Not necessarily; it’s not as if you have to stop it in its path; you just have to make certain the path clears the Earth. Start pushing far enough away and it takes (relatively) little energy; more than chemical rockets are going to provide, but a high-impulse, low thrust electrical propulsion engine could conceviably push it into a nonintersecting course. Of course, you’d first have to figure out how to mount such an engine and control its attitude; alternatively, a few large bombs detonated in a crater to direct the resultant thrust normal to the direction of travel could also effect a course change sufficient to miss the Earth.
But Armageddon was a dumb, dumb, dumb movie from beginning to end. Deep Impact wasn’t much more intelligent. But really, when you have the likes of Volcano and Dante’s Peak to compete with, how intelligent do you have to be?
Hmm… totally off-topic here, but as a resident of Florida (“The Sunshine State*”–really! Practically no hurricanes this year, honest!*), I strongly suspect that Staff Report is in fact almost completely wrong. At any rate, my many years of admittedly anecdotal experience with different-colored clothing says otherwise; I’m not sure what qualifies as “loose-fitting clothing,” but I generally wear my T-shirts pretty baggy, and black hots up a lot more than white, breeze or no. Regardless of whether black, fluffed plumage cools birds better or not, I think scaling up the data to apply to humans might well result in one of those “bumblebees can’t fly”-type situations
I’d also take issue with the contention that arctic animals’ insulation is white for more than just camouflage, although this is no doubt a beneficial side effect in winter. The arctic fox and hare shed off their white fur during the summer months, whereas the Emperor penguin retains its mostly black plumage despite living in the coldest environment on earth, probably because it does not have to fear predation when away from water. It’s true that the polar bear keeps its white color year-round, but my understanding is that their hair structure has quite different insulating properties from other Arctic animals.
Conversely, if black is really better at cooling, one would expect to find a large number of dark- or black-colored desert animals, when in fact the opposite seems to be true. The addax antelope of the Sahara desert, for example, has a brown coat during the winter months, but turns pure white in summer-- with the exception of a patch on the head and around the eyes, which probably helps to prevent desert blindness by reducing the glare from the sand.
I’ve never had the opportunity to ask any of the Tuareg people about their sartorial choices; however, they seem to be more famous for wearing blue clothing rather than black. The only consistently black-colored item of dress appears to be the veil, which again makes some sense if you wish to avoid desert blindness. I suppose it’s possible that black clothing can be more comfortable than white if there’s a breeze *and * you’re sitting in the shade to begin with, but I wonder if they spend a lot of their day in direct desert sunlight with dark clothes on. At any rate, I’ve never noticed the effect personally. I also note that the Tuareg are widely known as “the blue people” on account of their attire, which leads me to think that other tribes in the area may consider them a little weird.
Anyway. Sorry for the interruption. Back to the movies.
I was referring to the asteroid in Armageddon, which was supposed to have suffered some kind of impact that took it out of its safe orbit and put it on a course with Earth. Hard to follow exactly what they were thinking about that one, since they obviously aren’t clear about how big asteroids are, where they are in the Solar System, etc. . . .
Everything you say is of course correct if you want to deflect an asteroid on the order of a few tens of kilometers from a route toward Earth.
Heh. I never minded Jurassic Park because I’m very ignorant in bioscience. I guess I should be careful what I ask for.
But since you mentioned Crichton as an author, I have to say he is orders of magnitude above anything written by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. I’m tempted to sue them for the pain they caused me with The Ice Limit. I was in the hospital at the time and I had nothing else to read.
To be fair, a “nuclear bomb” is not a fixed unit of measure, so it’s possible the reference was to a larger bomb, even one that’s 100 times larger than you’re assuming.
Yeah, Preston and Child’s science does come across as somewhat hinkier than Crichton’s-- although I’m not sure whether that’s just because they try to explain it more, or what. It seems to be a constant in their books that there will always be at least one massively thick character in a position of authority who has to have the situation spelled out to them, and who then goes ahead and does exactly the wrong thing anyway. (Personally, I find this scenario to be disturbingly true to my own work experiences…) However, I tend to prefer Preston and Child anyway, because their books contain characters that, sooner or later, actually *do * something.
That said, I found the movie adaptation of their book The Relic to be intensely disappointing for a number of reasons. The book itself is pretty far out, not something to be read by anyone who objects to the notion of a computer program that can accurately predict the characteristics of a creature by examining its DNA. Even so, I was willing to suspend my disbelief for the purposes of an entertaining horror flick. Alas, I would have had to permanently expel my belief to even have a hope of enjoying *The Relic * One scene that comes to mind, very early in the film, clued me in on the level of thought that I could expect from the movie: The plot revolves loosely around a lost anthropological expedition, the last surviving artifacts of which have been recovered for a museum’s collection. Before shipping, these artifacts were packed in local plant material, there being something of a shortage of Styrofoam peanuts in the Amazon basin. When the boxes of artifacts are finally opened, having been sent by cargo ship from South America and kept in storage for months-- the leaves they remove from the box are green, fresh and healthy.
"Folks… they just didn’t care."
(Although having glanced at the reviews your link provides, I’m now strongly considering checking *The Ice Limit * out of the library, if only to find out more about the glamorous lifestyle of a “world-class meteorite hunter.” The phrase reminds me of the time when Snoopy from Peanuts pretended to be a “world-famous grocery clerk.”
I’m suprised Armaggedon’s movie grandfather, Meteor, hasn’t been mentioned yet. This was the disaster film with Sean Connery and a bunch of others I can’t remember. Somewhere near the beginning of the film, they speak of diverting the first manned mission to Mars to the asteroid belt. My brain shut down there and I didn’t pay attention to the rest of the movie.
I’ll submit that they are good storytellers. I just wish they would accept that they don’t know engineering and hire a consultant. Ice Limit was entertaining until I read such a glaring error that I threw it against the wall and had to page a nurse to pick it up for me.
And as has already been pointed out, it’s well established in the series of films that Spider-Man is superhumanly strong, right?
So when he punches Doc Ock in the face, which he does several times, that should have simply killed him outright. Doc Ock’s HEAD wasn’t mechanical. Spider-Man has many, many times the strength of an adult human; a punch from him should cave a skull in like an eggshell.
Sure, but I thought Spidey doesn’t like to kill people. I assume he knows how to pull a punch.
As for things striking the Earth, I think Niven and Pournelle address this fairly well in Lucifer’s Hammer.Scientists discover a comet over a year out, and initial reports say that the odds of it striking are millions or billions to one. Six months later, the odds are adjusted to some tens or hundreds of thousands to one. It’s only known for certain that the comet will hit a few days in advance, by which time the majority of people are completely panic stricken because they didn’t take the threat seriously enough to make any sort of preparations.
1972, the “Grand Tetons” fireball. It was about…1000 tons, I think? Picture—biggest I could find. I once saw a movie somesome managed to shoot of it, but I’m damned if I can find it online.
Nitpick: the Tsar was 57 megatons. (Although it was a 100 MT design, they scaled back the yield for the test.)
Not that an extra couple dozen megatons really matters for what we’re talking about… :smack:
Y’all are criticizing Spiderman, the movie in which you study science to learn to become the world’s best computer programmer, robotics expert, neurophysician, and astrophysicist? At some point, don’t you just recognize that their science is better than ours?
I dunno. AIUI, there are two places where the hunting for meteorites is good: the Austrailian Outback, and Antarctica. Both those areas are supposed to be pretty “adventuresome”* at least, which might be close to “glamorous.”
*With Adventures being defined as something nasty, dangerous and uncomfortable happening to someone else.
