For dropped objects from aircraft and up to up to suborbital ejecta I agree completely. Vt is our friend. Although size isn’t; the Vt of a refrigerator-sized hunk of rock or glass is still fast enough to only hurt briefly when it lands on you and you splat like a bug.
I did a lousy job of making what was mostly a humorous point that incoming stuff like satellite hunks, comets, and meteorites coming down from earth orbit or solar orbit can be loosely described as falling from a truly great height and having speeds such that atmospheric drag has a small or negligible effect.
And yes, I do understand that for stuff in solar orbit the actual contribution of Earth’s gravity well to the impact speed at the top of our atmosphere is itself small to negligible. It seemed funny at the time. Oh well.
And in that simulation nothing much went wrong with the engineering and there wasn’t any political dithering. So we’ve established that 6 months is a very loose lower bound; the true lower bound is IMO significantly larger/longer.
I don’t think anyone’s ever claimed that six months would be enough for a deflection. On that sort of timescale, the only question is going to be how many you can save from the meteoric winter, and the answer is going to be “not very many”.
Not reading the entire thread to see if this has been mentioned, but based on what I’ve seen in society, half the population would refuse to believe that there even was a meteor.
Normally Business Insider is behind a paywall / no adblock wall for me, so I didn’t even bother clicking Darren’s link. Having just tried it, much to my surprise the link actually leads to the non-paywalled sciencealert.com website.
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