Modding is a process
by asteroid or comet?
Published on July 26, 2009 By Zyxpsilon In Everything Else

15 years ago, Shoemaker-Levy rifled up a series of comet debris into the gas giant.

Well, seems like it took an amateur astronomer from Australia by the name of Anthony Wesley to tip Nasa or other professionals on July 19th to aim their telescopes at the event.

Earth would have been slammed to oblivion, btw.

Here's the Hubble "report"!

Nobody was able to detect the object BEFORE such an impact, this time.


Comments (Page 3)
4 Pages1 2 3 4 
on Jul 28, 2009

pseudomelon
You'd be surprised what a few hundred million dollars could do for several humanitarian efforts.

What good is ANY humanitarian efforts (until or inbetween, as a result of perpetual_consequential neglect justifiable or otherwise) if there would be absolutely nobody left, eventually?

yep, invest now; right in third world development, for cash, for profits, for rice & wheat, for pollution & industry, for guns & automobiles, for castles & ghettos, for politics & economics, for water & oil.

Kaboom, over.

So here's your balance sheet; 6 billions and counting, for wealth OR poverty. Still a zero sum result.

on Jul 28, 2009

Worry about the devil you know rather than the devil you don't.  (Not the correct usage of the idiom, but let it slide )  I'm not entirely convinced that we can do anything if there is something coming for us.  Put rockets on it?  Safely landing something on the space object, let alone getting it set up correctly to push it, sounds awefully difficult.  Blowing it up assumes that it's small enough to blow up, and that the chunks won't be just as bad.  But like I said in my first post in this thread, I am far from well versed in this area.

Would I rather put efforts into bettering the lives of people today than try to defend against something that in all likelihood will never happen in our lifetimes and we might not even be able to do anything about?  Absolutely.

on Jul 28, 2009

How to.

on Jul 28, 2009

Scoutdog
Well, there are several things we could do, most of them involve detonating things on or near the rock to knock it away from us, or putting some sort of an all-thruster robobtic device on it, that then pushes it away. It only takes a slight varience in direction or speed to make something miss us entirely.

Both were dismissed years ago for not making a dent in orbital gravity pulls extended by Earth & more importantly, the Sun.

Asteroids & Comets are drawn towards the surface, not simply flying by.

1/6250 is an EXTREMELY high odd, btw. Considering the diameter of Earth, it's 300kms worth of a rocky hyper-velocity bullet either hitting dead smack in the equatorial middle or skimming the atmosphere, in which case a Tungunska type explosion or any amounts of shrapnel (how many 5kms roaming around?) plummeting anywhere.

It's 11:55, and you've got five minutes.

I tend to agree, we're that stupid with some statistical truth or facts -- about Jupiter or not.

 

 

on Jul 28, 2009

Primal Zed
Worry about the devil you know rather than the devil you don't.  (Not the correct usage of the idiom, but let it slide )  I'm not entirely convinced that we can do anything if there is something coming for us.  Put rockets on it?  Safely landing something on the space object, let alone getting it set up correctly to push it, sounds awefully difficult.  Blowing it up assumes that it's small enough to blow up, and that the chunks won't be just as bad.  But like I said in my first post in this thread, I am far from well versed in this area.

Would I rather put efforts into bettering the lives of people today than try to defend against something that in all likelihood will never happen in our lifetimes and we might not even be able to do anything about?  Absolutely.

Well after NASA landed a prob on Asteroid Eros in 2001 i think we more then proved that would could reach these objects, and even put craft on, or in orbit of them. This alone is enough ( at lest for me ) to prove that we can change the flight plan of these rocks. So we already have the know how, and as far as money be concerned well its minor when compared to all that needless spending going around.

on Jul 28, 2009

Would I rather put efforts into bettering the lives of people today than try to defend against something that in all likelihood will never happen in our lifetimes and we might not even be able to do anything about? Absolutely.

That is the type of thinking people use to convince themselves they don't need insurance. Maybe 1 in 10,000 houses burn down in any given year, so why waste money on insurance against an event that probably won't happen to me? There are better things to spend that money on, right?

Besides, the point of finding these things NOW is to give us time to do something if it ever becomes necessary. It is much better to find the big ass rock with our name on it now, when it won't hit us for several years rather than waiting and having some amateur astronomer find it 2 weeks before it hits the pasific and makes the Indonesian tsunami look like a minor splash. The energy needed to prevent an hit is inversely proportional to the time before impact, and finding it early gives us time to build a rocket to do something about it

on Jul 28, 2009

tazgecko: I don't know if it's just me, but your picture doesn't show on my computer.  Lemme try a diff browser (I been havin trouble with Chrome formatting poorly on this site since I installed it on my new PC.  Any suggestions?)

others: Like I said in a previous post, it depends on who's price quote is closer to the truth.  Without all the information on what we can do, how much it costs, and how much money there is to spend, I can't come to a fair conclusion on how much should be invested.  I think some of my posts are almost knee-jerk to the OP's antagonistic, accusatory, and/or fear-mongering posts.

on Jul 29, 2009

tazgecko, all it took was a miscalculated reset in the trajectory BY gravity to not only spin the bullet outa control but also to deviate it enough so that it remains in OUR orbital grasp.

No computational power can negate Earth's location or weight.

on Jul 29, 2009

...and/or fear-mongering posts.

Better to be aware of the dangers than to sit on our hands doin' nothing about it.

on Jul 29, 2009

Do you wear a helmet all the time in case something falls on your head, too?  (I wonder how the odds compare to doomsday asteroids)

on Jul 29, 2009

WIllythemailboy
...time to do something if it ever becomes necessary.

We simply can't knock it off *precisely* enough to eliminate the probabilities (yes, that's much more than one outcome).

Right now, time is estimated as a lucky glimpse in someone's amateurish tiny backyard telescope doing a gambler shot at a theoretical quest for a planet mass-destruction device comin' from space.

Necessary? Pffftttt. No contest, we'd have a launch.

on Jul 29, 2009

Its a vid from you tube Primal ?

Must be chrome , firefox is ok

 

on Jul 29, 2009

well i'm using IE7 righ tnow.  It looks like just a blank picture - that is, there is an empty box and in the upper left corner is the lil picture icon thing with a square, a triangle, and a circle.

on Jul 29, 2009

Do you wear a helmet all the time in case something falls on your head, too?

Nope, only when i sat on a motorcycle... but i've played football a few times in High-school too. I intercepted passes and ran down fields to score touch-downs instead of throwing grenades at targets or using semi-automatic rifles to shoot down a black dot 600 yards away.

Practicing is simple balastics. Although, locking up clearly in combat is scary unless cloaked in a triple amphibious water_air_ground gimmick anyone must fear.

Look it's a UFO. Yeah, well. A blip on radars. Helmet free or not.

Back on topic?

Pray, space is vast.

on Jul 29, 2009

Must be flash

The link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPS-m_sI7_k&feature=SeriesPlayList&p=E720893BF835B588&index=4

Its just a short from a bbc documentary on how you could deflect an asteroid.

 

4 Pages1 2 3 4