so i just saw ‘deep impact’ about 13 years late, and i thought it was tremendous. emotional performances, pretty good effects, the works. then i got to thinking hey, instead of blowing up the giant rock of doom, why not just dig a hole roughly the size of the meteor (new york-ish) and line it with something indestructible so there’s no way a bunch of dust and whatever else will block out the sun and kill the world?
if they can “mine all the fissile materials on earth” for a bomb in ‘sunshine,’ certainly they can make some kind of unobtainium cradle for a meteor? unfortunately everyone made fun of me for this idea, and then sent me here to ask you folks why it wouldn’t work.
so my question is twofold: why wouldn’t it work, and what WOULD we do in the event of a giant rock falling from the sky about to kill us all?
a) They call it unobtainium because you can’t obtain any of it. b) You can’t dig a hole the size of New York without unobtainium, or keep an asteroid from going straight through any hole you can dig. c) How do you you know the asteroid won’t land a mile to the left? d) Think of putting a pail over your head. Now slam the pail with a large hammer. How does your head feel?
You can try to nudge an asteroid into another orbit, given many years of lead time. We’ve had a million threads on this, so a search should pull up lots of argument about how feasible it is.
I read somewhere that the one that gets us we’re never going to see coming. The number of scientists that are scouring the skies for cataclysmic meteors can be counted on two hands, and the majority of meteors that are found are found by amateurs. I’m looking for a cite. If I find it, I’ll post it.
Why do you think it would help to dig a hole? Even if it does fall right in the hole, it is still going to hit just as hard and so impart just as much momentum and energy to the Earth. That is what does the damage. I suppose a deep enough hole might cut down the amount of dust that gets into the atmosphere directly due to the strike, but that is only a small part of the problem. Indeed, the deeper it strikes, the more it might do in terms of setting off earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the like.
It wouldn’t work, because the asteroid is moving at 20,000 miles per hour. There is no conceivable unobtainium that can absorb that energy without transferring it to the earth below the cradle. Have you ever caught a baseball thrown very hard? The reason it stings even though you are wearing glove is the energy gets transferred from the baseball to the glove, then from the glove to your hand. So when a asteroid hits the earth, to avoid damage, something would have to absorb all that energy of the asteroid moving at 20,000 miles an hour, and there just isn’t any substance can do that without violating the laws of physics.
Deep Impact was somewhat plausible, at least by Hollywood standards. Sunshine was not. While the solution you propose might have been workable in the magical world where Sunshine was set, it would never work in the world of Deep Impact, which works under approximately the same laws as ours. You might as well ask, why not get Superman to deflect the asteroid, since he was able to do it in that one movie.
**meldiocre **is on to something here. No we can’t line the hole with unobtanium, but we could dig the hole all the way through the planet, and the the asteroid will pass right through without touching anything. Just to make it sporting, we could add some giant windmill vanes passing over the hole so the timing has to be just right.
Even if you were to construct an indestructible “cradle” for an incoming asteroid, and even if you knew exactly where the impact would be, the entire asteroid itself would be vaporized to produce plenty of dust, etc.
The Tunguska event is thought to be due to an asteroid just a few tens of meters in diameter that never even contacted the ground. Indeed it exploded in an airburst at an altitude of 5-10 kilometers.
An asteroid the size of New York would certainly reach the ground, punch right through your cradle (even if it were made of unobtanium), and likely punch through the Earth’s crust, with impact effects reaching the Earth’s mantle.
The superheated air alone would reach temperatures of 20,000 K. There is nothing remotely plausible that could withstand the impact of an New York-sized asteroid.
Honestly, if we get hot by an asteroid or any other celestial object of that size, none of us will be too worried about “why we didn’t dig a hole.” I will say, though that thinking like meldiocre’s is what leads to cutting edge technology…but with the “thought” must come the knowledge…we collectively possess it…
A mountain of indestructible unubtanium wouldn’t change much in the end. If the asteroid hits the unubtanium, it’ll still transfer all of its energy through the unobtanium into the earth, and still eject huge amounts of material. At that sort of energy scale the earth’s crust might as well be pudding. The unobtanium mountain would redistribute the impact energy somewhat
(perhaps you’d get less ejecta but more earthquakes) but all of that energy will ultimately do something destructive.
Then, why not dig a hole in the shape of a giant baseball glove? I’m sure if we would all work together we could even dig another one in the shape of those baseball caps where you can put soda cans on top.
I have a better idea. Make a giant rubber pad and put it at the point of impact. The asteroid will bounce off the pad back into space and Earth wil be saved. Make sure the pad is extra thick, because you don’t want the asteroid to break through it. Probably be a good idea to put some of those unobtainium springs underneath, just in case.
