputers and whatnot, knows exactly when and where this thing is going to strike, and they're not just sitting around waiting for it to happen.

In the meantime, I know I'll be stocking up on canned foods and bottled water, and I need to buy more ammo for my handguns. If this thing starts coming down in my back yard, I'll shoot at it myself. Or I'll shoot at any looters that come around looking for trouble.

* I spelled "nucular" correctly. It's spelled according to the pronunciation of the guy I elected.

Re:Good!

[scotch]

mankind has a notoriously short attention span.

Notorious to whom? Short compared to attention spans of what other species? Compared with animals? Do dogs and cats sit around behind our backs and say shit like this:

Dog: mankind has such a short attention span
Cat: tell me about it. me and my feline brethren have been working on catching mice for thousands of years. Some of our members have been known to study a mote of dust for upwards of 4 hours
Dog: I hear you - it's almost as if mankind is famous for having a short attentions spam. Infamous you might say. Heck, I'd go so far as to say they are notoriously short attentioned - wait, where's my tail? Did you seem my tail?

Or maybe you're communicating with aliens.

Re:Good!

[InfoVore]

New propulsion technology? You mean like Nuclear Pulse

I posted this to my local SF group boards a while back. Hope you like it:

10,000 Tons of Launch Weight: $500 million.

2000 Mini-nukes: $1 Billion
Finding a country to let you launch: Priceless

For normal trips to LEO, there are chemical rockets.
For everything else, there's Project Orion.

Several guys in the group work for Lockheed and want it on a T-shirt.

Cheers,
I.V.

Nah... No worries...

[emtboy9]

There is plenty of time now. NASA has all the time in the world now to develop a new super secret shuttle, and train a small flight crew. Then they will have plenty of time to hire a rag tag bunch of wise cracking oil drillers to send on said super secret shuttle, while first stopping off on Mir to visit with a crazy cosmonaut and refuel. Once they approach the asteroid, despite all their natural personality classes, they will come together and drill the required distance to the center of the asteroid, deposit a nuke or two, detonate said nukes, thus splitting the asteroid in half and getting each half to go its own seperate ways... and then Morgan Freeman will make a public speech glorifying the heroics of this intrepid band, and we will get to see hollywood make movies about their journy and adventure... oh wait... that already happened. Damn... guess we are fucked then.

Re:Our Eulogy

[bobgoatcheese]

Parent post is currently at +5, Funny.
Where's the "Ironic" meta-moderation option?

Mortal Kombat!

[TripMaster Monkey]

Komodo Dragon vs. Sewer Rat.

Round 1. Fight!

Crunch

Komodo Dragon wins.

Fatality

Re:Bunkers?

[dmarcoot]

No Flander's alowed!

Re:Our Eulogy

[joe_bruin]

NOT EARTH, that's where I keep all my stuff!!!

Re:Run for the Border!

[Greyfox]

An ocean hit would be worse. Ok, here's a scientific demonstration. Go into your bathroom and fill the bathtub up. Now put a bunch of little plastic guys on the bathroom floor. Go on, I'll wait for you to set it up...

All done? Ok, now take a big freaking cinder block, stand on your toilet and drop it on the little plastic guys. Ok now that's a bit of a bloodbath, sure. Set 'em up again and then lob the cinder block into the bath tub. See what the problem could be here?

So if the asteroid hits the ocean, not only will lots of people be killed, but you'll also get in trouble with your wife/parents/room mate for making a huge mess. Go figure.

Re:Let's make an Ark B

[flewp]

I can just see it... the MPAA will try to sue the asteroid for violating Deep Impacts copyright.

No need to fix that 2038 bug

[WarmBoota]

It looks like we won't have to put in overtime on that 2038 Bug [2038bug.com] w00t!

Re:Bunkers?

[KarmaOverDogma]

I personally love the idea of building a sock-rolid bunker that is so perfect that I am 100% certain to survive the impact.

Then, when all my friends and relatives in my section of the hemisphere are dead, I'll enjoy struggling for my own survival without clean, readily available running water and food. And then when I get sick after running low on my own hefty (let's be generous and say it's a 12 week supply) of water, I'll be proud of how I struggle to survive with complications from even the most minor of ailments after my modern drug supply is exhausted or proves ineffective.

When I use my most awsome shortwave radio, I'll be pleased to see how my important politicains (those who lived, that is) are the ones who are rescued first, and will shrug my shoulders as I look at the wreckage of my antennea array from the blast, hoping my small antennea doesnt eat up my power supply before someone can here me.

I'll be happy to have fully productive days, too, fending off what might be left of others who managed to survive but were less planful as I, as I count my ammunation running lower every day. I'll be thankful my hungry neighbor (the one living in a bunker right next to me) doesn't have a bigger gun than me, either.

I for one agree that life after a massive asteroid blast would be well on the high odds of survival and most likely fully worth living. After all: With God, all things are possible 8-D.