Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/04/asteroid-discovered-just-befor.html
…
5 Likes
A few hours? That’s plenty of time to send Bruce Willis up there with a few nukes. You alarmists would just hate it if we got a good night’s sleep.
12 Likes
5 Likes
Nah that was an alien space ship. Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker wrote a documentary about it.
5 Likes
4 Likes
A sign of just how far we have to go to be safe from asteroid impacts - this is hitting the news because nobody’s detected something before it hits us before. But we should be in a position to be detecting things well before they hit routinely. And we’re not.
7 Likes
The only thing that will make the world wake up and start caring about this stuff is if we get an impact that takes out a city, or even just part of a city. And of course that will trigger all kinds of nuclear/terrorist assumptions before they figure out it was an asteroid.
3 Likes
And they would have done… what, exactly?
Order an evacuation of the possible impact area; put emergency services on alert; divert flights…
Edit: this is something that is being practiced:
https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/pdc17/day2.html
3 Likes
Damn. So no giant lasers hidden under Mount Rushmore, then?
5 Likes
2 Likes
6 Likes
Most of the injured were hurt by the secondary blast effects of shattered, falling or blown-in glass.
Tell people not to run to their windows when they see the flash.
1 Like
“impacted earth’s atmosphere” - I don’t even know where to begin.
This is hitting the news because it was a small asteroid. Were it larger I’d have missed the whole story, with the panic and global atmospheric disturbances and all, long before I learned of it here just now.
As for how far we have to go to be safe from asteroid impacts, it’s about as far as we have to go to be safe from the tide. It’s a wetware solution.
Step one: collect underpants
1 Like
I’m partial to the highly improbable micro-black hole theory.
Don’t worry. Eventually, accumulated orbiting space junk will act as a vast shield!
1 Like
Agreed, but that ship impacted the water a long time ago.
Actually, a moderate mid-ocean strike is far more likely and will be quite hard to blame on terrorists. Just big (or maybe humongous) waves hitting all of the facing coastlines (or maybe around the world.)
For a general idea, see “Giant Meteor Impact,” J. E. Enever, Analog March 1966
1 Like
