4 ms·
> If you have a 25 m^2 cross section in the direction of the explosion, at that distance you have a roughly 1 in 246 billion chance of any given bit of debris h
by randmeerkat 2y ago
> If you have a 25 m^2 cross section in the direction of the explosion, at that distance you have a roughly 1 in 246 billion chance of any given bit of debris hitting you.
Source?
- a1369209993 2y ago$ units You have: 25m2 / 2tau(700km)^2 You want: /billion * 0.0040600751 / 246.30086
- randmeerkat 2y ago[flagged]
- ben_w 2y agoThe 'units' command line tool has been part of Unix since Bell Labs, and GNU Units came along in 1997. Personally I used basic high school geometry knowledge of "what's the area of a sphere", and you could also have just asked WolframAlpha, which also predates LLMs.
- randmeerkat 2y agoYet a formula that actually calculates the probability of impact is nowhere to be found in your response. You don’t consider mass, density, velocity, orbits, or anything else for that matter.
- ben_w 2y agoThe formula is an excercise for the reader, even if my audience was a 14 year old learning about this for the first time. As is figuring out why "mass" and "density" are unimportant. Might be a valuable lesson in "reading the question carefully" for them, though, as the scenario was: "That’s pretty close when your neighbor just exploded", which is why orbital mechanics can be disregarded in this instance.