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An Asteroid Could Destroy the World Before Impact
- thowawaygbuk 7y agoRidiculous to assume that US/NASA are only one with the capability, EU/China/Japan/Russia/India/SpaceX could very well launch an interceptor and ride the popularity. If anything I expect multiple independent efforts competing to become the first one to take it out and saving humanity.
- isostatic 7y agoThey mentioned ESA, but yes, Musk could fulfill his Iron Man dream and save the world single handedly, Bezos would no doubt fund his own version -- not only would it be a tax writeof, but it would be good for business (well better than an asteroid wiping out half your customers)
- ChuckMcM 7y agoThe cynic in me thinks Elon would first buy up all the property around the impact zone for pennies through a bunch of shell companies, then send up a BFR or FH with a W84 warhead (designed for a cruise missile so it would be extremely light relative to the lift capacity), rig it with an impact detonator that could be activated post liftoff, and then drive it into the asteroid. Save the day, collect the gratitude of a grateful nation, and then sell off all the property at an obscene profit to make back all the costs.
- godelski 7y agoI wouldn't take Armageddon as an instruction guide of how to safely get rid of asteroids. In fact, detonating it would likely lead to a shotgun effect. Lots of smaller pieces. Sure, these wouldn't do as much damage to a single city but they could damage many cities and many objects in orbit. Beyond that you now have to contend with the political ramifications of causing the destruction of someone else's property. Tldr: asteroid defense is quite hard. Currently we are not adequately equipped to do so it safely.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoOk seriously, you read the article right? And its really just a summary of the work of fiction that is coming out in book form, and in that fiction the people in the story all agree that using a nuclear weapon on the remaining shard is their last and only option. To be clear, I didn't write the book, I was suggesting (what appears to be a way to cynical :-) a coda where a billionaire with a penchant for making money in unconventional ways, exploits the situation. He thus saves the world according to what the book postulates is the best strategy and he makes a ton of money. That said, I agree with you, its stupid to blow up an incoming asteroid so that it can basically shred all of the satellites in orbit and cause a Kessler cascade and make it difficult if not impossible to put things in orbit for decades. But in defense of my comment, you have to work within the confines of the story, that is the rule of improv.
- jandrese 7y agoBreaking up the asteroid means more of the mass burns up in the atmosphere thanks to increased surface area. The real tricky part is delivering the energy to the asteroid in a way that causes it to actually break up. The nuke needs to be drilled down below the surface of the asteroid so it doesn't just heat up the surface, potentially fusing it into a more solid chunk. Of course the actual effects are hard to predict. Maybe we should be flying around right now blowing up random asteroids? First job for Trump's Space Force?
- isostatic 7y agoIn this scenarios it wouldn't destroy the world. A 50m asteroid hitting a minor city in the western world (with time to evacuate for anyone with a functioning braincell) is probably the best thing that could happen as far as space defence goes.
- magduf 7y agoWe already had something a bit like this, several years ago when a small asteroid exploded over Chelybinsk, Russia. 1000 people were injured. Has humanity sat up and decided to take this threat seriously? Nope. Most likely, this was a test from some aliens to see if we're smart enough to avoid a much larger, extinction-level asteroid headed our way, and to try to get us to prepare ourselves better without violating the Prime Directive too badly. We failed.
- module0000 7y agoI'm ready. An asteroid is an alright way to go out for me, everything else seems lackluster by comparison. This would be an acceptable early-ending to my normally schedule programming of marching endlessly behind the other humans towards oblivion. In all seriousness, what can be done about this sort of thing(mitigating it)? Opinions(albeit ones from the internet) range from spacecrafts intercepting and mounting thrusters to divert the object's course, or planting nuclear bombs, and other "fantastic" sounding solutions. Is there anything to be done other than expect the unexpected?
- xwdv 7y agoAgreed. If one must die an unnatural way, then it is better to die in an interesting way such as by asteroid strike than to die in some mundane way like a car accident or getting mugged and shot point blank in a parking lot.
- wcoenen 7y ago> In all seriousness, what can be done about this sort of thing(mitigating it)? The most important thing would be to make sure that we can see these things well in advance. No defense is going to work if you don't see the threat at all. Currently we can't see well in the region enclosed by Earth's orbit, in the direction of the sun. The B612 foundation was going to launch the Sentinel Space Telescope for that purpose, but they lost their funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_Space_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_Space_Telescope
- magduf 7y ago
- gojomo 7y agoFun story, but one quibble: with a week's warning, Pasadena, Texas could manage an efficient & orderly evacuation. The region has a high level of cooperativeness in the face of imminent common threats.
- post_break 7y agoLiving about 15 minutes away from Pasadena, if it needed to be evacuated it would take months. There's a meme of evacuating Katy any time it rains because the people there tried during a hurricane and ended up staying locked in grid lock for days. Now imagine that same scenario with the entire city of Houston trying to evacuate. Most people would not be able to escape in a week.
- rhino369 7y agoPart of the issue with Hurricanes is that they hit a huge area. If you just need to evacuate a single city, it would be a lot easier. Especially with the added urgency of an asteroid. Hurricanes happen all the time and usually, it's not the end of the world. The Democratic Republic of Congo, a near-failed state, managed to evacuate 300,000 people in three days from a Volcano. I'm pretty sure suburban Texas can handle it.
- abathur 7y agoBut they all know where the volcano is. Let's say a forecaster projected the impact location and area of mortal danger, and you found out your house is 100 feet outside of the projection. How confident would the forecaster need to be for you to be comfortable staying home for the event?
- magduf 7y agoI doubt it. DRC could do it because they can just get everyone to start walking, and 300k people walking as a huge group isn't that hard to do. Texas can't do it because everyone will try to load up their giant SUV and drive out on roads never designed for that much traffic, and they'll be stuck in gridlock where they'll die when the storm or asteroid hits.
- mannewalis 7y agohttps://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/ttx14/ https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/ttx14/
- lucb1e 7y agoFor anyone else alarmed at "wait so this isn't a complete fiction?", it's a 'tabletop simulation' -- a thought experiment but written down, to try and track down who would (should) be doing which tasks and how it might play out.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoThe part of the read where I realized it wasn't a real story I was reading was where it became 35% chance to hit. And I was like, "I think I'd know if this wasn't fictional".
- swamp40 7y agoFiction. Very realistic read, though.
- lucb1e 7y agoI don't really understand the title. Before I call clickbait, how did this destroy the world? Sure, house prices will fall in the predicted impact zone, people will panic and create shortages of essentials in a much wider region, and the worldwide economy is set back by a decade or two. But destroying the world before impact? What?
- jaysonelliot 7y agoIt really is clickbait. Nowhere in the article does it talk about "destroying the world." You'd suppose they were referring to some kind of near-miss from a massive body causing, I don't know, gravitational forces or something. What it's actually saying is that there would be a lot of panic in the run-up to an impact, so that even a relatively small event could cause oil prices to spike and real estate values to drop in the impact area. Hardly anything at all like the headline suggests.
- jandrese 7y agoWorse than the possible destruction of life is the destruction of money.
- gojomo 7y agoIt is an abusive title; 'disrupt' rather than 'destroy' would better match the events envisioned. (I wonder if the source book from which this was adapted, 'Fire in the Sky', includes other more-detailed scenarios of pre-impact destruction?)
- T-A 7y agoIndeed. It's doubly silly, because there is a class of asteroid impact scenarios to which it could actually apply. In the 2015 PDC exercise [1] the asteroid is also split in two by the first deflection attempt (that happens a lot in these exercises, see also 2017 and 2019) and the new bulls-eye is in India. So India plans a nuclear deflection attempt, but China vows to stop it, by intercepting it if necessary, because the second deflection attempt could result in the asteroid hitting China instead. Meanwhile Iran, also in the new risk corridor, but not in the old one, threatens retaliation against the countries behind the first deflection attempt if it's hit: the Great Satan (aka the US), EU, Russia and China. Bottom line: a recurring worry in these asteroid deflection scenarios is that whoever changes the trajectory becomes responsible for hitting whatever ends up being hit, and if that happens to be a nuclear-armed country, the consequence could be WWIII. [1] https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/pdc15/ https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/pdc15/
- feral 7y agoNot a specialist, but I don't buy this. In this story, they have a 6-year warning of an asteroid with 35% chance of 700megaton impact. I just know that with that lead time, and with such an aligning mission, humanity would be able to do amazing things. The Apollo program was from JFKs speech in '61 to moon in '69, and that's built on a '60s technological and social infrastructure. We have tons more brainpower and tech now, globally. This scenario would just be so politically aligning we'd be able to mobilize massive resources to stop it in that timeframe; way more than 6 launches. I'd be much more concerned about one they didn't see until 6 months out or something.
- arkades 7y agoAt six years out, it’s unclear where the asteroid will strike. You think Americans will throw their national budget behind doing “amazing things” for the Caribbean?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 7y agoHow localized would the effects of a 700 megaton impact be?
- toss1 7y agoYou can get a decent idea of the effects up to 100MT here https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Excellent calculator & visualization
- SEJeff 7y agoHorrible mental exercise... As localized as a 700 megaton nuke (compared to the 13-18 kiloton nuke that his Hiroshima). Reliable sources say that virtually everything within a 3 mile radius from the impact was heavily damaged in Hiroshima and everything within 1.6km / ~1 mile radius was obliterated so you should be able to extrapolate from that. For comparison, the entire USA is ~3.797 million sq miles, so the equiv area of 184.35 entire United States would be utterly obliterated. 700000000 - 18000 = 699,982,000 sq miles of totally obliterated things For comparison, the entirety of planet earth is 196.9 million sq miles, so the equiv area of 10 planet earths would be heavily damaged. (700000000 - 18000) * 3 = 2,099,946,000 sq miles of heavily damaged things Update: My math is totally wrong and people smarter than me explained it. Yay for internet people!
- ssully 7y agoHas anyone read the full book this is an excerpt from? If the whole book is like this it could be a fun read.
- post_break 7y agoThe cynic in me believes we'd do absolutely nothing and just let it slam into Pasadena after people who think it's a hoax fight with scientists.
- btilly 7y agoMistake #1, the idea of a "risk corridor" applies to an object in a decaying orbit. It will hit somewhere along the line of orbit. But for an object coming from out of orbit, there is a center of where it is likely to hit, and then a bell-shaped curve across the cross-section of the Earth for where it might. Basically half the world is at risk, with some areas at higher risk than others. Mistake #2, objects that we find which could hit us get within range of our rockets only a finite number of times. For a previously unknown large object with a several year returning orbit, that finite number is likely to be 2 - once when we found it and once when it comes back (at which point it is too late). A more realistic version would be that it is on a long trajectory that will hit Earth after 3-4 times. Which gives us a lot longer to prepare, and a clear timing on when we want to try to hit it. I won't comment on the cultural mistakes. Except to note that "We're going to get hit but odds are good that it is over water and nobody gets hurt" might be less panic inducing than the story claims.
- T-A 7y ago> the idea of a "risk corridor" applies to an object in a decaying orbit. It will hit somewhere along the line of orbit It also applies to asteroids, and is a standard concept used in these scenarios. See e.g. the materials from the exercise at this year's Planetary Defense Conference [1] (the story on LitHub is basically a variation on that scenario, which also features an asteroid splitting in two during the deflection attempt, a failure to use nukes, and a city destroyed by the impact: New York). > objects that we find which could hit us get within range of our rockets only a finite number of times There are more and less viable launch dates, clustered in launch windows, but the details vary depending on your vehicle and the orbit. JPL's NEO Deflection App [2] has several illustrative examples which you can play with, and which work pretty much as in the story. [1] https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/pdc19/ https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/pdc19/ [2] https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/nda/ https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/nda/
- btilly 7y agoHuh, that is bizarre. How does this square with my understanding that the path is off by something close to a normal distribution? I guess that the big question mark is time. If we know the path of the asteroid very precisely, and the path of the Earth very precisely, but we don't know exactly when the asteroid goes down that path, it would result in something like a risk corridor depending on where the asteroir was between leading and trailing the Earth at the point of impact. I wouldn't (in fact didn't) guess that. Thank you for the references!
- mar77i 7y agoI'd find it funny if the US proved uncapable to hit the damn thing and Russia just throws a makeshift deflection apparatus at it that basically makes use of angular momentum for the task (Soyuz™ tech!) and just keeps burning itself to death on the asteroid's surface. The result would be bipartisan gratitude to Russia, while putting Rachel Mathews out of a job for good. The potential hilarity of the future is literally endless, even without an asteroid on collision course.
- geogra4 7y agoIsn't this an allegory for global climate change?
- mar77i 7y agoSorry to break it to you, but last time I checked it wasn't climate if the weather goes "BOOM!"
- carapace 7y agoOnly about 150 years ago the idea of rocks coming out of the sky was ridiculous, fringe, crazy-person talk. We laugh at the flat-earthers, but I think you can estimate how sane an Earthling is by its attitude towards meteor defense. My point is most of us are "flat-earthers" after a fashion. Most people don't really internalize physics and the structure of the Universe[1], but when you do, you have these moments where your mind resolves the inconsistencies in your worldview and it expands and these mind-blowing vistas spread out before you. One thing you realize is that the sky is fucking terrifying. The world includes gigantic explosions that happen literally out of the blue for no real reason other than there are falling rocks in the sky and gravity. [1] If we did, solar power would have taken off the moment someone thought of it. The Sun is awesome.
- exabrial 7y agoHelp me with the maths... current largest rocket we have is The Falcon Heavy, correct? How much more capability would we need to hit something 3 years away from impact with a Russian Tsar Bomba? Let's assume we don't do multiple launches and orbit rendezvous.