15 years ago, Shoemaker-Levy rifled up a series of comet debris into the gas giant.
Well, seems like it took an amateur astronomer from Australia by the name of Anthony Wesley to tip Nasa or other professionals on July 19th to aim their telescopes at the event.
Earth would have been slammed to oblivion, btw.
Here's the Hubble "report"!
Nobody was able to detect the object BEFORE such an impact, this time.
The fact is, the odds are so astronomically low that it would hardly be worth the funding and effort required. We have real problems, and they're earth-based.
That would be a valid argument if asteroid searches took a significant amount of resources, which of course they don't. We've spent less on these programs in the last 10 years than we do buying a new aircraft carrier, or lofting one satellite. It's less than a pittance compared to something like social security. A few hundred million dollars, spread over several years (and more importantly, many countries) is a trivial cost compared to the potential down side of not knowing about an impact before hand.
Even if we did know an impact was imminent, is there anything that can be done about it?
Well, there are several things we could do, most of them involve detonating things on or near the rock to knock it away from us, or putting some sort of an all-thruster robobtic device on it, that then pushes it away. It only takes a slight varience in direction or speed to make something miss us entirely.
You'd be surprised what a few hundred million dollars could do for several humanitarian efforts.
What good is ANY humanitarian efforts (until or inbetween, as a result of perpetual_consequential neglect justifiable or otherwise) if there would be absolutely nobody left, eventually?
yep, invest now; right in third world development, for cash, for profits, for rice & wheat, for pollution & industry, for guns & automobiles, for castles & ghettos, for politics & economics, for water & oil.
Kaboom, over.
So here's your balance sheet; 6 billions and counting, for wealth OR poverty. Still a zero sum result.
Worry about the devil you know rather than the devil you don't. (Not the correct usage of the idiom, but let it slide ) I'm not entirely convinced that we can do anything if there is something coming for us. Put rockets on it? Safely landing something on the space object, let alone getting it set up correctly to push it, sounds awefully difficult. Blowing it up assumes that it's small enough to blow up, and that the chunks won't be just as bad. But like I said in my first post in this thread, I am far from well versed in this area.
Would I rather put efforts into bettering the lives of people today than try to defend against something that in all likelihood will never happen in our lifetimes and we might not even be able to do anything about? Absolutely.
How to.
Both were dismissed years ago for not making a dent in orbital gravity pulls extended by Earth & more importantly, the Sun.
Asteroids & Comets are drawn towards the surface, not simply flying by.
1/6250 is an EXTREMELY high odd, btw. Considering the diameter of Earth, it's 300kms worth of a rocky hyper-velocity bullet either hitting dead smack in the equatorial middle or skimming the atmosphere, in which case a Tungunska type explosion or any amounts of shrapnel (how many 5kms roaming around?) plummeting anywhere.
It's 11:55, and you've got five minutes.
I tend to agree, we're that stupid with some statistical truth or facts -- about Jupiter or not.
Well after NASA landed a prob on Asteroid Eros in 2001 i think we more then proved that would could reach these objects, and even put craft on, or in orbit of them. This alone is enough ( at lest for me ) to prove that we can change the flight plan of these rocks. So we already have the know how, and as far as money be concerned well its minor when compared to all that needless spending going around.
That is the type of thinking people use to convince themselves they don't need insurance. Maybe 1 in 10,000 houses burn down in any given year, so why waste money on insurance against an event that probably won't happen to me? There are better things to spend that money on, right?
Besides, the point of finding these things NOW is to give us time to do something if it ever becomes necessary. It is much better to find the big ass rock with our name on it now, when it won't hit us for several years rather than waiting and having some amateur astronomer find it 2 weeks before it hits the pasific and makes the Indonesian tsunami look like a minor splash. The energy needed to prevent an hit is inversely proportional to the time before impact, and finding it early gives us time to build a rocket to do something about it
tazgecko: I don't know if it's just me, but your picture doesn't show on my computer. Lemme try a diff browser (I been havin trouble with Chrome formatting poorly on this site since I installed it on my new PC. Any suggestions?)
others: Like I said in a previous post, it depends on who's price quote is closer to the truth. Without all the information on what we can do, how much it costs, and how much money there is to spend, I can't come to a fair conclusion on how much should be invested. I think some of my posts are almost knee-jerk to the OP's antagonistic, accusatory, and/or fear-mongering posts.
tazgecko, all it took was a miscalculated reset in the trajectory BY gravity to not only spin the bullet outa control but also to deviate it enough so that it remains in OUR orbital grasp.
No computational power can negate Earth's location or weight.
Better to be aware of the dangers than to sit on our hands doin' nothing about it.
Do you wear a helmet all the time in case something falls on your head, too? (I wonder how the odds compare to doomsday asteroids)
We simply can't knock it off *precisely* enough to eliminate the probabilities (yes, that's much more than one outcome).
Right now, time is estimated as a lucky glimpse in someone's amateurish tiny backyard telescope doing a gambler shot at a theoretical quest for a planet mass-destruction device comin' from space.
Necessary? Pffftttt. No contest, we'd have a launch.
Its a vid from you tube Primal ?
Must be chrome , firefox is ok
well i'm using IE7 righ tnow. It looks like just a blank picture - that is, there is an empty box and in the upper left corner is the lil picture icon thing with a square, a triangle, and a circle.
Nope, only when i sat on a motorcycle... but i've played football a few times in High-school too. I intercepted passes and ran down fields to score touch-downs instead of throwing grenades at targets or using semi-automatic rifles to shoot down a black dot 600 yards away.
Practicing is simple balastics. Although, locking up clearly in combat is scary unless cloaked in a triple amphibious water_air_ground gimmick anyone must fear.
Look it's a UFO. Yeah, well. A blip on radars. Helmet free or not.
Back on topic?
Pray, space is vast.
Must be flash
The link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPS-m_sI7_k&feature=SeriesPlayList&p=E720893BF835B588&index=4
Its just a short from a bbc documentary on how you could deflect an asteroid.
Maybe it's your helmet visor. Otherwise, get Adobe Flashplayer 10.
Yes, because clearly if we spend money on looking at rocks in space, humanity can finally reach its goal of living forever.
Or we could just raise funding on the search for vast deposits of unicorn blood.
In the end, Zyx, we all die. And we have far better ways of killing ourselves than the Universe seems to care to throw at us, for the moment.
Furthermore, if we did pump large sums of money into this, you're aware that we still may not see whatever comes? Not everything can be solved by throwing money at the problem, and quite frankly, the majority of space is pretty damn dark.
Funding this would also take funding away from NASA, which after the Bush administration, is already asphyxiating.
Not so, says the current generation of environmentalism goals. And their own ongoing quest for a future worth living for but still granted to THEIR precious childrens.
And yet, money can buy whatever we (as in Humanity, btw) decide or not; health or death, budgeted by conflictual choices, militarized by arsenals.
Catch a ride to Mars, dump the UN flag.
Party time, comet X is on its way.
What NASA can't (or wouldn't through decisions, btw) do, somebody else will and the USA would have to beg for a pie slice as usual.. without Russia, your obsolete fleet of shuttles wouldn't have a dockable ISS. Without Canadian Robotics, you wouldn't assemble it. Without Japanese technology edge, you wouldn't change batteries or deploy solar panels. Without European cashflow, you wouldn't launch probes.
Cooperation could save Earth in a space threat scenario, not pride or politics.
The "space threat" scenario would only be a danger over tens of thousands of years; we're almost certain to all be dead before anything sizeable strikes Earth.
They kept saying things like that when discussing things like "500 year floods" or the odds of cat 5 hitting New Orleans. The problem with planning like that is if you're wrong even once, you're screwed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
That happened only a hundred years ago, and could happen again next year, or not for another hundred years. How much of an investment is it worth to prevent another such impact, especially if is going to hit somewhere more valuable than Siberia?
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