God damn you 2020

However you interpret the statement, with a six-footer i am not sure it matters. Even if it is an iron-nickle slug, what would survive the atmosphere would not be a very significant danger unless it landed on someone’s head. With the big ones, absolutely a 0.41% chance would be bad. Sadly, this one is not up to solving our problems. Hmmm, land on someone’s head… Is Il Douche golfing again? Maybe I’m wrong!

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Well, we can compute this. (Someone should check my figures here, I’m literally using an envelope!) Nickel’s density is 9gm/cm^3, so a 2m diameter spherical slug of nickel would be around 90pi kilograms. The kinetic energy of such an asteroid traveling at, say, 40000KPH would then be:
(1/2)(90\pi)(40000*1000/3600)^2 ≅1.75x10^10 joules, or .0175TJ. Little Boy was around 63TJ, so this would be approximately 0.00028 Hiroshimas. Probably not much, but not “zero”; if it lands in NYC it could rattle some windows, maybe take an eye out.

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Narrator: There was no reprieve.

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It only got this hazy for a couple of days…when this mountain was on fire.

Not just us.

https://www.sfgate.com/california-wildfires/amp/Smoke-from-California-wildfires-visible-in-Kansas-15508734.php

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Dad joke of the day:

A guy walks into a bar and says, “Gimme a corona and 2 hurricanes.”
Bartender says, “That’ll be $20.20.”

Ba-dum-dum.
Thank you, folks! I’ll be here all week!

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Meteorite Danger Rating: Careful Now

father-ted

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And on, and on, and

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On the hurricane front, the good news is one of the hurricanes broke up before it became one… the bad news is that the one that’s still there might be a cat 4 when it hits the coast…

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Well, that’s a whole new pile of horrifying to deal with…

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Is there still room on the 2020 bingo card for “unleashing horrible chemical death along the East coast?” Unbelievable.

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vb2Y8Ek

Although… maybe this sort of thing should stay up?

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The amount of deadly leftover military and manufacturing materials is staggering. I wonder if they ever relocated the nerve agents stored underground in the MD/VA area. There was a report on a news show (can’t remember if it was 60 Minutes or 20/20) that described how it was buried. Since the containers within would decay over time, the solution was a scheduled maintenance job that involved putting new containers around the old ones.

Whenever stories about misplaced missile silos or munitions makes the news, I think about that report. Here’s an article from that timeframe, along with what they’ve been doing to eliminate or neutralize the materials since then:

https://www.armscontrol.org/act/1998-06/features/beyond-chemical-weapons-stockpile-challenge-non-stockpile-materiel

https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/demil/methods.htm

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Ship’s wreck containing thousands of tons of explosives in the Thames Estuary could cause Beirut-style explosion

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My family enjoys fishing in the ocean off the coasts of Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland. Sometimes, one of us will hook something on the bottom or get a lure tangled up in a wreck. Repeatedly pulling on the line really hard might free the rig, so that’s what we normally do first. If that fails, we cut line. After reading this, I’m gonna think twice about that. :fearful:

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The example you linked was three miles down, I think. You’re probably pretty safe fishin.

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The problem with storing things in the ocean is that waves will move them around:

The entire east coast gets whacked by hurricanes, tropical storms, and nor’easters on a regular basis - and those high winds cause high waves. That increases the risk of those materials moving close to the shore (or into a bay) where leisure anglers go. Those waters are shallow, which is what enables us to bottom fish. Hopefully, commercial outfits involved in dredging or fishing those areas use scanning equipment that would help them avoid objects like this.

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