/sci/ - Science & Math

I've heard we couldn't really do anything about it as far as blowing it up or anything but I heard we might able to alter the trajectory? Maybe I'm misremembering something I heard on Skeptic's Guide

>>5060471
Americans own the moon OP
I'll be having intergalactic house parties
Faggots like OP need not apply

>>5060480
On such short notice I doubt we could alter it's course.

Not OP; but what if all of humanity dedicated it's resources to building space ships and a sustainable space station on the moon, would it be feasable for humanity to survive with only one month of preparation time?

>>5060481
why am I a faggot?

>>5060488
Because you failed to point out the fallacy in my post.
The moon orbits the earth. If the earth was destroyed by a giant asteroid, the moon would have nothing to orbit around. It would be flung in a tangent trajectory either into the sun or into the cold outer reaches of space.
Seriously, why are you even on a science and math board.

>>5060471
There was a movie about this OP, I believe it was called "The Core in Space".

It had aerosmith and bruce willis.

>>5060507
No 17 mile asteroid would pulverize the earth. An asteroid the size of the moon might be able to do that. 17 miles will make earth "uninhabitable" due to dust in the air and everywhere, blocking out the sun. It would still be easier to live in an airtight space on earth than in an airtight space on the moon, though.

>>5060507
no I was ignoring "we gonna live on da moon now" as it's a dead rock and with a month prep time no one would even try that

also a 17 mile wide asteroid would not physically destroy the planet just fuck up the surface

>>5060515
but this is a serial thread

I do have a feeling we would just launch every nuke we have at it though

>>5060519
>>5060517
If the worst outcome is sullied air, I wouldn't mind underwater habitats. We Atlantis now

>>5060540
you gonna build self sustaining underwater facilities for 8 billion people in a month

mad contractor skills

>>5060575
>not saving just a few hundred

>>5060486
nope, one month is not nearly enough time

>>5060579
the real problem is no sun for who knows how many years

all the plants are going to die for sure this is a major problem for repopulating

the fuck is anyone going to eat after muh mre's
are gone

>>5060540
>>5060575
Doesnt even have to be underwater. Underground should already suffice, and be easier to construct.

>>5060595
>>5060595
oats and protein powder
i'll be the swolest person in my bunker

>>5060600
you could curl in the squat rack and it wouldn't even matter

>>5060604
blasphemy
for the squat rack is sacred

>>5060597

Doesn't even need to be underground. The problem with a meteor impact is crop death from reduced sunlight transmission in the post impact nuclear winter type environment.

1 month to meteor, do the following:

1. Identify every power plant on earth, especially nuclear ones, especially the ones away from the ocean coastline.
2. Provide as much fuel supply and experienced operators
3. Build electric light powered hydroponic setups in buildings around them.
2a. Stockpile as much food supply at the survival sites so that work crews can continue building hydroponic growops even after the meteor hits.
4. Select survival population size and type that your gear can support.
5. Maybe murder the rest of humanity so they don't try to take over the survival spots and ruin everything.

When the meteor hits, some survival sites will survive blast impact and the tsunamis if the meteor hits an ocean.

Those survivors wait out the nuclear winter type environment, eating their diet grown from electric lights powered by power plants, until conditions improve to the point where they can start crops outside.

Anywhere from a few hundred people to a few hundred thousand to maybe more than a million will survive to reboot humanity down the line.

>not realizing an actual asteroid is going to impact the Earth in a month and OP is some dumbfuck from the Pentagon trawling for ideas.

>>5060623
you're right.what was I thinking I'll do 5 sets of lunges and 5 sets of shrugs as penance

>>5060634
not realizing blowing my cover will result in a swat team "mistaking" your address for a drug king pin's

knock knock anon

it does sound like a solid plan though


so we don't lob nukes at it?

I don't get how something so insignificant could damage earth so much.

25 km wide vs the earth's 12,000 km wide. If I threw a grape at your head, even if it was really hard, nothing would happen.

>>5060652
Well, we could lob all our nukes at it, but then the asteriod would impact back onto earth and that postapocalyptic scenario would become a lot more zomby.

>>5060655
>>5060655
okay but consider a bullet

>>5060635
>>5060635
or just 3 sets of heavy deadlifts

>>5060655
are you going to throw this grape at like 70,000mph?

>>5060658
No, because the densities don't match up.

>>5060660
It wouldn't be that fast if the sizes were scaled down.

do you guys think we would try to bruce willis the damn thing?
if every nation/private corp that could into space sent enough teams don't you think we could manage to drill some nukes into it and set them off in sync

at least enough to break up the asteroid some to reduce it's damage?

>>5060674
ok to scale it's a rock and would be going as fast or faster than a bullet = me the dead

don't take my word for it ask the dinosaurs oh...

>>5060689
No, because a meteor won't go right through the earth. If it's a rock coming at me that quickly, I'd have to be made of rock and iron too - in which case, my entire surface area would definitely not be devastated.

>>5060689
>>5060689
i'd call it a dirt clod but it'd still cause death
if an asteroid of this magnitude hit the oceans wouldn't only coastal regions be affected
with no real lasting damage on the atmosphere?

we could just head to the mountains no?

>>5060681
well we'd do something

but our options would be really limited by time.

I mean how many space ships could we launch
right now? any american? 1 or 2 russian?

we only have a few ships but we've got a ass load of missiles and so does every other country. this seems like the best option to me

>>5060693
>>5060693
i don't think scaling things down to a grape and a person's head works as a model
since a bruise left by a frozen grape shot out by a potato gun modified to accept grapes wouldn't kill you, but the impact crater of a 17 mile asteroid some 80 miles across and would still fuck up most life on the planet

made up the 80 mile across crater size

>>5060693
How fast was the meteor that killed the dinosaurs?

Estimates on the nature of the meteor creating the Chicxulub crater indicate that it was a stony meteorite traveling about 10 to 70 km/sec and about 10 km in diameter.

>>5060533
That wasn't the point of the story. The point was that music and bruce willis saved earth.

>>5060471
Your entire premise is false.

We would have far, far more preparation time than a month if a 17 mile asteroid were heading for Earth and impact seemed likely.

The question of what to do about a large impactor (one large enough to cause widespread damage to a region or even trigger an extinction event) depends almost entirely on how soon before impact we discover it.

In likelihood, any impactor large enough to cause damage on a global scale is going to be seen years before its actually going to be a threat, decades even. This applies to pretty much anything larger than, say, a kilometer in diameter. It's pretty hard not to see objects this large coming from a long way off.

If we have a long enough time period the main objective is to alter the asteroid's trajectory - there are a variety of ways to accomplish this from attaching small ion engines to the asteroids surface, to using solar sails, to mass drivers, kinetic impactors, and even just parking a massive spacecraft in orbit around it. It doesn't take much to alter the course of an object away from an impact trajectory... provided you have several years or decades to work on it.


If the time before impact is only a matter of months, a much more rapid response will be necessary in order to counter the impact. This pretty much leaves the use of nuclear ordinance. If the time before impact is only a matter of days there's not a lot of options at that point besides evacuating people out of the impact zone. Usually the objects that we don't get much warning about are very small (tens of meters across) and while more than enough to wipe a city off the map, they're not enough to cause widespread damage. At present it is estimated that about 95% of all near-Earth asteroids larger than 1 km in diameter have been cataloged and their orbital trajectories for the near future plotted.


NASA came out with a report in 2010 I believe which described, in detail, strategies for identifying, tracking, and preventing impacts from Near-Earth Objects, you might want to take a look at it if you can find it.