What’s to debate? What Vegas thinks the odds SHOULD be?
Uh, my Link-O-Meter is registering ZERO…
Or at the very least, have a really bad day.
Yay! Bruce Willis is going to die, setting off a nuke inside QQ47 after drilling to its core!
Can we make sure that Ben Affleck is with him this time?
Regardless of whether it’s going to hit, we should be taking this chance to slap some rockets on it and move it into orbit. There’s all sorts of valuable minerals on there, it could form the structural basis for a major space station, there’s all sorts of uses. And we could ram it into the giant alien deathcruiser that’s going to be showing up in 2015 to haul us off to the salt mines of Proxima 7.
Where the hell is my OP?
THE ASTEROID MUST HAVE HIT IT!
We should be so lucky!
I’m sure it was very nice. No back to stockpiling foodstuff and water for the holocaust. Or the next blackout, which ever comes first. 
I, personally, am looking forward to post-armageddon chaos. Gonna start loading up on ammo and weapons in a few years. And gasoline for my car. It’ll be just like a movie. Several movies, actually.
Well 2003 QQ47 apparently has a velocity of 31.54 km/s and is 1.27 km long. Lets say that it’s cylindrical with a diameter = 1/3 its length and has a density of 3000 kg/m^3.
We would need to shed ~2 km/s off the thing to get it into our neck of the woods. That’s about 3x10^19 Joules. Over ten years you would need a source able to provide 90 giga watts of power.
I think we may want to wait for a smaller one, though I love the idea.
I second that. I look forward to sawing the tops off of old sedans and putting giant tractor tires on everything. Note to self, must buy spiked S&M regalia.
On another topic, I used the same link to find a 1 in 2,222,000 chance of the damn thing leaving a scar…
All right everybody, there’s nothing to see here…all of you go back to your shanties…
I say we should shoot it anyway. Give NASA a chance to blow things up on purpose.
Yeticus Rex (or anybody) why does the NASA link have an impact date irange from 2058-2099? There is nothing about March 21, 2014. What aren’t they telling us?
First off they determine the potential number of impacts and then “add” up the probability of each to give you the 1 in 1,000,000 number. Not all orbits fall within the definition of “impacting” earth.
Notice how the impacts cluster around a set of years? Those years are the ones where the two objects could be at the same place at the same time. As JPL and company build up a better picture of the asteroid’s orbit the potential path of the asteroid will narrow and the chances it will be in the same place at the same time as Earth will most likely become smaller.
In a slightly more serious vein, is there any chance this asteroid will prod our leaders into jumping back into space exploration and colonization? (Not likely) I mean, we do have all of our species’ eggs in one basket, figuratively speaking…
Here’s an interesting question: What would the odds have to be before we would expend massive effort to deflect the thing?
Let’s say that the astronomers come back and say that before they lost sight of it they got a good enough orbital reading to say that there was a 1 in 1000 chance that it would hit us. Would that do it? How about 1 in 100? 1 in 10?
If it were just a matter of mathematical expectation, it would be simple enough to calculate - The cost of a mission compared to the calculated economic cost of a strike divided by the odds.
So let’s say a strike would cost 100 trillion in damages. If there was a 1 in 1000 chance that it would hit us, they we should launch a mission as long as the mission costs less than 100 billion.
But of course, there’s no way to know any of these numbers with good accuracy, so I suspect it would come down to a matter of political will. What would it take for us to kick a mission into high gear? We’d have 11 years to design something, fly it, get it out to the asteroid, and deflect it. So the thing would probably have to fly in maybe 7 or 8 years to get to the thing far enough out to have a decent chance of deflecting it. That’s a MASSIVE crash program. Is it do-able? Would we do it? Or would we just devolve into partisan bickering, international bickering, and assorted tomfoolery until it was too late?
I’d start with the assumption that if scientists said, “There is a 100% chance that it will hit us. In fact, it will hit us on March 21, 2014, at 2:14 PM. The strike will be in Nebraska. It will destroy most of North America”, then there’s no doubt we’d do everything we could.
But what if there was a 1 in 50 chance, and the strike was likely to happen in, say, Africa?
The trouble with figuring out the odds is putting value judgements on things. If it’s a choice between risking obliteration of life over half the earth, or bankrupting every economy to deflect it, you can’t measure it in $ any more.
Anyway, how big is this one? Is africa far enough away?
A one M.J.Agee, whose web page can be found on google, says that the Bible predicted an asteroid hit way back when.
She says it will hit Sept. 12 2007. At noon.
Make sure you are done in the bathroom by then.
I’m hoping it splits our moon in two. I always liked Thundarr the Barbarian.