NASA Plays Well With Comets 101
jmichaelg writes "Taking a page from Hollywood, NASA approved a Deep Impact mission to poke a seven story hole into Comet Tempel 1. It's a little tough to get past the grandstanding on NASA's part - the collision is scheduled for July 4, 2005. OTOH, hitting an asteroid something NASA has to demonstrate they can do. They missed on their first attempt at an asteroid rendezvous and spent a year chasing Eros. Clearly, they need a bit of practice. Last year, Los Alamos Labs detected two meteors impacting the earth. The bigger of the two explosions was estimated at between 6000-8000 tons of TNT which is 1/2 to 2/3'rds of the bomb's yield that was dropped on Hiroshima. The Tunguska comet/asteroid explosion in 1908 was the equivalent of a 15-40 megaton bomb. The Near Earth Asteroid Tracking observatory keeps turning up previously unknown near earth asteroids all the time so it's just a matter of time before NASA will have to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid lest it destroy some part of us." We ran another story about this earlier this year.
Kinetic Energy of 1 Kg Going 50,000 MPH (Score:1)
300,000? (Score:2)
Personally, I find your figure of 300,000 dying each cenury a little far fetched.
Unless you are counting all the dinosaurs that geeked it when the Big One hit back in 65,000,000 B.C.E.
Re:300,000? (Score:2)
When? When did metor strikes across the midwest kill people?
Last I heard the Great Chicago Fire wasn't startd by a metor or Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
As for tunguska, I thought it was in a desolate part of Siberia, so far off the beaten path, it was monthes or years till it was investigated.
And the strike in the Saudi desert. The Wabar meteorite impact site in the Empty Quarter (Ar-Rub' Al-Khali) desert of Saudi Arabia was in 1863. And they don't call the Empty Quarter, the empty quarter because it's 3/4 empty, it's empty because no one lives there. I still think an average of 3,000 a year is very, very, very high for deaths by metor.
Chicago Fire (Score:2)
http://www.chicagohs.org/history/fire.html
"The summer of 1871 was very dry, leaving the ground parched and the wooden city vulnerable. On Sunday evening, October 8, 1871, just after nine o'clock, a fire broke out in the barn behind the home of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary at 13 DeKoven Street. How the fire started is still unknown today, but an O'Leary cow often gets the credit. "
Re:Cool factor (Score:1)
NSA. Hmmm.... Comet smacking Earth, causing death and chaos... Couldn't possibly be a national security issue with huge implications for domestic and foreign upheaval, could it? 8/
Re:300,000? (Score:2)
Also, events like the Chinese city that was destroyed in 1490, something like 10-20,000 people dying from "stones raining from the sky".
http://www.sns.ias.edu/~piet/press/worldend.htm
has some great civilization-wrecking disasters.
NASA deflection? Hardly. (Score:4)
Sure, NASA would be used for some consultation, but any deflections would be an AirForce/Boeing/Lockmart/NRO/NSA endeavour. The military is used to working under severe time and situational constraints, NASA is not. It might cost tens of billions of dollars, but the military will be able to accomplish it, whereas NASA would do something like forget to convert imperial to metric.
When the time comes (and it will), NASA will be a consultation and tech resource, nothing more. The rockets will be commercial Deltas or Titans, the nukes will come from the Air Force, and the failsafe methodologies will be purely DoD.
Easier to hit than land (Score:3)
Re:NASA deflection? Hardly. (Score:1)
Isn't that against Federation rules? (Score:1)
Intergalactic billiards (Score:3)
Re:Um, there are NO recorded meteorite deaths. (Score:2)
300,000 people die each year from tobacco. I've heard numerous reports of people being added in that statistic for things like smoking while driving and getting in a car accident and other vaguely connected statistics.
As for your statistics, I think you are just way off based. Tunguska wasn't even really thought of as a meteor strike, and the closest town (Irkutsk) only showed a spike on a siesmograph.. I think the only large group of living organisms killed by that meteor was reindeer.
95% of statistics can be skewed to support an argument.
.. and just like any good american action movie... (Score:1)
But first, the paniced masses must be given hope by the Hero in a 2.5 minute monologue, followed by cheers all over the world... :-)
(I don't dislike american action movies, but they certainly are predictable - just as the american view of the world and the american position in it)
Re:.. and just like any good american action movie (Score:1)
I just don't see the obvious in US alone saving the world...
Re:Why destroy it? (Score:1)
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Re:Intergalactic billiards (Score:2)
Of course, this is an organization that probably refers (internally) to any potential super high speed space travel technology as a "warp drive"...
Us Military Observations (Score:1)
Statistically speaking, they say that 3000 people die in a year from meteror impacts. That's not to say that 3000 people die every year from this, its an average, 300,000 people die every century.
two words (Score:2)
For instance, you wanna get to a probe that it is the same orbit, and therfore, going the same speed as you. You speed up, which transfers you to a higher orbit, and you have to pass the thing by, and drop down to speed and it comes up behind you. IF you time it right. It takes supercomputers to calculate this stuff, the math behind it is so complex that it exceeds Einstein's physics.
People need to stop belieing that space travel is like we see it on Hollywood, cause its not.
Re:300,000? (Score:2)
And we have had a few, chicago fire killed a lot of people, and that was a bunch of small meteor strikes accorss the whole midwest US, fires it caused killed a entire town in wisconson, someone remind me of the name, but the death count was over 1500. Estimated death count for all those areas involved in what is collectively called the great chicago fire is like 15,000 - 25,000. But I could be mixing facts on that one.
There is also recorded documentation of nighttimes bright as day in London and cities accross western Europe, and a religios document claiming refercne to the fiery mountain from god in russian like a week before. People die in russia, the ash the strike throws upo reflects light in the atmosphere and westerners see pretty lights all night long for a week.
Check your history, there are no documented cases of asteroid strikes, but their are plenty of acts of god all over theplace. What do you think that big area of glass covered desert in suadi arabia is from? The natives fear that place because allah burned it to the ground and into glass......
Re:Um, there are NO recorded meteorite deaths. (Score:2)
Stop thinking about it as a "3000 must die every year" its an average based on data pieced togther since man started walking.
Re:two words (Score:2)
might add.... (Score:2)
Re:300,000? (Score:2)
As for arabs, yeah, I knew that place was empty. If I know my theology, and I proboaly don't, they considered it a holy place before it was hit. I think they believe some great sinner entered the area and Allah got pissed. So like, 15 highwaymen might have died there, in a really interesting way I might add.
And back to tunguska, yeah, its out in the middle of BFE, but from the initial investigation, all the tribes said, no one was inside the blast area. Aparranetly, it had been some area that was decreed off limits for cattle grazing due o some tribal warefare, it was kind of a neutral zone. But 30 years later, they got some of the locals to admit that some clans were grazing animals in the area. They feared that the gods would strike them down if they talked, so they kept quiet for years.
And I don't think 3000 a year is unreasonable, the really, nasty, big rocks hit us fairly rarely, once in a blue moon. But they can potentialy kill a lot of people. The average is maintained over millenia. Man'e been around for a long time and a lot can happen.
Re:Easier to hit than land (Score:2)
Re:Celestial performance art? (Score:1)
I've seen a professionally offended societal go-gooder upset enough by something they imagined could be seen in an image of a solar flare's glowing burst of gas that they forbade it as a cow-worker's MS Windows wallpaper.
From past interactions with the religious types that might be paranoid about the same thing, I think it's a tossup whether they would blame NASA or that horrible Devil Comet.
Celestial performance art? (Score:2)
Presumably the plume from the impact would dissipate fairly quickly, but for a while recognisable shapes might be crafted.
And then there are the commercial possibilities, the advertising value of having your company's logo displayed across the sky for all in viewing latitudes to see should be worth a big donation to NASA. Or maybe the initials of someone who has too much money to throw away, like amateur astronaut Dennis Tito, could be tapped to subsidize the mission.
The possibilities are as endless as the bounds of bad taste!
Re:Nothing to worry about (Score:2)
It's hard to tell for sure how much copper is involved. The site linked to, and the press release linked to from there, give 3 possible masses. Well, actually, one mass and two quantities of force - it will weigh a variable amount in pounds under acceleration and zero pounds once in free fall, but will maintain the same mass in kilograms throughout.
Okay, since copper is not a precious metal I'll assume we aren't talking troy pounds. So is the impactor:
770 pounds (349.272 kg)?
771 pounds (349.7256 kg)?
350 kilograms (~771.605 Pounds)?
Naturally, the USA news services that picked up the press release judt dropped the "350 kilogram" number. Hopefully NASA will figure out exactly what it masses before launch. Navigation would go so much better!
"771 pound copper bullet" targeting comet (Score:3)
And is that Avoirdupois or Troy pounds?
neato (Score:1)
ahem
NEATO -- Near Earth Asteroid Tracking Observatory
Chasing Eros... isn't that a movie? (Score:2)
Funny, I spent a large chunk of my earlier years attempting a women rendezvous and spent years chasing Eros (love/lust).
Re:Better editing (Score:2)
Therefore, Tunguska was anywhere from 2000 to 6700 times more powerful than the referenced explosion.
Sheesh! Can't anyone do simple math anymore.
Mirror site (Score:1)
http://deepimpact.umd.edu [umd.edu]
astroid strike not so bad (Score:1)
Of course, it would really suck if it missed DC by just enough to hit one of the nuclear power plants in VA....
First words when it hits! (Score:1)
Re:I see someone has been watching... (Score:1)
Re:I see someone has been watching... (Score:1)
I see someone has been watching... (Score:2)
If it's not police chases, it's Egypt.
If it's not Egypt, it's asteroids and comets
If it's not asteroids and comets, it's a feature on something that's being shown in the latest movie (Pearl Harbor, Egypt, etc)
That thing with the Russian comet air burst was on for *hours* last night...it was inescapable (except for a thing on minesweepers [yep, the game, obviously] on History Channel).
The Discovery Channel has become the "EgyptPoliceChasesAsteroidsTopicalMovieStuff" Channel, but must Slashdot follow suit?
And if I'm flipping through channels and I see that security camera recording of that convenience store robber who puts his rifle on the counter, and the clerk grabs it again, I'm going to have an anuerysm. That, or the police chase with that guy driving a tank down the LA freeway.
BBC article (Score:1)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_
Slashdot Hype (Score:3)
This is about research, not about blowing up comets to save the earth.
Re:NASA *can* hit asteroids... (Score:1)
BTW. Awsome work you guys are doing. And glad you guys were able to get it back after the accident. How's the SUMER instrument doing?
NASA *can* hit asteroids... (Score:5)
I work with scientific spacecraft, and I'm still always surprised at the precision with which we can determine distances and positions of distant objects. SOHO [nasa.gov] is a million miles from Earth, and its radial position is known to within a few centimeters.
Barring egregious mismanagement [nasa.gov], it's not that hard to hit celestial bodies -- we have the right tools for the job!
Re:300,000? (Score:1)
FUD... (Score:1)
The chances of the earth being hit by a dangerously significant item from space are far lower than the chances I get hit by a car before I make it home tonight. People there is no news here, go home and relax and worry about something real like rising taxes and falling stocks.
Re:Um, there are NO recorded meteorite deaths. (Score:1)
Let the picking of nits commence! (Score:3)
Re:Hyperbole (Score:1)
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Hyperbole (Score:2)
Well I suppose it is a matter of time, but we could be talking throusands or even millions of years here.
Only nickel core objects can make it to the ground (everything else explodes in the upper athmosphere). These are rare enough. So a very large object would be needed before a big Megaton force blast is felt on the ground. And based on the size of the objects and how often these hit, the mean time between earth impact is large. On the order of thousands of years.
Personally, I don't think its something that is likely to happen in my life time. That said all these sky surveys for Near Earth Objects is to correctly assess the risk. The current margin of error in the calculations is large.
Then again I could get squashed by a giant falling rock before I fini
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Re:Some credit may be due... (Score:1)
Ah, but if I'm not mistaken, NEAR was operated by JPL, not NASA; perhaps that's what you meant?
Actually NEAR was operated at Johns Hopkins and funded by NASA. NEAT is operated by JPL and also funded by NASA.
Re:Slashdot Hype (Score:1)
It may also be that we find asteroids that are worth mining. The only way we'll find them is to send these kinds of probes out and look.
Re:NASA *can* hit asteroids... (Score:1)
There are a myriad # of things to go wrong but the more practice NASA has at doing this kind of thing, the more confident we can be that when the time comes that they have to do it right, they will.
Re:NASA deflection? Hardly. (Score:1)
You have to give NASA credit. The fact is that NASA, not DoD, sponsored the research that's made sci-fi sci-fact. Nasa managed the trip to the moon that demonstrated that the moon's craters were impact craters, not volcanic, and they underwrote Shoemaker and Levy's research that spotted the bolide which made earth-size plumes on Jupiter.
Re:they missed the first time? (Score:1)
Nasa can only be deemed capable of "planetary defense" if they get plenty of practice doing this kind of thing. Consider the Mars probes that failed for a variety of reasons and the jammed antenna on the Jupiter probe for examples of what can go wrong. The more practice NASA gets, the better off we'll all be.
Re:JHU APL, not NASA, in charge of NEAR (Score:1)
From the report you cite....
The make up burn placed NEAR on a trajectory to rendezvous with Eros on Feb 14 2000, 13 months later than originally planned.
Granted, they recovered from the initial miss, but the fact is they did miss on the first try. It doesn't matter if it's "an engine burn anomaly," the result is a miss on the first try.
I'm not castigating NEAR or NASA for missing on the first try. My point was that if you're trying to deflect an asteroid, you had better be where you need to be on the first try - you may not have time enough for a correction. The way to increase the odds that a "hose up" won't happen is to give NASA/JHU APL/JPL/... lots of practice.
Re:Oh come on you people (Score:1)
Page from Hollywood, indeed. (Score:2)
Deep Space One is an experimental probe designed to test ion propulsion and semi-autonomous operation. Deep Space Two was an auxiliary payload on the Mars Polar Lander that was designed to send two impact probes to drive into the surface of Mars and perform tests (they were lost along with the lander for unknown reasons.)
What will happen when we get to Deep Space Nine? According to the back of one of my DS9 novels, the phrase is trademarked. Will Paramount raise a fuss when NASA gets far enough along in the project series to argue with them? I hope not, since it'd be great PR. Besides, I don't think you can really trademark the term when used that way. They also tried to trademark "USS Enterprise" some time back, but the Navy understandably got upset and gave them some smackdown. I'm sure the thousands of sailors who have served on her agree with the sentiment.
Still, I look forward to seeing what Deep Impact can do. It'll help us carry out a mission like the Messiah's in the future if it ever becomes necessary in reality. (The Messiah, by the way, is an incredibly cool design. Who would have thought you could combine the Space Shuttle, ISS modules, Energia/Shuttle booster rockets, spare external tanks, and a NERVA engine so exquisitely?)
Re:Oh come on you people (Score:2)
To this day, the military has not specified what that payload was, though I speculate that it was likely a KH-12 spy satellite or a similar vehicle, which is reportedly very similar to the overall design of the Hubble telescope but optimised for looking back at the Earth instead of toward the stars. Using different sensors, of course; Hubble would be blinded if it pointed at the Moon or Earth. Hubble, incidentally, is one of the few payloads to even come close to filling the entire payload bay. Hubble filled nearly all of it; the emptiest shuttle mission ever was the first flight, STS-1 -- carried out in April of 1981 -- that carried no payload whatsoever.
Hoodwinked? No. They actually had input on the design and helped to make its development into a working vehicle possible. DoD stopped putting military payloads on the Shuttle because one has been lost. It seems that the military believes that one loss in 25 missions is unacceptable, even though to this day there have been none since in over 75 more missions. This is actually a good record, since there have been mishaps with just about every launch vehicle out there. It's just that the loss of the Space Shuttle results in huge publicity (rightfully so) while the loss of, say, a Delta II results in a collective national yawn and a flip of the channel to a football game. Even the Air Force's workhorse the Titan IV has failed several times, not just once.The Shuttle fleet is too busy right now to accept a military mission in any case, however, since three of the four shuttles are constantly flying to the space station and the fourth, Columbia, has not reentered service after its last Orbiter Maintenance Down Period (OMDP). Columbia is too heavy to reach the ISS, so she will be flying science missions as the shuttle did for years before the ISS began assembly in 1998.
NEATO (Score:5)
Am I the only one that sees the abbreviation for the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking Observatory is NEATO?
I bet they did that on purpose, those crazy astronomers!
they missed the first time? (Score:1)
to me that's more than half the difficulty of a 'deep impact' mission, delivering your payload to the asteroid.
i'd say NASA is quite capable of planetary defense.
Re:NASA deflection? Hardly. (Score:1)
Additionally, NASA is a US organization, and one must question the poltical implications of a governmental organization tracking down and destroying asteroids. Would NASA stop a small asteroid if it were about to run smack dab into Iraq? I know that sounds somewhat hysterical, but it still is a valid question- why isn't this program placed on a slighly higher level of internation, and national importance, instead of being relegated to a national(istic?) group with a shoe string budget. Perhaps we can throw scraps of our other failed space craft at it. Or the plans for the reusable air-to-space vehicle.
Re:Oh come on you people (Score:1)
You're thinking of the KH-11 series of satelites. The KH-12 was, I believe, a radarsat.
Re:Hyperbole (Score:2)
If we assume that a 1000 meter rock is large enough to do the trick then the actual odds of impact are - over the next 20 years - just 5000 to one against the impact. That is very lousy odds for an event that could kill a billion people.
A one KM diameter asteroid traveling at 21 Km per sec has the explosive energy of one hundred thousand 1 megaton hydrogen bombs. The fireball from such an impact would be about 75 miles across - big enough to punch out of the atmosphere much as Shoemaker Levy 9 did with Jupiter. The estimate is that we take a hit from a rock this size about every 100,000 years - over a 20 year span that gives about 1 in 5000 chance of a hit.
Of course we have been on the good side of that 5000 to one odds every 20 years since the beginning of recorded history.
Re:Better editing (Score:1)
Uh, did anybody *else* find this a source of confusion? Don't you think that 'megaton' is a familiar enough term in general use that it doesn't need to be translated or converted? Sheesh.
Re:might add.... (Score:1)
Cool Images (Score:3)
The theory also says that the plume may spew into space months after impcat providing tons of data on the compisition of comets (which belive it or not we know very little about other than theroy).
JHU APL, not NASA, in charge of NEAR (Score:2)
OTOH, hitting an asteroid something NASA has to demonstrate they can do. They missed on their first attempt at an asteroid rendezvous and spent a year chasing Eros.
First, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab [jhuapl.edu] did all the mission design [jhuapl.edu].
Second, JHUAPL didn't "miss" Eros - see the report [jhuapl.edu]. ...the main engine's normal start-up transient exceeded a lateral acceleration safety threshold that was set too low. It was an onboard software problem. Also, please note that NEAR carried out much more than its planned mission even after the hose-up. You really can't accuse anyone of having trouble "hitting an asteroid".
Re:Cool Images (Score:1)
I'll sue (Score:1)
Re:I see someone has been watching... (Score:1)
How can you not enjoy the ones where the criminal fleeing on a motorcycle broadsides a bus at 60mph, or the one where the criminal fleeing in a muscle car takes what looks to be an off-ramp from the elevated freeway, only to fly into the air, Dukes of Hazzard style, before crashing to earth? I also heartily enjoy the rare ones that end with some incorrigible, teenaged punk car thief removing himself from the gene pool when he plays chicken with an overpass support column or some such.
Admittedly, I do also like the more educational shows they run, but the police chase shows have their place.
Did anyone actually read the article? (Score:1)
Why destroy it? (Score:3)
Re:Page from Hollywood, indeed. (Score:2)
An Orion engine, if you please... Silently omitting that it would have been powered by atomic explosions so as not to upset the Greens.
Yes, it was cool!
Some credit may be due... (Score:3)
Now, wait, there has been quite a number of probes which missed their targets; can you name any, other than NEAR, which caught up with their target after doing so at the first encounter? Perhaps Japan's Planet-B in 2003, kind of... And which performed a soft landing on said target? None so far.
Ah, but if I'm not mistaken, NEAR was operated by JPL, not NASA; perhaps that's what you meant?
NASA no longer is adapted to crash-course missions; they'll ask for 10 years and/or a few trillion dollars. Better contract with private companies...
Guess you flunked math (Score:1)
Re:Page from Hollywood, indeed. (Score:2)
For you guys that don't know what I'm talking about: Orion was a 1950's or 60's proposal for a nuclear powered spaceship using only existing technology. It would consist of a cabin mounted on a very big, thick metal bell. To go, you launch a small nuclear bomb out the back and detonate it at the right distance for the bell to catch the blast without melting down. Repeat every few seconds until you are going fast enough. In the novel Footfall, to repel an alien invasion they created an Orion battleship by putting a heavy cruiser (ocean-going type) hull on the bell. Modern warships are designed so they can be sealed up for protection against chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but I'm not sure how much work it might take to make it airtight for space. But for the rest, it's armored, it's got eight inch guns to deal with the "small" stuff, and if those are insufficient you just build up speed towards the target, turn the ship, and toss some nukes. 8-)
Re:Hyperbole (Score:2)
Um, there are NO recorded meteorite deaths. (Score:1)
I did say "recorded"... (Score:1)
Re:band of material? (Score:1)
Sorry, just can't stand to see a good quote gone wrong.
Re:two words (Score:2)
<sarcasm> Supercomputers to calculate? Yeah right. Guess they had lots of processing power during the Mercury and Apollo programs, because obviously NASA must have access to alien technology that are much more advanced than what the rest of the world had at that time. </sarcasm>
band of material? (Score:2)
Any chance you have a URL with some more info on this? (You can imagine what a Google search on 'band of material' brings up :). Unless you're talking comet debris, and most of that is pretty tiny, I'd be curious as to just where this material is coming from, and how anyone detected it.
Reminds me of a really neat book from 1987, Exit Earth. The solar system is passing through some kind of matter that makes the sun go semi-nova, and to save humanity these big space-arks.. well, read it youself, it touches on some points that you normally don't see in sci-fi disaster novels.
Re:Another bright idea... (Score:1)
Re:.. and just like any good american action movie (Score:1)
Re:two words (Score:1)
Re:.. and just like any good american action movie (Score:1)
Re:Oh come on you people (Score:1)
Right now, NASA is getting its budgets squeezed while the current administration promises large amounts of funding for son-of-SDI type programs. If NASA wants funding, perhaps it would be better off making peaceful, scientific, programs look like hard-core military projects?
--
Re:Celestial performance art? (Score:1)
Re:Celestial performance art? (Score:1)
"Coke adds life!"
no surprise (Score:1)
Re: This is about research... (Score:1)
That does make some sense though. I think we all would agree that NASA has had some bad luck lately, and there isn't alot of popular support for the space program in the US right now, AFAIK. "Blowing stuff up" is more interesting to the average American when compared with research. Broadcasting the collision could make for a good media event, if done better than the J. Glen launch or the Mars landing. Potentially more... spectacular. I know I'll be watching.
Are all asteroids metal? (Score:2)
Or we could surround an area far above the earth with a metal net, and put opposite charge on the net and the asteroid so it will be caught. With infinite electrical power, I bet this would be possible.
Then again, maybe doing a magical fairy dance in your underware at sundown would do the same thing. Do I need a physics lesson?
Another bright idea... (Score:2)
Re:Oh come on you people (Score:1)
Hubble would be blinded if it pointed at the Moon or Earth
Not True. Look here. [nasa.gov]
As far as I know, Mercury and the Earth are the only planets Hubble has never looked at.
Re:Another bright idea... (Score:1)
The other problem is how do you charge up the plates. If you charge them on earth, then you sending a big charged capacitor up on rocket, which is a disaster begging to happen. (Ok maybe I'm in favor of that.) If you charge them once you are up in space, that means you have a decent power source up there -- then why not just fly the power souce to the asteroid, and use a little ion gun rocket to gradually nudge it away ?
Well, no explosion is involved. I admitt, if Nasa is going to spend billions on some stupid project (yes I think moving an asteroid which will probably hit in the pacific ocean or some worthless place like France is stupid, especially since if we saw it coming in time enough to deflect it, and it wasn't hitting France or China, the US is rich enough to move a few tens of millions of people for a few weeks and then rebuild the infrastructure there) then I want a huge explosion, god damn it. Bang ! Bright Lights ! Give me something for my tax dollars !
Re:Fraud (Score:3)
Which fact ? The global warming hypesters have a lot of little psuedo maybe-facts wrapped up in their stuff. Has the earth gotten warmer in the past 20 years ? Yes. Was it due to CO2 ? That hypothesis requires a huge amount of tweaking specialized computer models to make it match up with the data -- predicting Florida election returns with trained neural nets is more respectable, in my opinion. Remember, less than 20 years ago these same "scientists" were trying to get us all riled up about a coming ice age. Will the sea level rise or fall if the average temperature increases ? They can tweak their models either way. Some of them even say that there will be more snowfall in glacial areas, and invent a process which puts us all in an ice age. The one constant in all the models is that we are just flick of a butterfly's wing away from a cascade of causes and effects that ends in total disaster. Because otherwise, the study would not be published.
If the US found a cheap, safe, pollution and CO2 free way to make as much energy as we wanted tomorrow, the Sierra Club and the European Greens would fight it tooth and nail. Why ? Because they don't care about these "facts" of global warming and oil shortages and whatever; what they have is a religion, a faith that says the United States and other industrial nations committed some sin by being rich, and we must pay for it, preferably by giving away a lot of stuff to third world countries, and by sacrificing and suffering and walking around in hemp sandles instead of riding SUV's until our minds are appropriately aligned with the sanctioned TRUTH. Greens and Sierre Clubers would find a technical escape from their invented apocalpse extremely upsetting. That's the main reason why I'm for nuclear and wind energy, not because I actually want to save the world or anything stupid like that -- it's just a great troll of those stupid Kaczynskites.
. . . announcing to slashdotters the depth of your ignorance. . .
That never stopped me before . . .
. . . the fact that you have done NO research in any of these subjects . . .
Well, all of my nasty sniping and hyperbole aside, you would probably be surprised to know what I've done and read. Of course, I took it beyound your level of browsing a couple of articles in Scientific American and Discover, and then masturbating to the thought of how enlightened and politicaly correct I was. Get of the net moron, I think there is a cup of wheat grass or carrot juice or $6 coffee calling your name somewhere.
Re:band of material? (Score:1)
Collisions in general (Score:4)
There is an extremely low chance of such a massive collision in the next few hundred years, at least - what should be worrying, instead, is a smaller impact in the Pacific, which could wipe east-coast Japan off the map. These impacts happen much more frequently, some claim once every 10,000 years, and one might be coming soon due to the band of material the Earth is soon to encounter. The effects of such an impact on the global economy are incalculable, and the probabilities of such an occurance are much higher. The Japanese government is growing increasingly concerned, and are considering a 2 to 4 million dollar annual budget for the identification, tracking, and destruction of likely impact masses.
In fact, if the Russian impact of 1908 were in fact a metallic body (as is almost entirely disproven, at this point), and had struck the Pacific instead, this destruction of Japan would have already occured. And when you think about it, a few thousand miles of earth's surface is not a very wide safety margin, relative to the massive distances traveled by these objects.
One comment made in a recent TLC program on this issue strikes me... "Think about it: The number of people we have who are specifically employed to track these objects is smaller than the staff of a neighborhood McDonald's"
Re:Better editing (Score:1)
And I quote: (Score:2)
--Ben Affleck "Armageddon"
Interception smallest part of problem (Score:5)
Right now, we don't have the ability to do that. This interception is, in reality, rather meaningless from an Earth-protection point of view, although it is cool. And of course, there's always the scientific benefit.
Re:Hyperbole (Score:2)