Scott Manley did a great video explaining how easily we could redirect it if we found out it was going to hit the earth. We have multiple launch vehicles that can launch a mass at sufficient velocity to nudge it the small amount we need.
Fly safe.
But who’s going to pay for it? Not MY tax dollars!
That was his main concern. Like if we find out it’s going to hit central Africa would other nations even bother stopping it when it will be a localized event?
But mah copper!?
Edit: nevermind, they’ll probably justify doing nothing by saying it will create jobs and opportunities.
Plot twist the asteroid is made of copper.
Vibranium, duh. They should pay us for not divering the asteroid.
Maybe we can finance it with a brand deal or something, who’s Aerosmith’s record label?
Wait…
We don’t even need to land, drill into the center, drop a nuke and leave behind an American oil driller to detonate it?
I say we still do it, for good luck
I’ll be AJ! Liv Tyler was the main thing from that movie that stuck in my 13 year old brain.
I was disappointed about that, too
I’ve seen Don’t Look Up. Having the technology to carry out a mission like that is the easy part.
That’s not even Earth
A billion kilometers? How much is that? A few miles? Half a parsec? A couple pounds sterling? This is really worrisome…
Approximately 5X10^12 bananas if that helps?
This is grossly inaccurate and you should be ashamed. A billion km is 5 quadrillion bananas, or 5x10^15.
Unless… are my bananas smaller?
Unless… are my bananas smaller?
They are nice bananas. really… special.
A lot of girls prefer the smaller ones cause they’re flavourful, and exotic …
Roughly 7 million large boulders the size of a small boulder
Thats 6.685 astronomical units (around 6.5x the distance from the earth to the sun)
541 astronomical units (541 times the distance from Earth to the Sun)
What? Not it’s not. Where did you get this number?
It’s more like 6.7 AU. Source
In other words somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn in terms of distance to the sun.
You’re right. Major fuckup on my part, I guess. I was using Google search’s calculator function. I tried to reverse-engineer my mistake and couldn’t find anything sensible I would have entered to get 541 AU.
Thank you, this is the only measurement that makes any sense in any distance past like the moon before you get into longer units like parsecs or light years. Even though an AU is still only 150M km, it makes the math a lot easier for me to grok.
In the world of astronomy a billion kilometers is like a missile hitting the neighborhood next to yours. So while there’s a good amount of hyperbole there, it’s still relatively close. You’re still shaken up by it hitting your town. And eventually we will win the lottery and have an astronomical event outside our control devestate the earth. It’s happened before.
Well, a billion kilometers is almost 7 times the mean distance between the earth and the sun. Asteroids pass in that distance all the time. We’re currently closer to Ceres (the dwarf planet) than that and its on the other side of the sun from us.
Some might say we’re overdue…
Well when they’re saying there’s 2% odds, that’s…probably still higher than you want for the probability of a world ending asteroid strike.
It’s not a world ending strike. It’s 2.3% odds that a city ending strike lands somewhere on earth, most likely in the ocean.
It’s a fraction of a fraction of a % that it’ll hit somewhere with any humans at all, much less a populated city.
And on top of that, we have until 2032 to decide what to do about it, with enough time to potentially redirect it with technology we’ve already demonstrated that works. And if that isn’t enough, we just need one or two more data points to figure out almost exactly where it will hit, and can evacuate the area.
Just like we do for hurricanes and other natural disasters.
This is not an emergency, this is an easy mode try out for a real disaster.
This is not an emergency, this is an easy mode try out for a real disaster.
So it’s going to be horribly fumbled in the stupidest manner possible and will definitely become a worldwide disaster. Got it.
45/47 is going to shoot down anything that tries to divert it, then. Gotcha.
It’s not even gonna hit until 2032, orange fuckface is dead by then
The one caveat is, it’s going to be out of visual range soon and we won’t get any more info for a few years
The caveat to THAT is that we do have historical data, and if we can find one or more images confirmed to be the target, we could narrow it down without additional imaging.
The only thing to ever have a higher score than this one on the Torino scale (before further calculations reclassified it as a 0) is scheduled to come close by in 2029. Should be interesting to watch, at least.
City ending will cause weather chaos and possibly radioactive fallout.
But the funny part is that you think 2032 is enough time. Humans are USELESS when we need to do large international projects to a deadline.
You’re clearly falling for the clickbait articles. This is not a world ender and will not cause radioactive fallout. Read better articles.
The earths crust has radioactive material. Anything that fires loads of it into the sky could cause fallout. It surely depends where it lands, but it’s also not outside the realm of possibility.
Edit: you’re probably right.
Idk what to say. I am reading articles directly from NASA and other reputable sources, and it says the damage would be bad for a city but localized. I haven’t seen a single thing about fallout. So if you have some articles you’d like to share that says otherwise, by all means please share them. However the experts aren’t saying that so idk.
I feel like this is a microcosm of the internet.
There’s like zero trust in letting lifelong experts tell you what’s going on, and how to respond. And nodding your head. I guess people have always had their own takes, questionable sources and such for millenia, but it feels like we’ve passed a threshold.
No one trusts institutions so they assume that the experts are lying to them to further some political agenda or whatever. Add in AI bullshit that has flooded the Internet, so no one trusts articles anymore. Also most people just simply don’t have good critical thinking skills. It’s all really bad.
That’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works
You’re clearly falling for the clickbait articles if you read that this is a world ender.
China Sets Up ‘Planetary Defense’ Unit Over 2032 Asteroid Threat
This is just the plot to Don’t Look Up.
There’s a great video by Scott Manly on the subject if you want to learn more. It’d smaller than some nukes we’ve tested, and would land somewhere around the equator between the Atlantic and China if it does hit. It looks surprisingly feasible to deflect, but it’d be a time crunch to put a mission together in only a couple of months. Plus it might deflect it into hitting a different country.
Not high enough odds
The aliens are a nice touch.
They came to tell us Betelgeuse is going to go super nova any day now
Old news. It went super nova a few months back. But they’ll probably keep us from seeing it for about 600 years.
Also it seems to be a picture of the Earth colliding with the Earth.
They’re just trying to give us hope
Yeah. YR4 will get as close as 106,000km if it misses.
It’s pretty much speculation based on a probability that includes the chance to hit a narrow ring of places along earth’s surface, but we don’t know how dense it is, although we’re relatively sure it’s solid, and whether other debris will change its path before it remerges in 2028. It has no risk factor to us until 2032, just in case people are wondering why reputatable science journalists aren’t completely poopooing the narratives of other outlets. We’ll know what it eats for breakfast by 2029.
Trump did get re-elected, and he’s going to do comparable damage to the whole world, so, there’s that
I’m team asteroid strike. Hit me baby.
Promises, promises.
Work, damn you, WORK!
Don’t threaten me with a good time
Are we even training the oil drillers yet?
I kind of hope for a “Night of the Comet” scenario.
