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I wonder what kind of weaponry and energy is required to push it away from Earth's orbit or just simply shatter it into much smaller piece so they'll burn up in
by wyuenho 14y ago
I wonder what kind of weaponry and energy is required to push it away from Earth's orbit or just simply shatter it into much smaller piece so they'll burn up in the atmosphere.
- xhrpost 14y agoIf asteroid mining becomes a reality, I wonder if we could simply mine the thing down to nothing before impact.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoSure, but when you mine stuff, where does the stuff go? Instead of deflecting the whole asteroid, you're suggesting chipping it into a bunch of pieces and deflecting those somewhere. Same problem.
- will_work4tears 14y agoWe'd bring what we mined to earth or the moon, wherever the processing plants are. Mine != blow up and leave alone.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoIf you blow it up and leave it alone, it still hits the earth with just as much energy.
- will_work4tears 14y agoThat's not what mining is. Mining isn't deflecting. They would use and ideally process the material they mine. Not blow it up, not deflect it, possibly strip it down entirely and use as much of it as possible. Could be trillions of dollars of materials there.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoRight. But unless you want the products to stay on the asteroid, you have to ship it somewhere. Shipping it somewhere would also move the asteroid.
- will_work4tears 14y agoSo you are saying if they mine 10 tons of Iron, and bring it to earth, sans the rest of the asteroid, it'll blow up and cause destruction on earth? I think I missed that part in physics. Otherwise I don't see your point.
- dredmorbius 14y agoApophis has a mass of 27,000,000 tonnes. 10 tonnes is 1/2,700,000 the total mass of the asteroid. This would be the equivalent of trying to reduce the impact of a 180 lb human by trying to reduce his mass by 0.001 oz (or 82 kg man by 0.03 grams for civilized humans). Too small to matter.
- will_work4tears 14y agoYeah, it was just an example number, earlier I mentioned mining it down to nothing and I still got "it's just as deadly" kind of comments. Unless I'm missing something from physics, stretching the potential energy of the out across ~10 years from mining it will not be the same as letting it hit the earth.
- dredmorbius 14y agoChanging the orbit of an asteroid is a function of its mass and orbit (net momentum). De-aggregating the asteroid via mining does nothing to the net momentum of the asteroid. It would take just as much energy to re-orbit 1000 or 1,000,000 chunks of an asteroid as it would to re-orbit one. The energy transferred by multiple chunks of asteroid to the Earth is the same whether it arrives in one chunk or thousands. The only thing that would possibly make sense would be to drive two parts of the asteroid in different orbits. The net momentum hasn't changed, but the two pieces would split the difference and pass to either side of earth, possibly missing crucial "keyhole" orbits which would dictate a subsequent impact, though you could likely accomplish the same thing by exerting a small thrust against the entire mass over a long time. Mining doesn't change the fundamental orbital mechanics or energy costs.
- xhrpost 14y agoVery valid point. However, wouldn't this be true for all asteroid mining? Meaning if mining becomes a reality, it's something that will have to be accounted for. I'm guessing though that even by 2036 we won't be mining asteroids this big .
- Tuna-Fish 14y agoShattering a big rock into smaller pieces doesn't actually change anything about how hard it hits. At these kinds of energy scales, it's really just all about the kinetic energy it delivers. Even if the entire asteroid was vaporized before it hit it would still hit more or less as hard.
- marcosdumay 14y agoIt changes the aerodynamics properties, that are what protect us from most impacts.
- dredmorbius 14y agoYou're still heating up the atmosphere and generating shock waves. The difference is that you're distributing the initial shock over a larger area (and possibly longer time period). Any sufficiently large strike would create similar results by way of ejecta which would be thrown from the impact site and re-enter the atmosphere and strike the planet elsewhere. You might be able to avoid certain order-of-magnitude effects, such as piercing the crust and exposing the mantle, but at that scale of impact, it's pretty much assured to be a bad day regardless.