Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic All Shook Up in 2029

Apparently, there's an asteroid out there headed our way, with a worrisome chance of hitting the Earth on April 13th, 2029.

http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_16549.shtml

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/ip?2.2e-02



PJ

I've read that it is a 1/300 chance of it hitting Earth, so chances are that it probably won't even hit. Plus, but 2029, I'd like to believe our technology will be good enough to do something to the asteroid if it were to hit.
I wouldn't start planning for doom and gloom in 24 years yet.

- Laura

That was the original assessment, yeah... though I believe it's been upgraded to about a one in 45 chance. Still extremely unlikely, though, and you're right, with 25 years lead time we'll probably manage to find something to take care of the problem before it's too late.

It's just that whole "life imitating art" thing that got my interest...

PJ

Just as an update, the asteroid hitting the earth has been ruled out for 2029.

- Laura

I'm just as happy about that. I'll be 81 when that would have happened -- not exactly the age best suited for trying to survive a post impact world. :rolleyes:

Nan

Hmmm. Well, twenty four years. I'd be 66. And since I plan on dropping dead on my sixtieth birthday (just like my grandmother did and my mom almost did), I guess I won't worry about it. (There are certain benefits to planning on dying young)

Ah, that's reassuring Thanks, Laura, for the link!

PJ

Just saw something on AOL news when I went to check email. Looks like there's yet another one (isn't there always?), this one due in 2036. They're listing the odds, however, at 1/45,000, according to the article .

What I find interesting, especially having just seen that old SG-1 ep with the giant naqahdah-filled asteroid), is that this one has been named.... Apophis.

Dum-dum-dummmmmm!

Yeah, I did a spread on it in October for my fake science magazine that I had to make for Studio I class. 2029 and 2036 are actually the same asteroid, according to the real Sky & Telescope magazine (as opposed to my own magazine lol). Scientists are particularly worried about the flyby on April 13th, that people mentioned two years ago. If the flyby is close enough, the asteroid will get pulled into a gravitational keyhole which would officially put the asteroid on a trajectory towards Earth for 2036.

Bum bum bum!
JD

Still almost 30 years to go until then, don't worry guys. That gives us a few years to wait for a space ship from Krypton to arrive here

All kidding aside, our solar system currently travels through the denser parts of the milky way and a greater chance for impacts is expectable. I even read an article about some pessimistic scientists who speak of an almost guaranteed hit within a few hundred years from now. If we haven't wiped out ourselves until then we'll surely have some counteragents ready, right?

I did some mental calculations and (yes, I know I'm a geek) April 13, 2029 would be a Saturday. One day off from passing by on Friday the thirteenth of April.

Yeah, I was thinking that if the earth survives until then, (including advancement of technology) scientists should, if there's nothing better, be able to send up a remote-controlled satellite to bump it off course. Like Superman could have pushed it off course.

There was something on the news yesterday about them currently tracking something like 145 NEOs that could have the potential to hit us. But that all you would have to do is hit the asteroid several times, nudging it off course by a fraction each time, and in ten years you'd have nudged it enough that it would miss us completely.

Or something like that. <g> Anyway, we have Bruce Willis, so that's okay.

And ROTFL, Paul! Ominous, indeed!

ETA: Here it is, I found the article from yesterday on the BBC news website:

There was no mention, btw, in the televised report about certain countries having to be sacrificed to save the rest of the world!

LabRat

I have faith in Superman having arrived in real life by then

The threat will eventually become real. It's just a matter of time. Quite possibly thousands or even millions of years. But, sitting here at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, I'm hardly in a position to deny that an asteroid strike could be a real danger to the world.

I haven't looked into this in a while, but last I heard, there was compelling evidence for the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out when a giant asteroid collided with the Earth. The dust cloud from that impact changed the global climate, wiping out a large portion of life on Earth.

Furthermore, if you put the continents back together to form pangea, there's a neat little circle in the middle, formed by the Gulf of Mexico, the Carribean Sea, and the northwestern coast of Africa.

A shallow circular bowl in the middle of a giant landmass. There's a decent chance that I am, right now, sitting on the edge of the crater formed by the impact of an asteroid roughly the size of Manhattan.

But yeah... nudging it gradually out of the way sounds like a good option. Much more sensible than a lot of what you see in fiction, but that's not surprising. Nudging it over the course of a decade isn't nearly as exciting as blowing it up or taking it through hyperspace or whatever at the last possible second.

As for endangering some countries... that sounds kind of silly to me, if I'm understanding it right. But it's politics. What can you do?

Basically, unless I'm misinterpreting the comment, what he's saying is that if you alter the asteroid's course, you're going to change its impact site. So... maybe it's headed for L.A. (Given its current path, the current path of the Earth, the rotation of the Earth, the gravitational effects of the moon and other objects, etc, the impact would occur there.) The plan is to nudge it out of the way, so that it won't hit the Earth at all. But... it's going to take several nudges.

So now it's time to plan the first nudge. In what direction are we going to nudge it? How much? They do the math. They come up with a plan. They send the explosives out there. They nudge it. This changes the path of the asteroid, but only slightly. It's still going to hit Earth, but now it's going to hit NYC.

This is not actually a problem. Because, according to the plan, we're not actually going to let it hit at all. But the point is that if things go wrong from here on out - if the next nudge missions miss or don't get launched or whatever - the asteroid will hit NYC instead of LA because of our actions.

Which is a silly thing to worry about, since the strike would have global impact in any case and the object is to avoid it entirely, but there it is.

We're going to nudge it again. This nudge will shift the asteroid's path a little more. According to predictions, after this nudge, the asteroid will be heading for Berlin. This means that, after this next step, central Europe will be in the most danger. Effects on the US will be secondary. If the asteroid stays on its course after this nudge. Which is not the plan. But, if things go wrong after the second mission, the fact is that the asteroid will hit Europe instead of the US. Because of our actions.

We'll continue to nudge it out of the way until everyone is safe, of course, but the next intermediate step will temporarily increase the danger to Germany and neighboring countries. And some of the people there, particularly the politicians, are shouting their disapproval.

It's only an intermediate phase of a larger plan. The plan that will most safely, effectively, and efficiently solve the entire problem. But people are going to make trouble anyway, because that's what people do. It's the NIMBY problem again. Sure, we all know that we need the garbage dump and the power plant and the waste treatment plant and all that. They have to be somewhere in order for civilization as we know it to function. But wherever you try to put them, the people who live nearby are going to stand up and shout "Not In My Back Yard!!"

Same idea here, except that it's not even that bad. We're not talking about actual losses or any permanent effects. We're just talking about moving the theoretical impact point over and away, bit by bit. It has to be done gradually. We'll keep doing it until we're sure that the asteroid is going to give us all a wide berth. But until that last step, there's still a chance of impact somewhere on the globe, and where that target gets (temporarily) painted next is going to end up being a matter of politics.

Stupid, really, but what can you do?

As for that asteroid threat... yes, it could happen. Eventually, it will happen. But believe me, I check out astronomical websites every day, and I hadn't even heard of the 2029 asteroid. Trust me, if the threat had been real, the astronomy websites would have been full of it.

As a matter of fact, I have read at least two or three astronomical articles pointing out that there have been several "asteroid scares" in the media in recent years, but they have all been false alarms. The reason for this is that NASA have apparently decided that you will never be able to accuse them of keeping any secrets from the public. So, when they detect a tiny object out there moving in the general direction of the Earth, they go public right away and say something like, "We have detected an asteroid on an Earth-crossing orbit, and our estimate is that there is a one in 300 chance that it could collide with the Earth in 2029." Okay, but that is their estimate a day or so after they have detected that piece of rock. Give them another day, or better yet, give them a week, and they will come back and say that the asteroid constitutes no threat to the Earth. The reason is that space is huge, the orbits the earth and the asteroids trace out are very, very big, too, and the sizes of the earth and the asteroids are unbelievably tiny compared to the sizes of their orbits. For an asteroid to actually hit the earth, the shape and size of the earth's orbit and the asteroid's orbit must be incredibly well matched, and then the earth and the asteroid must move at precisely the speed that will bring them to exactly the same spot in space simultaneously, so that they collide. For anything big enough to actually damage the earth if there is a collision, the chances that the earth's and the asteroid's paths through space will match up so precisely in the foreseeable future is very close to zero. Really, people, that is the way it is.

Yes, sooner or later something will collide with the earth. But no, no one has detected this killer asteroid yet. And chances are that nothing major will hit the earth for, say, another million years.

So when you hear that astronomers have detected an asteroid that may collide with the earth in 2029, 2073, 2124 or even 2015, keep your cool and wait for a few more days, until the astronomers have determined the asteroid's orbit more precisely. When they have, you can bet your boots that the asteroid threat will have gone away. Of course, chances are that the tabloids which print the news about the asteroid scare will be much less willing to tell us that there is no danger of a collision after all.

Ann

Anyone interested in this will probably find the Spaceguard sites interesting

http://spaceguard.esa.int/

http://www.spaceguarduk.com/

The UK one has a very clear explanation of the way in which the odds of a hit are calculated. Reading the news page there, we don't appear to be in any immediate danger.