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This is a perfect sort of question for Randall Munroe.
Black hat guy: “What if we fired more guns?”
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
Steppenwolf may have the answer, right in front of us all along.
More YouTube:
City Prepping - 6 easy meals to cook over a fire after a disaster - YouTube
Combined with 12 Ways to Safely Cook After a Disaster - YouTube (Don’t alert the unprepared)
Unfortunately, I can’t come up with any meaningful entertaining answer. Once the asteroid is close, deflection is no good. You have all this kinetic energy that must go somewhere. If the asteroid were indestructible and you could all aim perfectly to stop it in its tracks… the energy of the recoil from all the guns would be precisely the kinetic energy of the asteroid, so dissipating the recoil would make a similar crater. It’s essentially the Hollywood fallacy that you shoot someone and they fly backwards writ large.
If the goal is to stop it in its tracks, then I see what you mean. But if you merely want to deflect it away from its path, it can keep the great majority of that kinetic energy, right?
If you know how far away the asteroid is, and its mass and velocity, and you can agree on how much deflection you need to push it by, it should be a fairly simple calculation. I guess you’ll also have to presume the asteroid to be spherical and of uniform density. Did I miss anything? I wonder if an engineer who plays billiards might even be able to estimate it in his head.
Hence the second part of my question:
If it’s within range of an AR-15, it’s ~500m away. With a lateral input of 10% of the kinetic energy, the impact point will only change by ~50m. I guess you could mount a very large and very dense artillery battery on Long Island, hit it a few kilometers up from the side with 25% of the KE, and end up with one large crater in New Jersey and a smaller one from the recoil on Long Island…
Realistic plans obviously involve a deflection by a tiny angle when it’s millions of km away so it misses the Earth entirely.
But anyway, I guess we should start a new thread if we’re going to do this…
Yeah, I forgot that part of the situation. My bad.
Fire enough guns at once, and it won’t even matter if you actually hit the asteroid. Instead, you’ll just shove the Earth out of the asteroid’s path.
Wouldn’t it be easier if everyone on that side of the world just jumped off a chair at the same time?
I don’t think that works. When you fall toward the earth after jumping off a chair, remember that the earth is being pulled toward you with the same force as you are being pulled toward the earth.
But that force is applied to a much larger mass, so the earth will move much less.
However, to jump off a chair, you first have to climb ONTO a chair which us exactly equal and opposite to the force applied when you jump off.
Czarcasm suggests that if enough people jump off chairs on one side of the planet, we could shove the earth out of the asteroid’s path. My point is, having any number of people jumping off chairs won’t budge the earth at all, not even a little bit.
But first, when those people climb onto the chairs, the same is true, just with the earth and the people pushing/pulling in the opposite directions vs. when they jump off.
Monday Morning Quarterback Quarterly - TOP TEN DUMB IDEAS TO AVOID REPEAT OF NEW YORK TRAGEDY - (Hint: All ten involve guns and chairs)