[Herra Tohtori]

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...

[vadar_1]

What if the moon is in the way of this asteoid...?

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*

[Mr. Vega]

Aw. If you're gonna disappear, then at least change Kal's avatar again

[Mobius]

Use Inferno Icanus....

Or Steadfast Terra since it's the only one you can see fighting for now

[Nuke]

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.

[Bobboau]

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.

[Rictor]

Also known as the Simpsons-Chihauha Law.

[WeatherOp]

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.

[Bobboau]

I think more smaller blasts would not be worse than fewer larger ons

[neo_hermes]

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 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.

[Bobboau]

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.

[Nuke]

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.

[Black Wolf]

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.

[Shade]

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.

[neoterran]

I watched an entire special on this, and basically nukes would be useless. Too lazy to pontificate about it here tho.

[Mobius]

Just die, like my poor Dinosaurs. Another Species will dominate the world.

[Quest_techie]

I could go for a little apocalypse

massive numbers of people heading for the midwest would make hitchhiking WAY easier

[Bob-san]

I was hoping we could actually change its cource so that it collides with the moon!  I'm always up for a nice lightshow...  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?

[WeatherOp]

I was hoping we could actually change its cource so that it collides with the moon!  I'm always up for a nice lightshow...  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.

[Bob-san]

As long as it isn't blue cheese... I hate blue cheese!!!!!!!!