Might I suggest something else...
Posted on 08/29/2002 5:47:34 AM PDT by Loyalist
Hollywood dispatched Bruce Willis and an arsenal of nuclear bombs, but the simplest way to save Earth from a monster asteroid may be to inflate a giant air bag and nudge the killer rock out of the way, an American scientist says.
Dr. Hermann Burchard suggests an air pillow as much as a few kilometres wide, inflated in space and steered by a spacecraft, could apply enough pressure to push an asteroid or comet out of Earth's path and prevent mass death and destruction.
Experts have lately been warning that a cataclysmic collision by cosmic debris, obliterating a whole continent or the whole of civilization, is anything but far-fetched.
Setting off a nuclear blast on such an object, as portrayed in the Willis film Armageddon, could result in the comet or asteroid breaking into smaller pieces, but staying on its crash course toward Earth. The massive space cushion would avoid that pitfall by softly shoving the projectile, said Dr. Burchard, whose suggestion is featured in the latest edition of New Scientist magazine.
"Then all you need is to take enough fuel along. You push it very gently. You don't want to push too hard because comets are very loose conglomerations of pristine matter," the professor at Oklahoma State University said in an interview.
"Bring enough fuel and you can push anything out of the way."
Dr. Burchard is a mathematician, but has an avid interest in asteroids and how to shield earth from them.
He said the air bag would have to be made from sturdy but light material -- perhaps Mylar -- that could be easily carried into space, then inflated by touching off some kind of chemical reaction.
It's a serious matter, said Dr. Burchard.
"There is a very, very realistic threat to humanity and nations should constitute some of or other national agency to set up a defence mechanism."
Canadian Dave Balam, one of the world's lead trackers of dangerous asteroids and comets, said Dr. Burchard's idea is not the first outlandish-sounding proposal for deflecting an incoming space object. Some of the ideas seem to make a great deal of sense on close examination, he said.
One suggestion is to attach a giant solar sail -- something like a "20 square-kilometre bubble-gum wrapper" -- that would use the wind created by high-energy particles emitted by the sun to shift the asteroid, said Mr. Balam, an astronomer at the University of Victoria. Other suggestions have been to attach some sort of engine that could do the same thing.
But any method for deflecting an asteroid would take time and require as much as 10 years advance warning of an object headed for Earth.
A worldwide project to identify potentially hazardous asteroids -- the thousands of objects that are 200 metres or more wide and could cross paths with Earth -- has probably identified 15% to 20% of them. The rest could be anywhere.
The most likely scenario, therefore, is that an unidentified asteroid would show up on the radar screen with hours warning -- not years, meaning little could be done to stop it, said Mr. Balam.
"This amounts to a sort of celestial sucker punch," he said.
Asteroids a kilometre-wide could cause catastrophic damage and create years of nuclear winter for a continent. Giant, 10-kilometre-wide rocks, like one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, would "sterilize" the planet, said Mr. Balam.
Everything considered, the chances of being killed by an asteroid are considered to be about one in 12,000, compared to the one in 10,000 possibility of being killed in an airline crash, he said.
© Copyright 2002 National Post
From the title, I thought this might be a story about Al Sharpton.
Sounds like the pledge class in a sorority.
World pop. = six billion. Divided by 10,000 = 600,000, divided by avg. life expectancy (let's say 60 years) = 10,000. Are there really 10,000 people killed in airline crashes every year?
And how do they figure the chances of being killed by an asteroid - when nobody in recorded history has ever been killed by one?
Basically, they calculate the number of asteroid impacts relative to the age of the Earth.
As for the 1 in 12,000 figure: what it doesn't say is that it's an all-or-nothing issue. No asteroid impact: no deaths. 1 large asteroid impact: over six billion (or, as the late Dr. Carl Sagan would say, "six BILLL-YUN") deaths.
It's like smoking a cigar in a fireworks shop. If nothing goes wrong, you're fine. If something does go wrong, you're hosed.
Might I suggest something else...
Bullsh*t on both counts. I'm guessing the odds for being killed in an air crash are significantly higher than that (although I don't have the data in front of me) - As for being killed by asteroids, I would dare him to name a single person, ever who was killed by an asteroid. (Maybe he was confused, and thought they meant hemmorhoids.)
However, I think the key is to understand how many known AAA earth-crossing asteroids (so called because they fall into three orbital types, each type epitomized by a specific asteroid--Apollo, Aten, or Amor) there are, how many come too damn close for comfort, and how long you keep rolling the dice.
Spin the cylinder and pull the trigger enough times, and the odds of you blowing your brains out approach 100%.
I can just imagine, if this was done, years in the future in some unknown galaxy, a resident intelligent being looking up in the sky and seeing this comet with a sail go floating by and saying “what the F*** is that and where in the H*** did it come from?” ;-)
< nitpick >
Common fallacy of probability. What are the odds of getting "heads" when you've just flipped 100 "tails"? The same as when you first started: 1:1
< /nitpick >
;^)
Not when it is expressed across N tries, as it was in my example. The odds get close to 100% when you have six tries.
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