Yeah, but what happens if you use Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian? :eek:
Slashdot’s got a story up saying that after further observations, the odds have dropped to 1:56000. I’m too lazy to link.
Dammit! Proof I won’t ever see a return on what I’m paying into Social Security. :mad:
Though it’s cool it’ll happen 3 days after my birthday. That’s going to be some kind of party. ALL INVITED! 
So we have 25 years to panic? Cool! How many 2029 Asteroid cults do you think will spring up between now and then?
I’ll be dead.
Why should I care?
I’ll be drunk.
Why should I care?
HOLY CRAP! I just thought: What if it hits Jerusalem. On good friday of the Julian calender. That would be fuckin creepy.
If you read the link, you’ll note that this “space rock” is considered big enough to cause significant local or regional damage. It would suck to be in the region where it hits, if it hits, but it doesn’t sound like a civilization destroyer.
You can relax now.After issuing an unprecedented “yellow alert” for a potential cosmic collision, astronomers said further observations showed that a recently discovered asteroid had no chance of hitting Earth in the year 2029.According to Alan Boyle, the Science Editor at MSNBC.com
WOW, from the diagram on that site this is going to be real close. So if it is visible from the N. America, East Coast (and its clear :dubious: ) I’ll be out trying to spot it
robz
Well, damn. All worked up over nothing. You don’t suppose we could go nudge it back to an earth-hitting orbit so that we can figure out how to save the earth from it, do you?
Let’s start the first one!!!
Amen, brother! But you forgot: phantom pains that you’re sure are fatal diseases in the borning.
And do yourself a favor: get a prescription for Nexium from your doctor and chuck all those rollaids. It’s the first true miracle drug since penicillin.
I’ve got it! Let’s send a ball of garbage of equal mass at it!
Morning or Afternoon?
NASA math.
I’ll bring the Kool-Aid if you all pitch in for sneakers for everybody
:eek:
Not sure how much credit you’re giving Hollywood, but just to be clear, this wouldn’t work. If you have one rock hitting the Earth, it deposits a bunch of kinetic energy in one place. If you blow it up, you have a whole bunch of small rocks, but the same total kinetic energy hitting the Earth. Assuming you somehow manage to pulverize it into rocks the size of a fist or smaller (unlikely), they hit the atmosphere and burn up.
As in, turn into fireballs.
Imagine the whole sky covered in meteor streaks, no black visibile, the whole upper atmosphere glowing.
The heat will raise temperature at the surface to a few hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Forest dry out and burst into flames. The surface of the ocean boils.
Breaking up an asteroid into smaller pieces is as bad or worse than leaving it in one chunk. What you want to do is use your nukes to vaporize part of the asteroid, changing its orbit ever so slightly. If you can do this decades before the strike, a very small perturbation in the asteroid’s orbit today can make the asteroid miss the Earth by a nice wide margin. Not that it would be easy, as even a small change to the orbit of a small asteroid would require a tremendous amount of energy.
You say this as if it were a bad thing.
According to the Death Clock, I am going to die in 2044. February 8th, to be exact.
I better book my winter ski trip in January 2044.