Thanks fieldmarshaldj. "Doth protest too much" ping.
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Posted on 06/06/2019 8:35:45 PM PDT by BenLurkin
You may have seen reports that a massive asteroid the size of a football field is hurtling toward Earth.
Although the European Space Agency (ESA) has placed asteroid 2006QV89 on its Risk List, there's no reason to sound the alarms just yet.
First of all, it's probably not as big as you think it is. The object is roughly 40 meters in diameter, according to the ESA. A football field is 48.5 meters wide and 109 meters long.
The Risk List might sound scary, but that simply means that ESA calculated a non-zero impact probability.
ESA says this particular asteroid has a 1 in 7,299 chance of hitting us. You're more likely to get killed by fireworks, which is a 1 in 340,733 chance.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
But that was not the statement. The statement was the likelihood that an individual would be killed by it, not whether it would hit Earth or not.
109 meters long? Must be a Canadian football field, eh?
Or they multiplied the width in yards by 0.9144 to get meters (close, but they still got it wrong) and divided the length in yards by 0.9144 to really screw up the length.
CNN is still stuck on using AOC's budget math...
*ping*
For the record here, this object in lunar distances, is expected to be 9x further away than the moon. At its closest.
Ooops, sorry, miscalculated. It will be 17x further than the moon (4263659/250000).
‘Huh? 1 in 7,299 is a higher probability than 1 in 340,733. Something is not right here.’
I can see why Vegas keeps cashing in...
Thanks fieldmarshaldj. "Doth protest too much" ping.
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Nice table! Civilization would end (depending on where it hit) if the impactor were a mile in diameter, and possibly a good bit less than that. It would take a while, but by the time starvation would kill most of the human race, most of it would have died of thirst because the 100 percent global overcast would cause the hydrologic cycle to slow to zero within days or weeks. By contrast, the Chicxullub impactor was six miles in D, which was six times in three dimensions of a 1 mile object (216 times).
There's a few nice vids, collected from dashboard cameras and such, of the Chelyabinsk (see the keyword) bolide of 2013. That wasn't all that large, and it detonated at 26 km altitude, AND it wasn't in the most densely populated area on Earth by any means -- yet thousands were hurt.
We had a Good Run.
Well, actually they ARE astronomical odds, they're just not all that high.
It won’t be a problem until about September 9.
A 40m ball with a density of 2 and a speed of 40kps has an energy equivalent of about 13 megatons of TNT. And then there’s a 70% chance it will hit in the ocean. We’ve done bigger H-bomb tests that this.
I can see the ICR news article now:
An asteroid came blazing out of the dark skies
at 0454 this morning over and crashed into the
Texas city of Beaumont, striking with the
intensity of a low yield nuclear weapon. Most
heavily damaged was the suburb of Wellspring.
ICR experts have determined that for an asteroid
to be steered so precisely as to hit a tiny pinpoint
on the surface of the planet, when there are uncountable
other sites that might have been hit, would require an
intelligence surpassing anything mortal and could
only have been a Act of God.
Astrophysicist Benjamin McLarkey told ICR that if
proof were needed that a deity was behind the
creation and control of the universe, this was it.
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