Posted on 06/20/2002 8:43:49 AM PDT by cogitator
Asteroid 1950 DA is calculated as the highest probability of impact with the Earth for any near Earth asteroid to date: about one in 300. This will be in March 2800. If it hits, this is bad news. Very, very bad news, particularly if we haven't figured out how to destroy it first.
Yeah, but in ant terms it's like a light year.
Ah, but they were claiming we were running into the mainstream, and all of those satellite were in Great Jeopardy!!!!!
As it turned out, nothing really happened except that these so-called experts got to run off with full boodle-bags.
While there is a nugget of truth at the center of the asteroid scare, I'm an admitted cynic on things like this. Too many managers are susceptible to the wiles of gurus, and they'll chase them to this or that trend until it becomes obvious that another trend is more demanding of their attention.
And the "experts" seem to be comprised of smart guys who know both math and marketing.
Beg pardon..I thought that they were all Perfect A$$....s!
I'm not a gamblin' man but I'm willing to stake good money on Humankind's ingenuity prevailing over the next 798 years.
Despite the threat to satellites, I was hoping we were going to run into the mainstream too. Meteor storms are very rare and quite amazing to observers.
According to the astronomers that have studied the Leonids, there is a very narrow band of relatively thick particle concentration. The experts attempted to predict when the Earth would encounter that band, if it did. Because the band is in orbit around the Sun, it is subject to perturbation from gravity (i.e., Jupiter) and even the solar wind, because we are talking about very small particles. But the experts don't know exactly where the band is, and it can't be observed from Earth.
So we missed the center of the band. We apparently came close; the show I saw last November was the best heavy meteror shower I've ever seen, and my light conditions weren't good. But it wasn't a meteor storm. The estimated rate of Leonids during the 1966 storm was around 144,000 an hour. The best that observers saw last November was 1500- 2000 an hour.
This is one picture (a 10-minute exposure) of the '66 Leonids.
I'm not ignoring the possibility of asteroidal devastation, mind you. But having seen the specialist-driven hoo-raw about not one, but two Leonids meteor showers ("satellites will be destroyed!!!!"), I'm mighty cynical about guys like this.
Money spent looking out for asteroids, our potential doom, is better than spending $500 million on African AIDS cases.
And if we DO have such a device by then, we could simply transport the asteroids directly out of the path using the combined oomph of our mighty, mighty laundry transporters!
There are already such careers underway in Europe, especially England. They have, of course, failed to spot most of the asteroids that have whizzed by close until 3 days after the event.
In any case, spotting asteroids won't do any good at all unless there is a program to actually do something about such asteroids. That is the problem: there is no action plan. Put anti-asteroid hardware in space and don't wait until the last minute.
"Will these primitive savages want to take a chance that it's NOT an act of God, especially after "He" hits 'em with four of five big asteroids over a period of a few years in response to their outragously sinful and murderous ways? I doubt it. Don't mess with God".
Because this type of assinide comment does not help any thing and in fact does more harm than good.
These things happen far more than people realize, meteors explode in the atmosphere on a regular basis.
If you are not familiar with the Tunguska blast in 1908 you should realize that such an event would wipe out any major metropolitan area. And it would be assumed that it was a nuclear blast.
The evidence would not bear this out, but by then it would most likely be too late, some sort of retaliation would have taken place.
Unless you believe that a politician could resist the enormous pressure to retaliate. Who is retaliated against wouldn't be a matter of prime importance.
Why do we always get this type of thing sensationalized? Why would a piece of rock "explode" as opposed to simply burning furiously until impact, at which point it would be much smaller? Just wondering.
I am very familiar with it. However, I don't believe it would be mistaken for a nuclear attack to the point where retaliation would be in order. Monitoring of possible missile launches and incoming atmospheric anomalies such as a meteor is sufficient these days for us to determine exactly what hit us.
It depends mainly upon the composition of the rock.
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