Giant FLYING SPACE ROCKS could KILL US ALL, warns Brian May Scientists are trying to raise awareness about planet-killing chunks of flying space rock with today's Asteroid Day. Among them are ex-Queen guitar man and astrophysicist Brian May and meedja celeb Brian Cox. Asteroid Day accompanies a call for a 100-fold increase in the detection and monitoring of asteroids, called the 100x …
'Best not to bother even contemplating potential contingencies'
Strange, I didn't say that, read what's written. Now, would I still be misinterpreted if I formatted comments more formally like thus: ∃x(D(x) → ∀yD(y))? Perhaps so.
I did refer to people being stressed by the continued repetition of such dire warnings; I also hinted that for the past two million years we humans have been on the planet we've not been hit by large flying rocks, thus we've survived. (Reckon the odds of a lottery win are probably better. If not, then it'll be amen—and quick.)
Now, what exactly didn't I say?
Well, they're warnings. The whole point of warnings is to stress people. If you give warnings and people still feel pretty relaxed about whatever it is you're warning about, then the warning is not really going to be effective. If the theater is on fire, you don't whisper "fire" once; you shout it and you keep shouting it until everyone is out.
Of course, it's debatable whether asteroid strikes are worth getting stressed about. It's true that humanity has been around for a while and haven't gone extinct due to asteroids; most asteroids are not an existential risk.
However, I'd argue that there's a wide, wide gap between "extinction" and "not a problem". If the Tunguska asteroid had hit a densely populated area, humanity as a species would have been fine, but the damage and loss of life would have been staggering. That kind of event could be effectively mitigated with proper asteroid tracking. You don't even need to be able to get rid of the rock; having a few years' warning to evacuate would already be a huge benefit.
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"If the theater is on fire, you don't whisper "fire" once; you shout it and you keep shouting it until everyone is out."
Absolutely correct.
But that's not the current situation with asteroids, if it were so then shouting "fire" would be precisely the correct thing to do—unless perhaps a 20-50km whopper was on a collision course, then it may be best to say nothing for all the obvious reasons.
The current state-of-the-art for detecting and monitoring asteroids is rudimentary. Seemingly, most big asteroids can be detected and monitored but many smaller ones–those somewhere in size between Tunguska and the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs–are hard to detect; alternatively, their whereabouts is unknown or they're known to lurk in hidden blind spots.
The all-too-subtle-for-some point in my above facetious/acerbic comments is that we're continually being bombarded with alarming words from scientific doomsayers who've no definite/concrete evidence of any potentially disastrous asteroid strike. Without definitive evidence, their ongoing strident warnings do little other than to cause worry and alarm. Eventually, this evolves progressively into a state similar to one created by the boy who cried "fire" once too often, the population evolves into a state of ambivalence.
There's no doubt there's a real threat of a catastrophic asteroid strike, and inevitably one will occur at some future time. However, what precise details do we now actually have for any such future event happening? Let's begin by asking the doomsayers for actual evidence. For starters, to date the whole of human history has passed without incident, so historically the odds are low. Further examination shows that the doomsayers have no definitive evidence of real 'suspects' who are actually dangerous–ones who've signs pinned on them showing date, time and bulls-eye location. Simply, the fact is there are no precise facts about any imminent or impending catastrophic impact(s), there are only noisy dire warnings. The evidence, in totality, is accurately described by the phrase:
"There's a chance of a possible maybe."
Logicians will recognize this statement as it's often analyzed formally. But as you'll have easily figured out, that's unnecessary as it's clear that this existential statement contains no concrete evidence or information that can be usefully used in any practical sense to plan for a specific future disaster. Again, the nett effect of such vague but dire warnings has a negative effect on the population. Eventually, the ongoing and non-specific nature of such warnings end up having the opposite effect, emotions are numbed and become cathartic and they do so in ways similar to the way that climate-change fatigue has taken hold of the population. An 'immune' population develops a response that's equivalent to the boy who cried "fire".
Brian May's warnings are no doubt made with the sincerest intentions, they would however be best targeted specifically at asteroid researches and those who fund scientific research rather than frightening the general population, as its citizens know damn well they're essentially powerless to prevent any such potential catastrophe.
Scientific research into making the planet a safer place from asteroid impacts is another matter altogether. It may be surprising for some to know its research of which I'm strongly in favour.
>historically the odds are low
The odds are the same as they've always been. It's the stakes that are higher.
Asteroid strikes that would have been inconsequential for most of human history would now be catastrophic.
>There's a chance of a possible maybe
Nope. It's a dead certainty. We just don't know when.
"If the theater is on fire, you don't whisper "fire" once; you shout it and you keep shouting it until everyone is out."
That's true. But if your village is near a forest and someone once saw a wolf there, you don't go around shouting "WOLF! WOLF!" just because there might be more wolves that you've not seen yet.
Signed
Peter (Yes, that one.)
"That kind of event could be effectively mitigated with proper asteroid tracking."
For something in the kiloton or megaton range, that's a bloody huge region to evacuate. Even with fully tracked and known orbits, we still can't be very precise about where a de-orbited satellite is going to come down or how much might make it ground level because we don't fully understand what will melt or drop off in the atmospheric entry and change it's trajectory. Now try that with a big rock of unknown shape, composition and spin. Yeah, it's moving fast so can't change course much but will it blow up at 30 miles altitude? 20 miles? 10 miles? 0 miles?
That recent one over Russia travelled a loooong way inside the atmosphere before it blew. A slight difference in size or composition would have affected where it exploded along that path.
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If you've got thirty years to work with, gravity tractors (stick a heavy spacecraft with an ion drive hovering near the asteroid) will probably work, as would chroming one side of the asteroid; and you can measure if it's worked.
Five years is cutting it a bit close, but an object that would hit us in five years and that we haven't discovered already is probably small enough that it turns into an evacuation exercise. Which would be somewhat expensive, and would cause quite a lot of stress-related illness, but nothing an even fairly incompetent government couldn't handle.
Coping with a well-predicted medium-sized tsunami, which is the expected result from a hundred-metre impactor, is a harder but not an impossible coordination problem
Gravity tractor, laser ablation, nuclear warhead near the asteroid and no contact causing ablation of the facing surface, ion thruster pushing it off course and a few other notions are being considered.
One need only move it a degree or so and it'd miss the Earth. Or speed it up slightly or slow it down slightly. If one wants to get fancy, one adjusts the course enough to slingshot around the planet and into an entirely different and distant orbit.
"So what happens when we discover an object which will hit us in 5 years?"
My prediction would be that my brain would hurt a lot. Perhaps a girl my age would go off her head and hit some tiny children, maybe a cop might kiss the feet of a priest. Others would probably drink milkshakes. Cold, long milkshakes.
If you can't divert it enough to miss the planet completely, divert it into an area with low population density and evacuate that area, or onto an island and evacuate that island. Make sure it misses cities and oceans (the latter because it'll cause a Tsunami all around that ocean's coasts).
So what happens when we discover an object which will hit us in 5 years?
Well, I imagine this little number would storm back into the hit parade or whatever the cool kids are calling it these days.
Smiling and waving and looking so fine...........
-EDIT-
Ninja'd by Hadvar.
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>>I sort of agree. So what happens when we discover an object which will hit us in 5 years? Or 100? What do we do with that knowledge? The atomic bomb method has been discounted because it will shower us with many missiles. Next idea...?
The atomic bomb method has been discounted because it justifies the Cold War nuclear arsenal buildup, a taboo of shrieking fit proportions for lefties. What size meteor, what composition, what speed, what angle are all variables that may have a cutoff point beyond a certain quantity. But up to that quantity, an ICBM hit with an armored nose cone for penetration could either blast a catastrophically destructive meteor into something more manageable or blast it out of its Earth intersecting path. Think surface area vs. heat ablation. The more surface area, i.e., the more blasted bits, the more of the mass of the original meteor will burn in the atmosphere. Also, a largely ignored variable is whether or not the meteor has a charge differential from Earth. If large enough, the meteor might be blasted before impact by an electrical discharge like the Tunguska meteor. So, yah, given certain parameters, an ICBM could save our bacon. And, yah, the most efficient deployment of ICBMs would be to base them in space, at which point they could intersect the meteor or its blasted chunks multiply at much safer distances from Earth. There is a forehead slapping degree of infantile rigorless thinking on this issue.
There's a few benefits to spotting, say five years out, that a rock is coming:
1. You can zap the fella. Yeah, sure, all sorts of options have been discounted. But in times of war things get done and developed really quickly.
2. The further out you spot them, the less deflection you need to make them miss.
3. If you can spot the big ones 5 years out you can spot the littler close ones too. Even if you can't stop them, you can advise local governments/people they are coming - like the one that hit Sudan a couple of years back - so they don't think it's enemy action.
"...like the one that hit Sudan a couple of years back..."
I remember that. India and Pakistan had mobilized their nuclear forces when that detonated over the Med and chunks landed in Sudan.
Everyone's baro-sensors tripped at nuke levels, but no radiation for those with satellites looking for such things. Both sides had an "Oh, shit!" moment and put their stupid toys away and started talking. For the truth is, Sudan isn't all that far from the India-Pakistan border, as the meteor flies. Had that popped off in that region, the nukes would've flown before anyone realized it was a fireball of meteoric origin.
"800 square miles", "120 ft across.", "travelled at 33,500mph", "heated the air to 44,500°F", "28,000 feet above the ground"
Oh FFS Reg. You're writing about astrophysics on a tech website and yet you give all the measurements in imperial. I should expect better but El Reg seems more and more like a Top Gear spin-off every day.
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"If the Siberian object, at 120 feet across, was equivalent to to 185 * Hiroshima (185 * 20 kilotonnes = 3700 kilitonnes), why was the Chelyabinsk object, at slightly over half the size (65 feet), only equivalent to 500 kilotonnes?"
Shape, density, composition, velocity, irregularities in the composition of the meteor, density of the atmosphere at the point of disruption of the mass, amount disrupted and size of the resulting debris all come to mind, along with a full dozen other factors that would include time of year (atmospheric density of the lower atmosphere based upon the temperature), amount of water in the are (density and cooling factors if it passed through stratospheric clouds), altitude of disruption also figures in.
If it popped upon contact with the boundary of the stratosphere, the effects on the ground would be lesser than if it popped midway through the stratosphere, due to the inverse square law and atmospheric density. If it disrupted into 5cm units and less vs 5M rocks and assorted sized debris, etc.
Kinetic energy = mass times velocity squared. Mass is proportional to diameter cubed. So there's a factor of about eight from the relative sizes. Double the velocity could easily account for another factor of four. Finally, there's the extent to which it dissipates its energy in the atmosphere before impacting the ground. It'll be far worse if it's coming straight down compared to a very oblique impact with the atmosphere. A large one will shed relatively little energy in the atmosphere. Small enough, and it's just a shooting star. That Chelyabinsk meteorite shed all but a small amount of energy in the lower atmosphere, which broke a lot of windows over a wide area rather than subjecting a smaller area to the equivalent of a small ground-burst nuke.
"If astrophysicists are using SI properly, why were Rosetta and Comet 67P quoted by ESA as being 303 million km from Earth last week, and not 303 Gm?"
Because, the people of the land that still uses inches, feet, yards and miles are metric challenged.
You know, 'Murica.
Yeah, I'm thrashing my own nation and its idios. Yes, I used the ancient Greek for a reason, I'm quite certain that the ancient Athenians had the right of it, in terms of democracy.
"Oh FFS Reg. You're writing about astrophysics on a tech website and yet you give all the measurements in imperial. I should expect better but El Reg seems more and more like a Top Gear spin-off every day."
+1
I think the old dart has yet to fully give up on the imperial system. It harkens back to the good old days, empire, colonialism, a car industry and such...
Well, El Reg realizes that it has an audience in the US, which still soundly remains in the 19th century.
Hell, the health care system is purely 19th century in nature, with payment for treatment and no universal health care, unlike modern, civilized nations.
Most of my peers don't have a clue what a meter is, save for those peers I served in the military with. That said, I'm one of the few of those peers fluent in English, rather than American. ;)
Hell, the health care system is purely 19th century in nature, with payment for treatment and no universal health care, unlike modern, civilized nations.
On the other hand, their health care system is where we send people when our health care system has decided it can't offer any more treatment.
@Wzrd1 - "El Reg realizes that it has an audience in the US"
I get that El Reg has a US audience to cater for but surely that still is largely a tech and scientific audience, which even in the US, I would expect to understand and use metric. Considering this is about space and even NASA uses metric, you would have thought that El Reg wouldn't have seemingly gone out of its way to use Imperial (which I have just realised the US calls 'English').
Hopefully we'll develop a system to detect (and somehow deal with) anything threatening to collide with Earth.
But the human race still needs an exit plan. We might figure out, someday, a practical way to defend ourselves against massive flying rocks, but what about things like supervolcanos and climates that vary from snowball earths to boiling Cretaceous periods? Planets are just too dangerous to live on. Our future, if we have one, will be in space habitats. Otherwise, someday there will be another real disaster like the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, and the human race will be just another layer of interesting fossils for some future life form to dig up.
Has to be "Vonnegut." Imagine humanity, after all our wars and petty feuds, scheming and hustling, taken out by a frozen rock. It's all going to end someday, one way or another. If it happens in our lifetimes at least we get to say we saw it happen.
Seriously, the Elite want to know about a possible extinction event so they can barricade themselves against the inevitable financial and social upheaval that will ensue when word leaks out to the masses. This asteroid-gazing program isn't for the likes of us, it's for Our Betters.
Sure. But being scientists who work in the field of "flying space rocks", they're really quite keen on knowing all about flying space rocks, and you can be quite sure that if you give them money to spend on learning about flying space rocks, that's what they'll spend it on (although they might spend some of it on flying space icebergs, or some other field closely related to flying space rocks instead).
Look at the Chelyabinsk meteor that went down in Russia. If people knew about it an hour earlier, there could have been warnings. With contingency plans, lots of injuries and damage could have been prevented. Simply opening the windows probably could have prevented them bursting, and walking outside could have allowed thousands of people to watch the spectacle completely unharmed.
A good meteor watch system could turn a big problem into a harmless and fun event.
If we're going to be hit with an asteroid big enough either to kill us, or to make the living envy the dead, I'd rather not know.
I'm given to understand, from countless movies on the subject, that the first several attempts at deflection always fail, but the final one, spearheaded by a bare handful of plucky and attractive people in their 20's and 30's will brilliantly succeed, with but seconds to spare.
While I agree that impactor warning is a good thing, the event in question is being supported by a an organization called the B612 Foundation. This so-called "non-profit" raised $1.3 dollars in 2013 to support building telescopes to search for such things - and promptly paid its chairman Ed Lu and chief operating officer Danica Remy $240,000 and $204,279 annual salaries. Hmm. Not sure those two are fully committed to the cause!
Whew! It's going to miss! Uh...but it's going to hit the moon and knock it out of orbit or at least put a sizable wobble in the moon's orbit. Uh...best to prepare for those 56 meter tides now! Or not. It (the moon) might just smack us a good one but not to worry we've got those ion engines...
Or with the moon orbiting so much closer we'll have more shade and global warming will be solved. Uh...
THE VOGONS ARE COMING! THE VOGONS ARE COMING!
Oh dear, here we go again with big scary numbers implying facts but with fudges like "potentially"
This brings back memories of when a certain woman spouted the claim that "all men are potential rapists. While true, the likelihood is approaching zero, so a pointless statement.
I thought Brian May still IS the Queen guitarist. He's certainly TOURING as "Queen + Adam Lambert"
To those (much earlier) posters saying that humans have been on the earth for (x) number of years and in that time we have been hit by (y) number of asteroids. Do take in to account for nearly all of those (x) years, the human population was a miniscule fraction of what it is today, and how many of these (y) asteroids have hit the planet in the last 200 years?
Lets say (approximately) that in the last 6000 years the global population went from 10mil to 1bn, and then in the last 150 years, it has gone to over 7bn. These people all have to go somewhere and this is usually either into places they weren't before, (meaning more targets for asteroids) or into the same places but more densely than before (meaning more devastating targets for same asteroids) and in some cases, both, (so new massive targets).
"ex-Queen guitar man and astrophysicist Brian May"
I think you'll find that Brian May is still very much an active member of the band known as Queen and are touring in South America later this year - http://www.queenonline.com/
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