7 ms·
What can be done to increase the asteroid impact probability?
by lambdadelirium 2y ago
What can be done to increase the asteroid impact probability?
- gear54rus 2y ago[flagged]
- jakeinspace 2y agoDon't become the very thing you claim to hate!
- jdmoreira 2y agoWe can land on it, drill and plant nukes inside to shatter it
- chrsw 2y agoThat's not what they asked
- littlestymaar 2y agoIt would definitely increase impact probability though.
- chrsw 2y agoNot necessarily. See my new comment above. In addition, depending on how far out you do it, gravity will allow it to reform. And if it never reforms because you blew it to dust headed out to interstellar space you wont get an impact either. It's not at all a simple problem.
- ta1243 2y agoThat would create far more objects, many on the same rough direction, thus increasing the chance of an impact
- chrsw 2y agoOnly if you managed to leave the trajectory the same if it was already on a collision course or change the direction to a collision course. Do you think you can control that with a nuclear explosion? You probably don't know enough about to the system to make a high confidence prediction of the new outcome.
- echoangle 2y agoNot really, blowing it up is going to create a lot of fragments with slightly different orbits, and some are going to have practically the same as the whole Asteroid had before. So the chance of anything at all hitting earth will increase, but the parts will be smaller. It would be like a bullet turning into buckshot during flight.
- chrsw 2y agoIf we were talking about a projectile fired at relatively close range on the surface of the Earth I would agree with you. But we are talking about a very small object very far away with already only a 1% chance of impact. Buckshotting the object with a random explosion is unlikely to change the dynamics of system to point where you say with high confidence the chance of impact is much higher. Some fragments might hit but it's very difficult to predict.
- echoangle 2y agoAs long as some part of the asteroid keeps the old trajectory, the chance can only increase because you’re adding particles with slightly different trajectories.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pxmpxm 2y agoCan't tell why I'm hearing "I could stay awake just to hear you breathin" in my head when reading the above
- jdmoreira 2y agoSomeone finally got it! Congrats!
- vasco 2y agoGet a lot of people to jump at the same time to nudge us into the path.
- 2-3-7-43-1807 2y agothat's a beautiful idea. it will only work if we act together as one human race. this is the moment where we have to put political conflicts aside and commit collective suicide.
- skykooler 2y agoThis would move the Earth by less than the width of an atom: https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/
- devsda 2y agoSo, we all have to just skip for a while ? There's a Sci-Fi Plot in there somewhere: A hero tries to and succeeds in persuading govts to organize a planet scale skipping effort to get earth closer to a passing by rock and escape an impending disaster on earth.
- vardump 2y agoGP didn’t specify Earth.
- mherrmann 2y agoGod I love HN.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Timwi 2y agoWe're gonna need a bigger rock.
- Malcolmlisk 2y agoMonke, smash!!
- Trasmatta 2y agoAnd can we speed up the timeline? 2032 is too far away.
- chrisshroba 2y agoCan we also add mass to the asteroid?
- tungah 2y agoAnd speed
- Qem 2y agoWaiting. In general the probability increases as more data is gathered, and the error ellipse shrinks with the Earth still inside. Then is suddenly drops to zero in the overwhelming majority of cases, when the Earth finally gets out of this shrinking error ellipse.
- dguest 2y agoThe precision (of the observed trajectory) increases. If the probability increased in general we should recalibrate our probability estimates.
- halfmatthalfcat 2y agoBeen rooting for Asteroid/Meteor in the recent presidential elections.
- chrsw 2y agoThe best way I can think of is similar to what I heard from Jaron Lanier (he may not be the first person to explain this). Basically what you do is send something massive out there that will gravitationally tug it into a collision course with Earth. Obviously this will take quite a bit of time but if your calculations are correct it will pretty much guarantee impact.