I’ve asked and gotten no answers but from what can gather during impact winter lots of water vapor is stored in the heated up stratosphere which cools down as the soot falls out, then dropping out the water. The CO2 would remain causing rapid warming with ice melt.
So should be lots of water as the impact winter resolves. Don’t know if making them functional would be possible though.
Sure, some debris will make it up as far as the GPS orbits, or even to geosynchronous, but satellites are very small targets in a very big space, and unlike on the ground, almost isn’t good enough: A satellite would be destroyed by any hit, but wouldn’t even notice a bit of debris that missed it by a centimeter. It’d be an extreme fluke if even one satellite got hit, and you’re not going to see two get taken out.
Right now quite a few cars and trucks there are diesel over petrol (although that may change within a few decades to EVs and or … fuel cell vehicles). The goal would not be to make as many exploration vehicles as cars anyway. A few will do.
Even with a short warning before impact sharing of information needed for survival might occur.
The hypothetical (supported by some modeling it seems) was that the region is relatively spared. Have their geothermal power. Have ability to survive the several years of impact winter. No the hypothetical is not that only subsistence level sheep farmers survive. Although indeed the first job is creating new food supplies as the winter abates and the rains fall.
Yeah some safety and environmental health standards might need to be relaxed. Ya think that’s going to be politically possible?
Just how little volume of ejecta do you think we’re talking about, here?
I’ve been assuming, for the Iceland discussion, a zero-warning scenario. Things change quite a bit if there’s any effort to purposefully stock Iceland up with information (and materials). Although I personally would not choose it, or any island, if I knew in advance a 15km impactor was on its way.
I’m not saying only subsistence sheep farmers will survive the impact. I’m saying in order to continue surviving, everyone will have to become subsistence sheep (or cattle) farmers.
Politics isn’t the issue. It’s survival. When a cloud of toxic, explosive silane gas wipes out everyone at the tyre recycling plant, “I wish I hadn’t voted for it” isn’t going to be the concern. it’s “Oh, no, we’ve killed a hundred of our tiny population.” Granted, politics is then going to come into it with “… including all those engineers we slaved to keep fed. Why are we building an airship, again?”
Got a brand spanking new carbonaceous chondrite on the ground. Some interesting shots of how pieces turned to dust when they strike a hard surface. That class of asteroid is basically just dried mud.
I’m familiar with the reference. But no, I’m referring to the fact that we only detect half of these things after they’ve missed us. And of the rest, the average warning time is 14 hours.
Of course, that time improves as they get bigger. And improves as our tech gets better. But we’re still well in the “sudden impactor” era.
These things? 15 km wide planet killer rock things?
Yeah not seeing ones a hundred meters or so wide coming has happened. Cite that we miss half of the ones even that size though would be appreciated. My understanding is that missing car sized ones makes the news.
There haven’t been any 15km ones, missed or not. But there’s nothing about ones of that size that make them unmissable. Especially if they come from our current blindside.
Sorry, I was replying to the first part of your post and completely skipped the rest. By “these things” I mean near-miss asteroids as a whole that we’ve detected. That should have been obvious from context, I’d think, as a 15km-sized near miss would be world news, detected early or not.
But sure, here’s your cite
So looking up a conversation app on line the largest group in that citation, which have more than half detected and rapidly increasing, are a few dozen meters large.
That missing ones 25 meters wide, even 100 meters wide, is different than not seeing Chthon let alone one kilometers wide. And that assuming such is not a reasonable assumption.
Of course it’s reasonable, given that there’s a giant blind spot in our current detection capability. Doesn’t matter what size it is, if it’s coming at us from sunside, we won’t see it (until we have decent space-borne detection)
As far as large (15km or larger) rocks coming from our blind side (i.e. towards the Sun), those will be discovered at some other point of their orbit when they are not between Earth and the Sun. Actually, probably all of them or that size or larger already have been discovered. Ditto for most that are somewhat smaller. The ones that are only discovered when they zip past us are usually in the 100 meter or smaller range.
We haven’t detected all the large (defined as 1km or bigger) ones (link).
The goal is to detect better than 90% of them, since we have a reasonable but not precise idea of how many there are. We’re not to 90% yet.
Just in the last couple years, an amateur found a 1km asteroid. We’re still at the stage where amateur astronomers can find massive asteroids by searching random bits of sky.
Certainly agreed that it is a big deal that there may still be 1 km plus ones out there unidentified. And your other citation puts the need to identify the larger number of smaller ones as an even bigger deal, and discusses the belated attempts to address the need -
None of which however supports the statement that there’s an undetected 15 km wide one would sneak up and slam in with literally “zero-warning”.