M'kay, pay attention. Roche limit passed, gravitational stresses rip apart comet nucleus, pieces of nucleus are give tangential vectors because of being ripped apart, tangential vectors are magnified by being imposed during highest speed of object whipping around sun, magnification of tangentiality is caused by tangential imposition at the very start of the exit path from the sun, pieces of the object maintain statistical mean around original vector away from sun, statistical mean is not affected by spreading cone of tangentially impacted Roche limit destruction derived separation of pieces of nucleus, cone of potentially destructive material continues to expand along original vector away from sun towards Earth.
” towards Earth.”
That’s where your “critical thinking” fails miserably.
The orbit doesn’t come close to us on the outbound run.
No, any possible “coning” of debris also will not be severe enough to reach us.
Again, example of shoemaker-levy 9 which had two years to “spread out” before hitting Jupiter.
OK.. Now apply it to your own answer.
cone of potentially destructive material continues to expand along original vector away from sun...
Why, yes it does. Kindly note in your own wording the words "along original vector." This original vector - how many degrees removed from the plane of the elliptic was/is it? So then, how many degrees off the plane of the elliptic is the current outbound vector that by both the laws of physics and your own admission is the same as the original vector?
towards Earth.
Was the original vector in any possible way going to intersect Earth's orbit? If not, then maybe you need to choose a different wording here. Try this visualization. You are in a field. You are running across that field, let's say East. I am standing 9 miles from you and I fire a projectile of some sort in the direction of the field you are running in at an angle such that this projectile will pass 4 miles over your head at its closest point to you. Is this projectile heading towards you? And if you insist that it is heading "towards" you is the fact that it will pass four miles over your head a reason for you to act like Chicken Little, or would that be irrational?
The evil cone of destruction from comet Ison will pass Earth's orbit (93,000,000 miles from the sun - 1AU) around December 29 at which time it will be 40,362,000 miles - .434 AU ABOVE us. The sky is falling... We're all gonna die... Say, you don't also watch/listen to Alex Jones do you?