Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Rictor on December 24, 2006, 04:35:44 pm
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2517816,00.html
NASA is drawing up a shortlist of ideas to be unveiled early next year for diverting a 40m-ton asteroid that is on course to pass dangerously close to Earth.
The schemes will be presented and discussed at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fears that the planet may be in danger from asteroids were heightened by the discovery of one orbiting the sun that, on its present path, will pass within 22,000 miles — a hair’s breadth in astronomical terms — in April 2029.
Nasa’s idea is to engineer a minor shift in its trajectory that would make the asteroid miss Earth by a wider margin on this and all subsequent passes. Under one possible plan, a robotic craft would be sent to the asteroid to attempt to alter its course. One option might be to install a propulsion system on the surface to nudge it onto a new course.
The studies follow the discovery of hundreds of small asteroids orbiting the sun that repeatedly cross Earth’s orbit, raising the possibility of a devastating collision. The one causing most concern is a rock of more than 1,000ft called Apophis, the Greek name for the Egyptian god Apep, known as “the Destroyer”. It will come so close that it will pass under many satellites and may destroy some.
Quick, get Bruce Willis and Ben Afleck on the phone! And Robert Duval too. Maybe if we sacrfice them to the gods, they will be appeased and spare our wretched planet.
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22.000 miles. That's close. Should make for a nice spectacle in the sky if it passes at night, if nothing else when it starts clearing out any satellites that get in its way. Definitely gonna grab a telescope and camp out in some dark place for the night if it passes at the right time and is above the horizon :)
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For comparison: the Earth's average distance from the Moon is 385,000 kilometers, or 239,227.909 miles (all hail Google!). That asteroid will be super close.
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Holy ****. Solution: "The use of nuclear weapons is now authorized." -William Adama
Seriously, though. Jesus. That's kinda scary. I vote instead of altering the asteroid's course, we slow down Earth's orbit. =D
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That asteroid will be super close.
Yep. Geosynchronous orbit is about 35.700km, so it's actually right about there unless my conversions are off. Which should get interesting, I bet there will be more than a few geo-sync satellite operators biting their nails while that thing flies by.
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Thats good news, now the american and russian governments can actually have a chance to use all those nuclear missiles they built, its not like they would be ever used for anything else. ;)
If its passing that close wouldnt it be caught by Earth's gravity? Then wouldnt it either stay on the orbit or crash into us?
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Quick, get Bruce Willis and Ben Afleck on the phone! And Robert Duval too. Maybe if we sacrfice them to the gods, they will be appeased and spare our wretched planet.
screw them we need O'Neil, Carter, Jackson, and Teal'c, I mean how many times have they killed him already.
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At that distance, the orbit will definitely be altered by Earth's gravity, but to be caught it'd have to be moving slower than geo-sync satellites. As it is, it's moving faster than the escape velocity for Earth (just checked), so it'll pass us and keep going. The chance of its orbit being altered in such a way that it would hit us later would be very small, as it's just too small a window given how much difference even the minutest deflection now will make over the course of several years.
[Edit] Would have been cool though, if it was caught by Earth's gravity. Suddenly having two moons would definitely be something, satellite chaos nonwithstanding :)
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i guess your talking about that asteroid that will come by here in 2012. ive got no worries i trust what americans say, it should be interesting :P.
that asteroid will be coming by earth again in the year 3000 after its passed by earth in a few years time, a combined effort from ukraine, russia, scotland and usa to launch thier aging nukes.. finally a world where nukes will be a thing of the past, well except korea (cant remember witch side) and iran.
atleast thats what i remember from 1998.
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You know, it says which asteroid and when it will pass us right there in the quote in the first post. Apophis, April 2029. As for the rest... whatever. Not worth the effort.
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At that distance, the orbit will definitely be altered by Earth's gravity, but to be caught it'd have to be moving slower than geo-sync satellites. As it is, it's moving faster than the escape velocity for Earth (just checked), so it'll pass us and keep going. The chance of its orbit being altered in such a way that it would hit us later would be very small, as it's just too small a window given how much difference even the minutest deflection now will make over the course of several years.
[Edit] Would have been cool though, if it was caught by Earth's gravity. Suddenly having two moons would definitely be something, satellite chaos nonwithstanding :)
i doubt earth has any capture potential. that thing most likesly follows a comet like orbit. meaning it will be going hella fast, without an actual means to slow down, save perhaps auto-aireobraking in our atmoshphere as it passes theres no way it would end up staying for any period of time, more likely it will be accelerated by earths gravity and slingshotted away, changin it orbit drasticly enough so we dont have to deal with it ever again. still if it hits us, cool, if it dont, cool,if nasa blows it up, cool. i dont see any way it can go wrong :D
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Heh. I vote they try to capture the thing. You want a sure-fire way to make earth-orbit interesting and profitable, place that puppy in GSO.
Not that I think for one minute NASA has either the cojones or the capability to perform such a braking maneuver, but gosh that would be cool. An extra moon, a source of raw materials with an escape velocity of virtually zero, and a radiation shielded platform upon which to construct a real space station. Buy yours today! Operators are standing by...
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Yea, and while we're at it, let's **** up the Earth's seasons, climates, and tide effects due to the increased gravitational pull :rolleyes:
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not sure if a small asteroid has much gravitational pull, try orbiting phobos in orbiter, it has so little gravity you need to use your rcs thrusters :D
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What if the moon is in the way of this asteoid...? :nervous:
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then were in deep dark brown pool of excrement, with a nice aroma :D.
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No, I've got it! We should just hitch a ride on it. It's a free, fast natural spacecraft. We send up a team when it's close, they latch on and just wait until it gets close to Mars or some other planet, and then they get of. We could even send up a mutliple team or probes, one for each planet the asteroid is likely to get close to.
Not only would we be cheating death, we would also be cheating the universe. How's that for chutzpah. As for the asteroid hitting us, I'm not too worried.
Even if NASA does nothing, or their plan fails, you gotta believe the Russians have a nice, fat nuke ready and waiting to greet it. I imagine whoever happens to be the President of Russia at the time getting really drunk and yelling up at the sky "Come on motherfuker, we'll take you! You wanna dance? Let's dance. We got enough nukes to blow up the sun! You don't **** with the Motherland and live to tell about it, ****ing rock!"
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umm typical sterotypical attidtude about russia.
now-a-days its politics on a secret level inside the kremlin. the bbc did a inside view of the kremlin and how politics work.
its much different compared to the western world, i think russia would launch a nuke anyway, not only protect its people but to have a better image in the eyes of the world, instead of this 'motherland russia'.
besides dont mafia bosses say these lines 'you wanna dance? lets dance'? :nervous:
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I think it was a joke Centrixo :p
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Nuke's right. Lunar tides are caused by 7.3477×1022 kg orbiting around us. Apophis only has a mass of 5×1010 kg. In other words, the thing is 12 orders of magnitude smaller than the Moon. I wouldn't worry about messing up the tide or seasons. In fact, I seriously doubt it would even be (readily) visible from the ground. It'd be like Sirius or one of the planets. You can usually see them if they are in right part of the sky, but you kind of need to already know where to look.
Anyway, 'tis just a thought experiment. I wanted to go "up" since before I learned how to read. One of the biggest obstacles to real development in space is that once you get out of LEO, you have essentially no protection from radiation. It's too expensive to lift the material and equipment needed for "conventional" radiation shielding (i.e., put something thick and dense between yourself and the radiation source), and we don't have any promising leads on a more lightweight "active" protection system (read: forcefields). So, my pitch is that the cheapest way to protect people from radiation in space is to use protection that's already up there to begin with. Capture an asteroid.
Now. Any bright ideas on how to do that? Deflecting an asteroid off its current trajectory is hard enough. hmm... it might be smarter to move it into a lunar orbit instead. At least there if you screw up, you are less likely to, ya-know, end civilization and whatnot. Seriously though. If you wanted to capture an asteroid, how would you do it?
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I'd imagine actually intercepting the thing would be relatively easy, landing too (unless it's rotating on more than one axis). Once there they could probably attach some kinda thruster.
However. The amount of thrust needed to significantly alter its flight path would probably be...a lot. And the amount of fuel to provide that thrust would probably be prohibitive. Probably.
Anyway, assuming this thing did hit (land, sea....the moon) what kinda damage are we talking about?
If anyone feels like quoting Billy Bob Thornton.....um, don't?
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They should nuke it just to see if they can.
Just totally cluster-**** it with everything they've got. Sure, it'd rape all our electronics, but it'd make a pretty show....
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They should nuke it just to see if they can.
Just totally cluster-**** it with everything they've got. Sure, it'd rape all our electronics, but it'd make a pretty show....
10k 1000 megaton nukes in close earth orbit == ****ing lightshow maaaan ;)
nut a comet as raw materials? it is a bloddy snowball, nothing but ice there afaik.
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We'll just land on it, drill several holes deep inside it, and lo- no, wait, that's been done. How about we open a giant hyperspace wind- no, that's been done too. Why don't we mount laserbeams on three different aircraft and have them focus their firepo- dang it! Oh, I give up. Extinction ftw.
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Ashrak's idea is good. Just launch the nukes at 11:59 PM of next sunday and... Happy New Year! :lol:
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Even if NASA does nothing, or their plan fails, you gotta believe the Russians have a nice, fat nuke ready and waiting to greet it./i]
You do realise that when there's a nuclear detonation that destroys Apophis and the Russians admit to doing it to save the Earth it's just a cover to hide the fact that it slammed into one of the several thousand geosynch nuclear armed satellites up there from the Cold War that would make Thatcher and Reagan piss their pants.
...and by having a press release about the plan to divert threatening asteroids some 20 years before hand it'll seem legit.
Of course since the nukes are aging there's the chance nothing will happen, but all bases must be covered.
Ace sits back as he only has a few months to live as Polonium powder is surely but slowly added to his food, water, and keyboard.
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why don't we just repeat the bruce willis film except we instead send a bunch of the drunkest folks we can find...we'll have to look in ireland...or australia..
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well if i wanted to turn an astroid into a space craft. id land a robotic probe or perhaps even a manned spacecraft on it and attach banks of ion thrusters. youd also need a way to steer, a reaction control system, this may be based on chemical or ion trusters. or you could use inertia wheels or gyros like the hubble, those wouldnt use fuel but power. if we want it manned we would need to burro into it and hollow out a control center, depending on the integrety of the material, if its pourous youd need to seal the interior probibly coat it with plastics to prevent pressure loss, life support equipment, computers, fuel tanks, a bar could then all be installed.
operation would be kinda akward for an astronaught. the asteroid might have a funky center of gravity youd need to use asymetrical thrust to compensate. thruster re-orientations (turns) could take days, and you still have to overcome gravitational torque effects (and considering the size of the rock could take considerable energy to merely compensate for this, let alone manuver). it might be more aeffective to have ion thruster arrays pointing in all directions to provide thrust along multiple axes. the rock's rcs thrusters would attempt to maintain a solid stellar alignment, you have engines pointing everywhere, so a compuiter would calculate the position of every engine, toe position of cg and create a burn solution to create thrust along any vector, witout rotating the engines. sorta like the way a borg cube manuvers.
an astroid of considerable size and composition could even yeilt enough space to have massive zero g factories within them. not only could mining operations be undertaken on the asteroid, but the astroid could also bea mobile factory which would find asteroids of value, intercept them, mine them, antd process ore onboard. it would probibly work best in gather/process cycles, after mining a considerable haul of ore, you would reposition closer to the sun to power factory equipment. other than industrial production, they could also have a section for agricultural development comets and ice dwarves could be mined of water. bacteria could be introduced to steryl space dust to render soil. after suffietient material was gathered from deep space, the ship could get in close to the sun for growing season. sence you can maniver closer or further from the sun you can percisly control growing conditions and produce considerable crop yeild. you could turn a rock like eros into a trhiving spaceborn metropolis, completely self-suffieteint in every way, cept maybe after awhile everyone would be mutated and wierd. :D
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Am I the only one thinking that all the SG-1 fans are pissed off that it's not called Anubis instead?
Or that it's not been hollowed out and filled with naquadah :D
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Well, we don't know about that last part yet. There may yet be hope :p
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can i go up and fly it into the earth :D
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Am I the only one thinking that all the SG-1 fans are pissed off that it's not called Anubis instead?
Call the asteroid Ulysses so you satisfy Ace Combat Fans. Also,build something like Stonehenge to destroy it.
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Quick, get Bruce Willis and Ben Afleck on the phone! And Robert Duval too. Maybe if we sacrfice them to the gods, they will be appeased and spare our wretched planet.
screw them we need O'Neil, Carter, Jackson, and Teal'c, I mean how many times have they killed him already.
:lol:
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@ Nuke.
[thinking...] You know, that might actually work. You'd need a whole lot of noble gas for the ion thrusters, though. At first, I was thinking that the specific impulse of those things would be so small that it couldn't work, but thing is, you can keep them running for years on end so long as you can keep them supplied with reaction mass. Over those times scales, the change in momentum might be enough after all. I wonder if there's anything on Apophis itself that could be used in that capacity? Can ion thrusters be run of something other than xenon, neon, or other noble gases?
Not so sure about gyros, though. I mean, yeah, you could, I guess, but ye gads, those things would have to be spinning fast to make a dent on the spin of something that big. I think you'd be better off using ion (or other electric) drives for torque to stabilize the thing first, and then use gyros to keep it stable. Even in microgravity vacuum, there are material limits to how much RPM our bearings can handle!
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Here is how we do it...
We pump all kinds of mess into the atmosphere, making Global Warming so insanely strong it creates a Super Hurricane that blow it back into space. Ofcourse the only drawback is the we die in the process, but dang wouldn't it look cool. :D :p
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I vote for an orbital ping-pong bat with a 25km diameter :D
And maybe some guy down in NASA with an Atari 2600 Paddle controller :nervous:
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Well, we don't know about that last part yet. There may yet be hope :p
If it is then nuking it would be a REALLY bad idea.
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Just beam-free-all that Deimos the CIA has hidden in orbit.
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Am I the only one thinking that all the SG-1 fans are pissed off that it's not called Anubis instead?
Or that it's not been hollowed out and filled with naquadah :D
Exactly, what I had in mind...words "Apophis" and "Asteroid" just matched.
:lol:
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Nuking large objects in space is useless. All it would do is turn a giant bullet into a giant scattershot shotgun blast. Same effect on earth.
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Nuking large objects in space is useless. All it would do is turn a giant bullet into a giant scattershot shotgun blast. Same effect on earth.
...not really.
When you crack an asteroid to small pieces you dramatically increase the amount of surface exposed to atmospheric heating. This equalt to more of the asteroid vaporized during entry, which causes less of the asteroid to actually impact the surface, and as it's the surface impact that causes most of the damage (although atmospheric explosions à la Tunguska can also do significant amount of damage), shattering an asteroid early enough could very well be rather helpful.
In short words - a one cubic kilometre asteroid would plunge through the atmosphere with great ease, impact the surface and wreack havoc on at least one hemisphere (guesstimate), but one trillion stones of one cubic metre would all burn in the atmosphere, provided that they were spread to big enough area.
Physically, the impulse would be the same and energy released would be the same, but distributed on wider area and in longer time. It's not the energy that kills but the time in which it is released.
Shotgun is only effective at short range compared to a rifle...
Anyway, even at worst-case scenario... 880 megatons is not that bad globally... Well, it's about four times the Krakatoa explosion, but the effects of impact would be greatly related to where it would hit.
Meh, it's gonna be cool whatever happens. The way I see it, I'm going to survive my life whatever I do. Until I die. Which will eventually happen even without asteroids impacting the planet, so... what gives. AT least that'll be a kick ass way to plunge the world to post-apocalyptic nomadic tribal culture where survivors try to live in frozen cities, crawling with man-eating, infectous zombies and other nice phenomena...
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What if the moon is in the way of this asteoid...? :nervous:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d6/2004mn4d4_s.gif)
The caption reads "The small white bar indicates uncertainty in the range of possible positions."
So its going to miss the moon by a wider margin then whats its going to miss us by, but not by much.
Who really cares about the moon anyways.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis
*goes back into hiding*
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Aw. If you're gonna disappear, then at least change Kal's avatar again :p
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Use Inferno Icanus....
Or Steadfast Terra since it's the only one you can see fighting for now :D
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Nuking large objects in space is useless. All it would do is turn a giant bullet into a giant scattershot shotgun blast. Same effect on earth.
...not really.
When you crack an asteroid to small pieces you dramatically increase the amount of surface exposed to atmospheric heating. This equalt to more of the asteroid vaporized during entry, which causes less of the asteroid to actually impact the surface, and as it's the surface impact that causes most of the damage (although atmospheric explosions à la Tunguska can also do significant amount of damage), shattering an asteroid early enough could very well be rather helpful.
In short words - a one cubic kilometre asteroid would plunge through the atmosphere with great ease, impact the surface and wreack havoc on at least one hemisphere (guesstimate), but one trillion stones of one cubic metre would all burn in the atmosphere, provided that they were spread to big enough area.
Physically, the impulse would be the same and energy released would be the same, but distributed on wider area and in longer time. It's not the energy that kills but the time in which it is released.
Shotgun is only effective at short range compared to a rifle...
Anyway, even at worst-case scenario... 880 megatons is not that bad globally... Well, it's about four times the Krakatoa explosion, but the effects of impact would be greatly related to where it would hit.
Meh, it's gonna be cool whatever happens. The way I see it, I'm going to survive my life whatever I do. Until I die. Which will eventually happen even without asteroids impacting the planet, so... what gives. AT least that'll be a kick ass way to plunge the world to post-apocalyptic nomadic tribal culture where survivors try to live in frozen cities, crawling with man-eating, infectous zombies and other nice phenomena...
yes but your forgetting that if you nuke the asteroid into all those little pieces, they will all be irradiated and would produce considerable radioactive fallout when they burn up in the atmosphere. still its probibly better than having most of the planet's surface blasted away.
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if you have a lot of little peices they will have more surface area and smaller indevidual mass, if you do a good enough job of smashing it up and spreading it out it'll burn up in the atmosphere.
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Also known as the Simpsons-Chihauha Law.
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if you have a lot of little peices they will have more surface area and smaller indevidual mass, if you do a good enough job of smashing it up and spreading it out it'll burn up in the atmosphere.
From what I read about in PM magazine, the rock itself is 800-900 feet, it *if it hits the gravitational keyhole it is projected to hit somewhere in the eastern Pacific. So, at impact you would create a huge crater, generate some pretty good sized Tsunamis, and be one heck of a lightshow. It would most likely kill a few million or so people, but most likely lower due to a huge amount of evac time.
But, if you do not detonate it correctly, you might have 5-7 chucks of rock about 100 or so feet, that on impact will create a mile wide or so crater, and create a blast wave similar to a low to mid sized nuclear bomb.
So the question is one big blast in the ocean worse than multiple blasts, where some will hit land and possibly major cites, all with no time to evac.
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I think more smaller blasts would not be worse than fewer larger ons
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i was thinking of something odd....OK. If Apophis does just happen to get caught by the earth's gravity while it was attempting a slingshot maneuver around earth.(it absorbs alot of the satellites causing it to slowly lose speed) Now if it's speed was lowered significantly by the Multiple scored hits from the staellites. could it possibly add it's minor amount of gravitational force to that of the moon and lower the tides even further. so that when the Ice caps Do rise they won't rise as high as we would have expected? sry for the very long run-on hastily done sentence just had to get this outta my mind before i fall into a medicated stupor.
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no. gravity is weak.
a spec of foil that is any man made satalite won't phase a 400 meter long rock moving at interplanetary velocities, in fact a 400 meter long rock like this has for all practical purposes no gravity at least as far as us people on the surface of the earth are concerned, so even if it did crash into the moon or start orbiting, you'd never know.
in fact, if there were a rock 100,000 times as big it probably wouldn't have a decernable effect on the earth.
and more mass would cause higher tides.
and the tides have nothing to do with rising ocean levels from melting icecaps.
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this might be a far fetched idea but i wonder if anyones considered trying to strap thrusters on this thing and rather than try to push it away, decelerate it at the right time so that it gets captured by earths gravity. then you can send manned missions to do research on the rock. potentially investigate the potential for mining it. why waste an oppritunity like this when we can use it to learn a few things. if the rock becomes bothersome we can attach another engine and send it on its way.
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Terrible idea. First off, the risk is enormous. What if they screwed up? It's come crashing down to earth, which is exactly what we want to avoid. Moreover, even if they didn't screw it up, getting something that big into a stable orbit that doesn't collide with anything else would be a miracle, since it'd more or less have to be on that orbit when it got to us, since even nudging that kind of mass would be difficult. Finally, there's almost certainly no point. There's not a lot to study in asteroids (We know what they're made of geologically from meteorites), and mining, well, there's only something like a 1% chance that this would be a metallic asteroid - silly bet to make w2hne you're gambling with (potentially) the lives of millions.
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And there's the fact that the mere act of slowing it down over the course of several years until it's moving at less than Earth's escape velocity would make it miss us by millions of kilometres instead of the 35.000ish we're looking at now.
Best case scenario it might be possible to put it into an orbit that would intersect ours at about the right speed some hundreds or even thousands of years in the future, and I suspect that by that time we really wouldn't care about some silly little insignificant asteroid, as we'd either be far enough advanced that managing asteroids is nothing out of the ordinary, or we'd be dead.
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I watched an entire special on this, and basically nukes would be useless. Too lazy to pontificate about it here tho.
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Just die, like my poor Dinosaurs. Another Species will dominate the world.
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I could go for a little apocalypse
massive numbers of people heading for the midwest would make hitchhiking WAY easier
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I was hoping we could actually change its cource so that it collides with the moon! ;7 I'm always up for a nice lightshow... :lol: and that's why the moon is there! I say we change its cource and make a new Sea of Tranquility! ;) how does that sound?
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I was hoping we could actually change its cource so that it collides with the moon! ;7 I'm always up for a nice lightshow... :lol: and that's why the moon is there! I say we change its cource and make a new Sea of Tranquility! ;) how does that sound?
Good idea, maybe it rain cheese down upon us. :D
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As long as it isn't blue cheese... I hate blue cheese!!!!!!!! :lol: