3 ms·

I'd be interested to see someone do the math, but I'd be curious how much energy it would take to deflect it by hitting it with nukes. It seems like if we could

• Retric 10y ago
  1m/s * 1 year = 31,556.926 kilometers considering the earth has gravity I don't think you could really go much lower than that unless it was really close to missing us in the first place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet) is is a little smaller than that and estimated at 9 x 10^20 kg. So call it 10^21kg. KE = 1/2 m * v^2 (mass in kg, v in m/s = joule) but a bomb is not 100% efficient call it 50%. So, 1/2 * 10^21 * 1^2 /50% = 10^21 joule. Largest bomb ever detonated is = ~2.1×10^17 J so ~5,000 of them is kind of an ultra optimistic estimate. Not that we actually have 5,000 of them. Worse each of those weigh ~60,000 lb so we now need build rocks, and even build the infrastructure to build the rockets to get 300,000,000 kg out there not just LEO. At a rough ballpark 1/2 the worlds GDP for 8 years is not going to get you there. Worse that 50% was crazy optimistic.
  • arcticfox 10y ago
    Forgot to respond, but nice analysis! Thanks! Interesting how it comes out to something definitely infeasible, but still in the approximate realm of the world's nuclear capability (~16k of various sizes exist today). The rocketry there would seem to be the impossibly limiting factor.