Asteroid 2004 MN4 May Hit Earth After All 857
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."
Not enough time for counter-measures (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't even imagine what things will be like in another 30 years...I mean, if in 1915 you told someone that in 30 years a bomb would be built powerful enough to flatten a small city, they'd laugh at you.
Practice makes perfect (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
"This is most likely not the object with our number on it, but one day we will have to address this question and we'll need the technology."
So let's develop the technology now, when a screw up won't mean utter devastation of part of the planet.
Before we get our hopes up... (Score:1, Insightful)
With the fanboy wave-off out of the way, I would like to say that the mere threat of this should get our notice. We're not in danger right now of running out of oil but sooner or later we will be, and without energy on hand, getting access to nuclear fissile materials will be next to impossible never mind refining them and we still won't magically overnight be any closer to getting fusion or mass-energy conversion working.
Add to news of the Yellowstone mega-caldera and the possibility that we're headed towards a cooling phase planet wide, and this rock being in the neighborhood ready to drop in and we're looking at a pretty good picture of a species with less security than a corporation firewall administered by your neighbor's five year old and much more serious ramifications.
Of course we need to spread out and make sure the species can sustain itself past such an event. Problem is, will anyone really grasp it when so much more pressing stuff is on the plate, like who's still in the running on Amazing Race?
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Practice makes perfect (Score:2, Insightful)
Then it
1. Becomes even harder to prevent from hitting us 2.It does even more damage if it does
Re:2037... (Score:0, Insightful)
You are forgetting that we should get cure for aging in 20 years. So you might be 59, but you could look and feel like 20-30-year old. Retirement accounts are propably cancelled and people have to work their whole lives, unless they collect enough money to be without work for few decates.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I think we should focus our efforts on keeping the planet we live on viable. If some big rock later undoes the hard work, so be it.
Meanwhile we're hell-bent on destroying a perfectly viable planet with our own home-grown stupidity - at the rate we are going we'll eventually finish the job whether or not an asteroid beats us to the punch is just a matter of timing.
Re:Orion Project (Score:5, Insightful)
You've never had any experience trying to get the government to actually do anything concrete, have you?
Re:Not enough time for counter-measures (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. And, if in 1975 you told someone that in the next 30 years no rockets would be built powerful enough to send a man to the moon, they'd laugh at you.
Re:Curious about gravitational pull claim (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no idea....I'm no physicist, but it seems that if they know the object's mass and the object's size, they can figure the object's density, and infer its composition from that. What more do they really have to know?
(Mabye he's afraid it's composed of antimatter or admantium or neutronium or naquada, or has a quantum black hole at its center, or some other bullshit concern...)
Re:Orion Project (Score:3, Insightful)
You want an example of the technological progress a government can make in 6 years? Compare a tank from 1939 with one from 1945 (or for a more extreme example, compare an atomic bomb from 1939 with one from 1945). The military technology used by the combatants in WW2 improved massivly over the 6 years of the war and this is while several of the countries were having the crap bombed out of them. When properly motivated by immediate national interest governments have an enormous capacity to get things going.
And don't give me any of this "Space travel is really hard and expensive" crap either. Most of the cost of the space shuttle is tied up in our desire to have the astronauts return alive to the ground with little risk of anybody on the ground getting killed. Once you throw those restrictions away (which I'm pretty sure you could count on with ~10^9 lives at stake) it gets a lot less impossible to put a lot of nukes on an intercept course with enough fuel to slow down near the offending rock..
I'm not saying it's a walk in the park but the major roadblocks will be technological not bureaucratic.
-Pinkoir
Re:Orion Project (Score:5, Insightful)
The US did Mercury and Appollo in timeframes that short. And global catastrophe wasn't a motivator then.
I really hope not (Score:4, Insightful)
If the sole reason you want a space program is paranoid fear that we might be hit by a rock, that's a pretty sad reason.
I'd like to visit the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I'd like to see other star systems. I'd like to advance our knowledge of the galaxy and universe and try to find other life forms.
I mean, if people were dying left and right by micrometeorites hitting the earth and blowing out people's skulls but no one in power cared, I'd be concerned. That's not the case here.
Let's keep the fearmongering to a dull roar here. How sick does our society have to be when someone start's talking like a bad sci-fi thriller about the end of the world?
The sole purpose of any space program should be like any other science program, to make the unknown known and to expand the horizons of human understanding.
Frankly, if the meteor is coming in 2035, my opinion is that it's pretty much too late now. Get out your sandbags and automatic rifles and prepare for the armageddon (not the movie!).
Impact or not,prepare as if it was coming your way (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, whenever has our beloved President ever let a treaty stand in his way? [cnn.com]
Re:Orion Project (Score:5, Insightful)
Because most of the groundwork has been done to death. There are engineers out there who could build an Orion in their sleep, partly because it's so damn simple.
The other issue is that there simply isn't enough time to build some other super-booster. Both the Saturn V and the Energia are out of commission due to a lack of production facilities. In the case of the Orion, you'd be building something far simpler and more along the lines of a traditional building or ship hull.
But you have 20 years
You'd have 6 years, because scientists will be uncertain until 2029.
kinetic kill weapons are not that a good idea, little thing called the "law of conservation of momentum" you're not going to move a 64 gigatonne something much by hitting it with the sort of mass you can afford to lift off of earth
Well, on the small side we could build an Orion of about 3000 metric tonnes. On the large side, we could build one of about 8,000,000 metric tonnes. Maybe it's just me, but I think 8 million tons + a significant amount of relative velocity could make a difference.
I agree with you though, it's something of wishful thinking to hit it with a kinetic kill. The most likely scenario would be to take up station near the asteroid and go through several iterations of planting and detonating hydrogen bombs. The idea won't be to break it up, but rather to provide propulsion. As such, the bombs would be detonated on or near the surface of the asteroid.
What you do need to do is shift it's orbit, you don't need a lot of mass or a big motor, just time - get started now, drop and iron drive and solar cells on the thing now and fire it up, maybe deliver some more mass in 5 years, carefully watch where it's going and eventually drop it into the sun or Jupiter
The only problem is that we don't have engines that can make a dent in 46 gigatons of mass. As you pointed out yourself, the law of conservation of momentum is going to have a lot to say about a constant 1/1000 lb of thrust against that much mass.
Re:Orion Project (Score:5, Insightful)
Motivate the human race enough and its ridiculous what we can accomplish. We're 3 generations removed from 'total war' economy. An extinction level event would be sufficient motivation for us to see such economic focus once again.
Re:I really hope not (Score:3, Insightful)
Joe sixpack doesn't care about science, or exploration unless it directly affects him. The only reason a lot of the "space race" happened is because people were afraid of the commies. Now that there isn't such a fear, things like NASA get their budget slashed, and creativity suffers. Sometimes you need the fear of imminent death to drive science and technology (like in war).
-Jesse
Re:Our Eulogy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the reason some Funny posts get modded Insightful, Informative, Whatever is because starting sometime ago Funny mods no longer improve your karma. Thus to counteract, if a post already has a few Funny mods, a moderator might mod it Informative to boost the poster's karma a bit.
Makes some sense to me. After all, Funny comments in
Re:Good! (Score:1, Insightful)
A billion or so people dying so we can be "taught a lesson"?!?
Maybe if we are all lucky - someone will come along and teach you a lesson about always wearing body armor. Because you never know.
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
In all the fossil record, we never find one screw nor washer, no bolts, not a single microchip, no industrial manufacturing complexes, etc. There you have it. Proof in the form of lack of evidence
Re:Good! (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they talk about the difficulties inherent in how dangerous they are. I don't know if you've checked up on the shuttle boosters any time recently, but they are EXTREMELY dangerous. The key is mitigate the danger in as many ways as possible.
BTW, most of what you're reading is the 1960's technology. The TRITON Trimodal link is an example of a "safe" engine built in modern times. Besides that, most of these engines are designed to be deployed in space where the extra radioactive pollution doesn't matter.
Re:Not enough time for counter-measures (Score:5, Insightful)
Check out the timeline for the us space program, and you plot the trend.
5 may, 1961 - Freedom 7, first manned sub-orbital flight
20 feb, 1962 - Friendship 7, first manned orbital flight
21 Dec, 1968 - launch Apollo 8, first manned lunar orbit
21 July, 1969 - First manned lunar landing
12 April, 1981 - First launch of space shuttle
1 feb, 2003 - shuttle fleet grounded
There isn't much advancement in this curve, and there is a whole lot of retreat. A once proud program, that had the capability to put a man on the moon, just last week, outsourced to get one of thier folks into low orbit. That is a rather telling 'detail' as to just how much advancement is really happening.
Technology may be advancing, but I wouldn't be counting on anything the usa is developing to be useful in dealing with an asteroid collision scenario. The current administration has priorities higher than space travel, and, the debts they are running up to achieve those goals, will prevent future generations from persueing any meaningful space program during the timeframe in question.
Re:Good! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Curious about gravitational pull claim (Score:3, Insightful)
Most likely the strength of the material. This determines how much energy is dissipated by tidal forces during the close Earth flyby of 2029. That in turn affects the orbital parameters and hence the possibility of a later impact. The strength of the material (is it solid rock, or a big gravel pile) is very hard to determine remotely.
Re:Good ol' knowledge... (Score:2, Insightful)
This thing hits New York or Tokyo today, you think you wouldn't care ? Even if you aren't directly affected or anyone you care about is, think about the economy. We aren't self sustained hunters living far away in small groups anymore. Sure, humanity would survive, but would suck loosing your job because the economy took a hit now wouldn't it ?
Re:Good! (Score:2, Insightful)
Couldn't agree more.
How much would it cost to create a colony on Mars? What would we be able to do on own planet for the same amount of money? It seems to me that for the same amount of money we could develop a way to protect all of humanity from an asteroid strike, rather than send off a select few to the new home of humanity in the stars.
Besides, is colonizing Mars really any easier or better than colonizing a post-apocalyptic Earth? I would think a self contained biosphere built on Earth would be hella cheaper than one built on Mars. I would guess that Earth after a worst case asteroid scenario would still be more habitable than Mars. If nothing else, the "colonists" will sure have a ton of biomater to subsist on for awhile.
Personally, these arguements that we need to colonize space because we're trashing Earth sound a bit to me like someone who wants to buy a new house because they don't feel like cleaning their perfectly good existing house. Yeah, the new house may be more fun and exciting, but any way you rationalize it, you're still just rationalizing it.
No Space Program required for survival of Impact (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Point of impact (Score:2, Insightful)
Lot more water out their covering much more of the earth than land.
Two thirds of the earth is water so a water impact is more likely than a land impact. In such a case it would suck to be living on an island or any of the coasts in the body of water it hits in because of the resultant Tsunami.
Just a thought.
Re:Orion Project (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good! (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile we're hell-bent on destroying a perfectly viable planet with our own home-grown stupidity - at the rate we are going we'll eventually finish the job whether or not an asteroid beats us to the punch is just a matter of timing.
We can fix this place up, but what's gonna happen when the one comes that we divert?
What happens with global warming is killing us?
What happens when we get into a nuclear war?
What happens when earth starts naturally changing it's weather pattern to something that threatens or survival?
So what if we can protect ourselves from one thing? FFS man, can't you see we *NEED* to invest time into getting out of here so our species can survive. So what if we fail 10,000 times, at least we're trying!
Re:Our Eulogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps someone should read a little less Nietzsche.
Re:Good! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good! (Score:3, Insightful)
You sir, are obviously an idiot who either can't read or can't be bothered to read. We DID build nuclear thermal engines. They were done. Ready to fly on the Saturn V. They simply weren't needed as the time, because the LHOx engines matured faster. Nearly ALL Mars missions call for NTR engines, which is why the TRITON got built.
As for nuclear pulse propulsion, most of the work has actually been done, including tests to verify the basic concept. (Test Video [nuclearspace.com]) Von Braun himself was a big proponent of launching a mini-Orion on the Saturn V. His idea was that the V would get things to orbit, and the Orions would take them to the solar system. Too bad our government stabbed him in the back by dismantling the Saturn V program...
It always amazes me how people will happily chime in with criticizim even in the face of overwhelming evidence. No wonder you posted as AC.