I wonder which escape shuttle I’ll be on…
From what they’ve described, it’s not big enough to blow up the moon or anything. I had visions of a 50-mile-wide monster punching through the Earth’s crust and annihilating all life down to the last microbe, but it’s just a kilometre long. It would blow up pretty good, but we’re talking Deep Impact damage, not Armageddon.
2.8x10^12 kgs. You might get a speck or two in your eye.
If this is a poll, I’m going with the quoted passage.
I’d be in favor of moving the people out of the impact area and stockpiling food. If, as it seems, many of the great extinctions in Earth’s history were caused by impacts it would behoove the ‘intelligent’ species to give it some serious consideration.
I don’t know at what size asteroid you have to spend trillions of dollars, euros, and yen to deflect it. That is one issue where a panel of bickering scientists would come in handy.
I’m sure that as the asteroid gets closer to Earth, we’ll be able to better track its position and velocity, and recalculate the odds as needed.
Sam Stone’s just posted the most interesting thing I’ve read in quite some time. How much is enough, indeed?
Wow - very insightful. Go back and read it again, really.
Wish I had an answer. How much would we spend to avert a catastrophe that might not happen anyway? How good do the odds have to be before we’re spurred into action? I’d like to think they wouldn’t have to be very good at all. I’m cynical enough to believe that they’d have to be spot on before anything happens. And that saddens me.
As you were.
Snicks
I’m sure that as the asteroid gets closer to Earth, we’ll be able to better track its position and velocity, and recalculate the odds as needed.
Yes, but the longer we wait, the more difficult it is to deflect it.
We don’t need it in orbit, just make sure it doesn’t hit us, then put a mining base on it- you could make a lot of stuff from a rock a kilometer long…
anyone know if it is rocky, iron or carbonaceous?
This mining operation would be periodically accessible from Earth, at which time the products of mining could be sent in to Earth orbit a little at a time, using slow, low energy transfer orbits.
These ~1km objects are being discovered constantly- many of them come close to the Earth- they don’t hit us, we are a very small target.
However the 500m, 200m, and smaller objects are more numerous ond come closer; we should be looking at mining these as far as possible as well. These rocks are an opportunity to grasp, not a disaster to be feared.
As the NEO programmes detect more and more, and smaller and smaller objects, these ‘near miss’ media events are going to happen more and more often until we are having one every year or two;
To kickstart the exploitation of the solar system, NEO’s are the most valuable objects in the sky, apart from the Moon; if these objects are owned and mined they will also be controlled.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html