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Interesting to do a thought experiment on what it would have been like if humanity had known that the Russian meteor was coming a few months in advance. maybe
by uglycoyote 13y ago
Interesting to do a thought experiment on what it would have been like if humanity had known that the Russian meteor was coming a few months in advance. maybe they would have said there is a 20 percent chance of it coming down and causing major death and destruction. governments would have invested millions in trying to stop it. will smith would have been sent up in a rocket to stop it. everyone would have had big parties and said their last goodbyes.
- jccooper 13y agoCouple months? You could maybe track it and predict a large impact zone, and evacuate if needed. No chance to move it; nobody has a rocket that can be ready in that timeframe, much less a vehicle to intercept and move the rock. And even if you could, it was such a small rock that it's probably cheaper to let it hit and replace everything on the ground. For launch alone: F9 is $54M, Proton $72M, and SLS $1.5B (should it ever exist). There's not much the Chelyabinsk could have hit that would cost as much as trying to stop it. Even pretty big rocks have to get lucky to cause much damage, as sparse as development is, but since you can't tell where exactly they will hit until quite late, it may be better to move any sufficiently large Earth-interceptor to avoid the possibility of an unlucky hit.