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That depends on what you mean by "large asteroid". Anything circa 100m can be deflected by planting nukes on one side, or even by using daft measures like painting one side white. It is not difficult to deflect an asteroid of this size in outer space.

If you're talking the really huge "planet killing" types, we already know where they are and none are likely to hit us in the next 100 years unless something goes incredibly wrong, eg two of them bash into each other and sends one towards us.

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQp7cVu3Ny0
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ano2y1ewwzQ
Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmi--Ov_pSs
Part 4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdu8qAMG_ow
Part 5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO62ibV1ojU

 

For now, it's got to be the different versions of Harlem Shake.. I love watching those videos.

 

My first natural reaction would be- "how do you dare, ignorant, evil politicians and "scientists" from NASA, how do you dare to ignore the danger and waste money for relatively stupid projects like walking around Mars with a rover ?"

Or wasting billions of dollars for so called "space race" against the USSR, and also several wars, including damaging the lives of millions of people...

Or this:

In 1992, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told their Congress "We spent over 30 thousand billion dollars to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its satellites in order to elicit material and spiritual collapse."

But if I think twice... If Mother Nature wants to destroy us, She can use other means- Supervolcanos like that underneath the states, or Megaearthquakes, or shifting Earth's axis, thus changing the location of Poles, etc...

Thing is that we should have already made some progress with those technologies for pushing asteroids off their trajectory and potential collision course.

But maybe it's just me and I don't understand the global plan.

 

Nearly a million kilometers is a pretty damn big miss. To put in perspective how big a miss that is, the earth itself is not even 13kkm across, and at a million kilometers' distance is just a little blob of color against the blackness of space. We don't need to worry about misses; it missed! In fact, most of the entire universe misses us ALL THE TIME. So quit trying to make waves.

Galactic scales don't matter. If it misses then it missed, and that's all that matters. Talking about galactic scales is just dumb, and an obvious attempt at trying to "wake up" the general population to the fact that there are dangerous projectiles flying about out there. We might as well say that on a galactic scale, the andromeda galaxy is on a head-on collision course with the milky way. Shit will go down in about two billion years, in extreme slow-motion. Hold onto your hats fellas, this is gonna get rough!



You're so silly for quoting this kind of alarmist crap.

Doesn't matter where they come from. It's irrelevant. If some strange guy murders you for no apparant reason, do you care where he was born? We can rest assured that whatever asteroid(s) may cross our path now or in the future, they orbited something somewhere at some point, and that time, velocity and gravity henceforth put it into our vicinity.

Where it came from is impossible to know. It could have originated from outside our solar system for all we know.

 

A 100m asteroid isn't all that dangerous. Granted, it will destroy a significant area around the impact site, but so little of the Earth is inhabited that it's unlikely to cause a significant death toll. The impacts don't become really dramatic until you get to around 200m or so (which would destroy a small state).

Perhaps more to the point, using a nuclear blast may just turn that one projectile into many smaller ones, creating more widespread damage.

I don't think that would be a very effective deflection mechanism, because most asteroids are likely to be tumbling as they orbit the Sun. Using the gravitational attraction of a spacecraft that is kept a distance away from the asteroid is a better bet. But whichever way you slice it, these sorts of methods take a long time, and are most effective while the asteroid is still a long time from hitting us.

No, we don't. We have only tracked a fraction of the asteroids out there, and there is absolutely no guarantee that there aren't any very large ones on track to hit us soon. Granted, a large impact sometime soon is unlikely. They only happen once every hundred million years or so on average. But the possibility is still out there, and the damage is enough that we should be spending a heck of a lot more money tracking asteroids.

 

Anyway, relevant to where the thread has gone:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr...s_saving_the_world_from_rocks_from_space.html

(link contains a 5-minute video)

But honestly, I'm still skeptical that we've detected all of the large asteroids that cross the Earth's path.

 

I guess most of the asteroids come from the asteroid belt between planets Mars and Jupiter. Thing is that there are random collision events between those stones and it is very difficult to track all of them...

 

I'm not at all worried about new asteroids stemming from collisions in the asteroid belt. Granted, they do happen all the time. The difficulty is I expect it to take quite a while for an asteroid from such a collision to strike the Earth (to be fair, if it made a beeline for us it would only take a year or two, but the chances of that are minuscule...more likely, if it's going to strike, it enters an orbital path that eventually crosses our orbit after some large number of passes around the Sun).

The main thing is that we need to track the asteroids that are out there, and I'm not sure that we have enough eyes on the sky to do that effectively, because very little money is dedicated to the search.

A bigger worry, as far as major impacts are concerned, is that of a comet. The issue with comets is that they have extremely long orbits, so there are a great many comets out there that simply haven't been close enough to the Sun to see since we had the telescopes to see them with. And any one of them could potentially be headed right for us and we may not know until it's too late.

All that said, such large impacts are rare, and the chance of one happening within our lifetimes is small. We do have the technology to detect them, and the technology to deflect them if we have somewhere around 3-5 years' warning, so given the danger it is absurd that we aren't putting more resources into finding such asteroids and comets.

 

A new leader

 

Just... so random!

 

Behold, the power of 486!

 

Haha, that's great

So strange to hark back to the days when draw time of a spreadsheet was significant. And serving a 3GB database? These days there are petabyte-scale databases that serve data in a fraction of a second (e.g. Google Web Search).

 

The 11th Hour is a new documentary from Leonardo DiCaprio about the state of humanity and the world. Join the action at www.11thhouraction.com

When this clip gets as many hits as gangnam style, Ill have some hope for humanity

 

Hmmm this thing is 6 years old...

 

The movie is so huge, I like.
It doesn't matter how old it is because it is topical at least until people change their thinking and big corporations throw the shitty aim of constant growth based on limited resources away. Then people will differ from the primitive civilisation which they do belong to now

Today is the Earth's Day. Happy Earth's Day

 

"This message is brought to you by Warner Brothers. Our motto is 'Warner Today for a Warmer Tomorrow'.

In no way can we be described a a big corporation with shitty aims of constant anything. Certainly not constant revenue growth, constant stock price growth, constant growth in our exec salaries or anything like that.

Under no circumstances would we recruit a fading ex-A-list star to take part in an exercise of band-wagon-jumping just for the money. No way siree."

 

Whoa, there. Leo DiCaprio a fading ex-A-list star? That's not true today, and it especially wasn't true back then - this was right after Blood Diamond and The f'in Departed!

 

Ok, enough with the earth saving, now I want my new copy of GTA V, and whoever runs the shady garage where those asian children run the machinery to burn the game´s DVDs better reduce their pay even further because inflation is kicking in and I don´t wanna have to pay more than $60!