5 ms·

We can land on it, drill and plant nukes inside to shatter it

• chrsw 2y ago
  That's not what they asked
  • littlestymaar 2y ago
    It would definitely increase impact probability though.
    • chrsw 2y ago
      Not necessarily. See my new comment above. In addition, depending on how far out you do it, gravity will allow it to reform. And if it never reforms because you blew it to dust headed out to interstellar space you wont get an impact either. It's not at all a simple problem.
  • ta1243 2y ago
    That would create far more objects, many on the same rough direction, thus increasing the chance of an impact
    • chrsw 2y ago
      Only if you managed to leave the trajectory the same if it was already on a collision course or change the direction to a collision course. Do you think you can control that with a nuclear explosion? You probably don't know enough about to the system to make a high confidence prediction of the new outcome.
      • echoangle 2y ago
        Not really, blowing it up is going to create a lot of fragments with slightly different orbits, and some are going to have practically the same as the whole Asteroid had before. So the chance of anything at all hitting earth will increase, but the parts will be smaller. It would be like a bullet turning into buckshot during flight.
        • chrsw 2y ago
          If we were talking about a projectile fired at relatively close range on the surface of the Earth I would agree with you. But we are talking about a very small object very far away with already only a 1% chance of impact. Buckshotting the object with a random explosion is unlikely to change the dynamics of system to point where you say with high confidence the chance of impact is much higher. Some fragments might hit but it's very difficult to predict.
          • echoangle 2y ago
            As long as some part of the asteroid keeps the old trajectory, the chance can only increase because you’re adding particles with slightly different trajectories.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• pxmpxm 2y ago
  Can't tell why I'm hearing "I could stay awake just to hear you breathin" in my head when reading the above
  • jdmoreira 2y ago
    Someone finally got it! Congrats!