Ridiculous to assume that US/NASA are only one with the capability, EU/China/Japan/Russia/India/SpaceX could very well launch an interceptor and ride the popularity. If anything I expect multiple independent efforts competing to become the first one to take it out and saving humanity.
They mentioned ESA, but yes, Musk could fulfill his Iron Man dream and save the world single handedly, Bezos would no doubt fund his own version -- not only would it be a tax writeof, but it would be good for business (well better than an asteroid wiping out half your customers)
The cynic in me thinks Elon would first buy up all the property around the impact zone for pennies through a bunch of shell companies, then send up a BFR or FH with a W84 warhead (designed for a cruise missile so it would be extremely light relative to the lift capacity), rig it with an impact detonator that could be activated post liftoff, and then drive it into the asteroid.
Save the day, collect the gratitude of a grateful nation, and then sell off all the property at an obscene profit to make back all the costs.
I wouldn't take Armageddon as an instruction guide of how to safely get rid of asteroids. In fact, detonating it would likely lead to a shotgun effect. Lots of smaller pieces. Sure, these wouldn't do as much damage to a single city but they could damage many cities and many objects in orbit. Beyond that you now have to contend with the political ramifications of causing the destruction of someone else's property.
Tldr: asteroid defense is quite hard. Currently we are not adequately equipped to do so it safely.
Ok seriously, you read the article right? And its really just a summary of the work of fiction that is coming out in book form, and in that fiction the people in the story all agree that using a nuclear weapon on the remaining shard is their last and only option. To be clear, I didn't write the book, I was suggesting (what appears to be a way to cynical :-) a coda where a billionaire with a penchant for making money in unconventional ways, exploits the situation. He thus saves the world according to what the book postulates is the best strategy and he makes a ton of money.
That said, I agree with you, its stupid to blow up an incoming asteroid so that it can basically shred all of the satellites in orbit and cause a Kessler cascade and make it difficult if not impossible to put things in orbit for decades. But in defense of my comment, you have to work within the confines of the story, that is the rule of improv.
Breaking up the asteroid means more of the mass burns up in the atmosphere thanks to increased surface area.
The real tricky part is delivering the energy to the asteroid in a way that causes it to actually break up. The nuke needs to be drilled down below the surface of the asteroid so it doesn't just heat up the surface, potentially fusing it into a more solid chunk.
Of course the actual effects are hard to predict. Maybe we should be flying around right now blowing up random asteroids? First job for Trump's Space Force?
In this scenarios it wouldn't destroy the world. A 50m asteroid hitting a minor city in the western world (with time to evacuate for anyone with a functioning braincell) is probably the best thing that could happen as far as space defence goes.
We already had something a bit like this, several years ago when a small asteroid exploded over Chelybinsk, Russia. 1000 people were injured.
Has humanity sat up and decided to take this threat seriously? Nope.
Most likely, this was a test from some aliens to see if we're smart enough to avoid a much larger, extinction-level asteroid headed our way, and to try to get us to prepare ourselves better without violating the Prime Directive too badly. We failed.
I'm ready. An asteroid is an alright way to go out for me, everything else seems lackluster by comparison. This would be an acceptable early-ending to my normally schedule programming of marching endlessly behind the other humans towards oblivion.
In all seriousness, what can be done about this sort of thing(mitigating it)? Opinions(albeit ones from the internet) range from spacecrafts intercepting and mounting thrusters to divert the object's course, or planting nuclear bombs, and other "fantastic" sounding solutions. Is there anything to be done other than expect the unexpected?
Agreed. If one must die an unnatural way, then it is better to die in an interesting way such as by asteroid strike than to die in some mundane way like a car accident or getting mugged and shot point blank in a parking lot.
> In all seriousness, what can be done about this sort of thing(mitigating it)?
The most important thing would be to make sure that we can see these things well in advance. No defense is going to work if you don't see the threat at all. Currently we can't see well in the region enclosed by Earth's orbit, in the direction of the sun.
It's very easy to avoid asteroid impacts. You do lots of observation, so that you can tell decades in advance, that the asteroid is an imminent threat. Then you build spacecraft which intercept it, and use some type of engines (probably ion engines) to slightly change its orbit. You don't need extremely powerful ones, you just need them to operate for a long time. A very small orbital change will result in it completely avoiding the Earth decades later.
The key, of course, is being prepared well ahead of time, and looking for these things. We're doing a terrible job of these.
If you're a stupid species like the dinosaurs and don't bother to prepare for these things decades in advance, then there's nothing to be done; just let it happen.
Agreed. To elaborate, if you have enough advance warning, you can also dodge all the questions about asteroid composition and what happens if you impact it, etc., by using a gravity tractor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor
If you can lob one at an asteroid with a multi-year period as it passes near Earth, you can totally, reliably solve the problem for quite cheap. I'd like some significant redundancy in the mission just to be sure, but it wouldn't be that hard, inasmuch as one can say that about anything in space.
The situation gets once worse once that ceases to be an option. When you're back to using electromagnetic forces by touching it in some manner, by landing, pushing, exploding, whatever, you've suddenly got a lot more problems.
Eh, that all assumes the object has a relatively short orbital period around the Sun. None of that would work for an object with a very long orbital period, which would have a very high velocity in the inner solar system and likely would not be observed until it was already on its way here. Then there are objects which are not in orbit around the Sun, with even higher velocities.
>and likely would not be observed until it was already on its way here.
That's my whole point: if we were more serious about this, we'd have orbital observation platforms looking for all these objects and keeping track of them all, so that we aren't surprised by anything short of another asteroid from totally outside the solar system like that one a couple years ago.
Fun story, but one quibble: with a week's warning, Pasadena, Texas could manage an efficient & orderly evacuation. The region has a high level of cooperativeness in the face of imminent common threats.
Living about 15 minutes away from Pasadena, if it needed to be evacuated it would take months. There's a meme of evacuating Katy any time it rains because the people there tried during a hurricane and ended up staying locked in grid lock for days. Now imagine that same scenario with the entire city of Houston trying to evacuate. Most people would not be able to escape in a week.
Part of the issue with Hurricanes is that they hit a huge area. If you just need to evacuate a single city, it would be a lot easier. Especially with the added urgency of an asteroid. Hurricanes happen all the time and usually, it's not the end of the world.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, a near-failed state, managed to evacuate 300,000 people in three days from a Volcano. I'm pretty sure suburban Texas can handle it.
Let's say a forecaster projected the impact location and area of mortal danger, and you found out your house is 100 feet outside of the projection. How confident would the forecaster need to be for you to be comfortable staying home for the event?
I doubt it. DRC could do it because they can just get everyone to start walking, and 300k people walking as a huge group isn't that hard to do. Texas can't do it because everyone will try to load up their giant SUV and drive out on roads never designed for that much traffic, and they'll be stuck in gridlock where they'll die when the storm or asteroid hits.
Look up Pasadena Texas on google maps and see how big houston is. If Pasadena is about to get rocked, so would every single city "in" Houston. You're talking about over 2 million people all trying to drive out at the same time.
t around 10 am on August 28, Mayor Ray Nagin declared a mandatory evacuation of the city, after Hurricane Katrina was updated to a Category 5, the strongest possible hurricane. By the time the hurricane hit, at around 7 AM on August 29, later studies revealed that around 90% of the New Orleans population left. That’s around one million people within 21 hours..
For anyone else alarmed at "wait so this isn't a complete fiction?", it's a 'tabletop simulation' -- a thought experiment but written down, to try and track down who would (should) be doing which tasks and how it might play out.
The part of the read where I realized it wasn't a real story I was reading was where it became 35% chance to hit. And I was like, "I think I'd know if this wasn't fictional".
I don't really understand the title. Before I call clickbait, how did this destroy the world? Sure, house prices will fall in the predicted impact zone, people will panic and create shortages of essentials in a much wider region, and the worldwide economy is set back by a decade or two. But destroying the world before impact? What?
Nowhere in the article does it talk about "destroying the world." You'd suppose they were referring to some kind of near-miss from a massive body causing, I don't know, gravitational forces or something.
What it's actually saying is that there would be a lot of panic in the run-up to an impact, so that even a relatively small event could cause oil prices to spike and real estate values to drop in the impact area.
Hardly anything at all like the headline suggests.
It is an abusive title; 'disrupt' rather than 'destroy' would better match the events envisioned. (I wonder if the source book from which this was adapted, 'Fire in the Sky', includes other more-detailed scenarios of pre-impact destruction?)
Indeed. It's doubly silly, because there is a class of asteroid impact scenarios to which it could actually apply.
In the 2015 PDC exercise [1] the asteroid is also split in two by the first deflection attempt (that happens a lot in these exercises, see also 2017 and 2019) and the new bulls-eye is in India. So India plans a nuclear deflection attempt, but China vows to stop it, by intercepting it if necessary, because the second deflection attempt could result in the asteroid hitting China instead.
Meanwhile Iran, also in the new risk corridor, but not in the old one, threatens retaliation against the countries behind the first deflection attempt if it's hit: the Great Satan (aka the US), EU, Russia and China.
Bottom line: a recurring worry in these asteroid deflection scenarios is that whoever changes the trajectory becomes responsible for hitting whatever ends up being hit, and if that happens to be a nuclear-armed country, the consequence could be WWIII.
In this story, they have a 6-year warning of an asteroid with 35% chance of 700megaton impact.
I just know that with that lead time, and with such an aligning mission, humanity would be able to do amazing things.
The Apollo program was from JFKs speech in '61 to moon in '69, and that's built on a '60s technological and social infrastructure. We have tons more brainpower and tech now, globally.
This scenario would just be so politically aligning we'd be able to mobilize massive resources to stop it in that timeframe; way more than 6 launches. I'd be much more concerned about one they didn't see until 6 months out or something.
At six years out, it’s unclear where the asteroid will strike. You think Americans will throw their national budget behind doing “amazing things” for the Caribbean?
As localized as a 700 megaton nuke (compared to the 13-18 kiloton nuke that his Hiroshima). Reliable sources say that virtually everything within a 3 mile radius from the impact was heavily damaged in Hiroshima and everything within 1.6km / ~1 mile radius was obliterated so you should be able to extrapolate from that.
For comparison, the entire USA is ~3.797 million sq miles, so the equiv area of 184.35 entire United States would be utterly obliterated.
700000000 - 18000 = 699,982,000 sq miles of totally obliterated things
For comparison, the entirety of planet earth is 196.9 million sq miles, so the equiv area of 10 planet earths would be heavily damaged.
(700000000 - 18000) * 3 = 2,099,946,000 sq miles of heavily damaged things
Update: My math is totally wrong and people smarter than me explained it. Yay for internet people!
I'm a bit skeptical of your math. 700 megatons would be a bit over 10x the size of the biggest nuke ever detonated, which was still a city-killer, not a country-killer.
Yield isn't linear. It's a cube root relationship.
The difference between 100MT, 10MT and 1MT is hardly insignificant, but it's smaller than many people realise.
FWIW a ballpark estimate says 700MT would have a 1 psi overpressure radius - which would break windows but not buildings - of less than 100km.
It would be a huge bang and the noise would circle the world a few times. But if it landed on land, the total obliteration region would be smaller than a state. And the explosion itself wouldn't be extinction-level - although the winter that followed it would cause some severe problems.
Tambora, which is the biggest explosion in modern records, was estimated around 33GT, and the blast effects from that were very, very, very bad, but still relatively localised.
Chicxulub has been estimated as at least 20 billion Hiroshimas - and perhaps as much as four times that. That set fire to most of a hemisphere. And it still wasn't a complete obliteration/sterilisation event.
> Chicxulub has been estimated as at least 20 billion Hiroshimas - and perhaps as much as four times that. That set fire to most of a hemisphere. And it still wasn't a complete obliteration/sterilisation event.
Unless you were a dinosaur living at the time :)
Thanks for the cluebat, I've put an update on my post to note the math is all bollocks.
Depends where it hits. An ocean hit would wipe out coastal communities all around the ocean. A land hit would send up huge amounts of dust and plunge the world into a nuclear winter for some time. A hit in the right kind of coastal shelf could replicate the K-T impactor.
Such a huge asteroid may be exactly what we need to slow down global warming - fighting one catastrophe with another:
"In the year following the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, average Northern Hemisphere summer temperatures fell by as much as 1.2 °C (2.2 °F).[12] Weather patterns continued to be chaotic for years, and temperatures did not return to normal until 1888.[12] The record rainfall that hit Southern California during the water year from July 1883 to June 1884 – Los Angeles received 38.18 inches (969.8 mm) and San Diego 25.97 inches (659.6 mm)[13] – has been attributed to the Krakatoa eruption.[14] There was no El Niño during that period as is normal when heavy rain occurs in Southern California,[15] but many scientists doubt that there was a causal relationship.[16]
The Krakatoa eruption injected an unusually large amount of sulfur dioxide (SO2) gas high into the stratosphere, which was subsequently transported by high-level winds all over the planet. This led to a global increase in sulfuric acid (H2SO4) concentration in high-level cirrus clouds. The resulting increase in cloud reflectivity (or albedo) reflected more incoming light from the sun than usual, and cooled the entire planet until the suspended sulfur fell to the ground as acid precipitation."
If your government is willing to spend trillions on adventures in syria and other countries, and they have no real impact on the life of an average american, they they will scrape together a few billion to save their collective asses.
Faith in institutions, including the government has declined since. Maybe it's a chicken-and-egg problem, but as much as I want to agree with this I can't.
Interestingly it's increased in the military since Vietnam so maybe we should let the Air Force take charge of this if it ever happens.
I like your optimism. But I see most people just shrugging their shoulders if they don't see how it could affect them. Long term risk often hard for humans to comprehend.
We also have much cheaper and more reliable access to space. SpaceX and eventually Blue Origin will continue to push this down significantly. The one downside of this is that the same types of tools in space to deflect asteroids would be quite excellent for pew pew against things down on earth. It could cause a whole new level of cold war style standoffs.
> This scenario would just be so politically aligning we'd be able to mobilize massive resources to stop it in that timeframe; way more than 6 launches. I'd be much more concerned about one they didn't see until 6 months out or something.
So what you're saying is, this optimistic scenario where everyone pitches in to do the rational-but-expensive thing to save themselves is less like an imminent car crash that's unavoidably about to occur because an oncoming car has swerved into our lane, and more like... the steps we'd need to take to avoid drastic climate change?
That's the scenario where you don't believe we'd fail to do the right thing?
I had a similar thought. Leaving aside the merits on the short story and how realistic it is, I think the major distinction with climate change is that there is not a large group of wealthy and influential people profiting from the existence of the asteroid.
I disagree with your analogy, on the grounds of human factors.
If we were talking about budgeting money to detect an asteroid in the first place, the analogy would be spot on. And indeed, we do suck at detection, its a tragedy of the commons, its difficult to align on, all those things you mention. Because its abstract.
But, IMO, there is a huge psychological difference between trying to sell the public on detecting an asteroid, vs diverting one we know is coming. The one you know is coming is this concrete physical threat.
This is very easy to sell. At a visceral level, almost everyone has been hit by a rock. Once you believe NASA telling you its coming - and I bet policy makers will believe that piece - the rest sells itself.
This is the difference between getting someone to pay money for health insurance, vs getting them to pay to remove a tumor. The former is a much harder conversation than the latter, though they are functionally the same.
Climate change involves explaining the impact of potential changes to a complex system.
There have been very many action movies about asteroid deflection. Its simple, its dramatic, its sudden. Its like the moon landing. Climate change is this slow creeping abstract thing, and that honestly matters hugely in terms of human factors.
It's better compared to the effort made in a war, to fight nazis, etc.
There wasn't much talk of cost - cutting once your country might be obliterated. And unlike nazis, asteroids don;t negotiate
Half the politicians will be telling people that the asteroid is nothing to worry about. That it's a wild goose chase cooked up by the other side, and that we should be spending our tax money on more important things.
Mistake #1, the idea of a "risk corridor" applies to an object in a decaying orbit. It will hit somewhere along the line of orbit. But for an object coming from out of orbit, there is a center of where it is likely to hit, and then a bell-shaped curve across the cross-section of the Earth for where it might. Basically half the world is at risk, with some areas at higher risk than others.
Mistake #2, objects that we find which could hit us get within range of our rockets only a finite number of times. For a previously unknown large object with a several year returning orbit, that finite number is likely to be 2 - once when we found it and once when it comes back (at which point it is too late). A more realistic version would be that it is on a long trajectory that will hit Earth after 3-4 times. Which gives us a lot longer to prepare, and a clear timing on when we want to try to hit it.
I won't comment on the cultural mistakes. Except to note that "We're going to get hit but odds are good that it is over water and nobody gets hurt" might be less panic inducing than the story claims.
> the idea of a "risk corridor" applies to an object in a decaying orbit. It will hit somewhere along the line of orbit
It also applies to asteroids, and is a standard concept used in these scenarios. See e.g. the materials from the exercise at this year's Planetary Defense Conference [1] (the story on LitHub is basically a variation on that scenario, which also features an asteroid splitting in two during the deflection attempt, a failure to use nukes, and a city destroyed by the impact: New York).
> objects that we find which could hit us get within range of our rockets only a finite number of times
There are more and less viable launch dates, clustered in launch windows, but the details vary depending on your vehicle and the orbit. JPL's NEO Deflection App [2] has several illustrative examples which you can play with, and which work pretty much as in the story.
Huh, that is bizarre. How does this square with my understanding that the path is off by something close to a normal distribution?
I guess that the big question mark is time. If we know the path of the asteroid very precisely, and the path of the Earth very precisely, but we don't know exactly when the asteroid goes down that path, it would result in something like a risk corridor depending on where the asteroir was between leading and trailing the Earth at the point of impact. I wouldn't (in fact didn't) guess that.
I'd find it funny if the US proved uncapable to hit the damn thing and Russia just throws a makeshift deflection apparatus at it that basically makes use of angular momentum for the task (Soyuz™ tech!) and just keeps burning itself to death on the asteroid's surface. The result would be bipartisan gratitude to Russia, while putting Rachel Mathews out of a job for good. The potential hilarity of the future is literally endless, even without an asteroid on collision course.
Only about 150 years ago the idea of rocks coming out of the sky was ridiculous, fringe, crazy-person talk.
We laugh at the flat-earthers, but I think you can estimate how sane an Earthling is by its attitude towards meteor defense.
My point is most of us are "flat-earthers" after a fashion. Most people don't really internalize physics and the structure of the Universe[1], but when you do, you have these moments where your mind resolves the inconsistencies in your worldview and it expands and these mind-blowing vistas spread out before you.
One thing you realize is that the sky is fucking terrifying.
The world includes gigantic explosions that happen literally out of the blue for no real reason other than there are falling rocks in the sky and gravity.
[1] If we did, solar power would have taken off the moment someone thought of it. The Sun is awesome.
Help me with the maths... current largest rocket we have is The Falcon Heavy, correct? How much more capability would we need to hit something 3 years away from impact with a Russian Tsar Bomba?
Let's assume we don't do multiple launches and orbit rendezvous.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadSave the day, collect the gratitude of a grateful nation, and then sell off all the property at an obscene profit to make back all the costs.
Tldr: asteroid defense is quite hard. Currently we are not adequately equipped to do so it safely.
That said, I agree with you, its stupid to blow up an incoming asteroid so that it can basically shred all of the satellites in orbit and cause a Kessler cascade and make it difficult if not impossible to put things in orbit for decades. But in defense of my comment, you have to work within the confines of the story, that is the rule of improv.
The real tricky part is delivering the energy to the asteroid in a way that causes it to actually break up. The nuke needs to be drilled down below the surface of the asteroid so it doesn't just heat up the surface, potentially fusing it into a more solid chunk.
Of course the actual effects are hard to predict. Maybe we should be flying around right now blowing up random asteroids? First job for Trump's Space Force?
Has humanity sat up and decided to take this threat seriously? Nope.
Most likely, this was a test from some aliens to see if we're smart enough to avoid a much larger, extinction-level asteroid headed our way, and to try to get us to prepare ourselves better without violating the Prime Directive too badly. We failed.
In all seriousness, what can be done about this sort of thing(mitigating it)? Opinions(albeit ones from the internet) range from spacecrafts intercepting and mounting thrusters to divert the object's course, or planting nuclear bombs, and other "fantastic" sounding solutions. Is there anything to be done other than expect the unexpected?
The most important thing would be to make sure that we can see these things well in advance. No defense is going to work if you don't see the threat at all. Currently we can't see well in the region enclosed by Earth's orbit, in the direction of the sun.
The B612 foundation was going to launch the Sentinel Space Telescope for that purpose, but they lost their funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_Space_Telescope
The key, of course, is being prepared well ahead of time, and looking for these things. We're doing a terrible job of these.
If you're a stupid species like the dinosaurs and don't bother to prepare for these things decades in advance, then there's nothing to be done; just let it happen.
If you can lob one at an asteroid with a multi-year period as it passes near Earth, you can totally, reliably solve the problem for quite cheap. I'd like some significant redundancy in the mission just to be sure, but it wouldn't be that hard, inasmuch as one can say that about anything in space.
The situation gets once worse once that ceases to be an option. When you're back to using electromagnetic forces by touching it in some manner, by landing, pushing, exploding, whatever, you've suddenly got a lot more problems.
That's my whole point: if we were more serious about this, we'd have orbital observation platforms looking for all these objects and keeping track of them all, so that we aren't surprised by anything short of another asteroid from totally outside the solar system like that one a couple years ago.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, a near-failed state, managed to evacuate 300,000 people in three days from a Volcano. I'm pretty sure suburban Texas can handle it.
Let's say a forecaster projected the impact location and area of mortal danger, and you found out your house is 100 feet outside of the projection. How confident would the forecaster need to be for you to be comfortable staying home for the event?
Nowhere in the article does it talk about "destroying the world." You'd suppose they were referring to some kind of near-miss from a massive body causing, I don't know, gravitational forces or something.
What it's actually saying is that there would be a lot of panic in the run-up to an impact, so that even a relatively small event could cause oil prices to spike and real estate values to drop in the impact area.
Hardly anything at all like the headline suggests.
In the 2015 PDC exercise [1] the asteroid is also split in two by the first deflection attempt (that happens a lot in these exercises, see also 2017 and 2019) and the new bulls-eye is in India. So India plans a nuclear deflection attempt, but China vows to stop it, by intercepting it if necessary, because the second deflection attempt could result in the asteroid hitting China instead.
Meanwhile Iran, also in the new risk corridor, but not in the old one, threatens retaliation against the countries behind the first deflection attempt if it's hit: the Great Satan (aka the US), EU, Russia and China.
Bottom line: a recurring worry in these asteroid deflection scenarios is that whoever changes the trajectory becomes responsible for hitting whatever ends up being hit, and if that happens to be a nuclear-armed country, the consequence could be WWIII.
[1] https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/pdc15/
In this story, they have a 6-year warning of an asteroid with 35% chance of 700megaton impact.
I just know that with that lead time, and with such an aligning mission, humanity would be able to do amazing things.
The Apollo program was from JFKs speech in '61 to moon in '69, and that's built on a '60s technological and social infrastructure. We have tons more brainpower and tech now, globally.
This scenario would just be so politically aligning we'd be able to mobilize massive resources to stop it in that timeframe; way more than 6 launches. I'd be much more concerned about one they didn't see until 6 months out or something.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Excellent calculator & visualization
As localized as a 700 megaton nuke (compared to the 13-18 kiloton nuke that his Hiroshima). Reliable sources say that virtually everything within a 3 mile radius from the impact was heavily damaged in Hiroshima and everything within 1.6km / ~1 mile radius was obliterated so you should be able to extrapolate from that.
For comparison, the entire USA is ~3.797 million sq miles, so the equiv area of 184.35 entire United States would be utterly obliterated.
For comparison, the entirety of planet earth is 196.9 million sq miles, so the equiv area of 10 planet earths would be heavily damaged. Update: My math is totally wrong and people smarter than me explained it. Yay for internet people!The difference between 100MT, 10MT and 1MT is hardly insignificant, but it's smaller than many people realise.
FWIW a ballpark estimate says 700MT would have a 1 psi overpressure radius - which would break windows but not buildings - of less than 100km.
It would be a huge bang and the noise would circle the world a few times. But if it landed on land, the total obliteration region would be smaller than a state. And the explosion itself wouldn't be extinction-level - although the winter that followed it would cause some severe problems.
Tambora, which is the biggest explosion in modern records, was estimated around 33GT, and the blast effects from that were very, very, very bad, but still relatively localised.
Chicxulub has been estimated as at least 20 billion Hiroshimas - and perhaps as much as four times that. That set fire to most of a hemisphere. And it still wasn't a complete obliteration/sterilisation event.
Unless you were a dinosaur living at the time :)
Thanks for the cluebat, I've put an update on my post to note the math is all bollocks.
Such a huge asteroid may be exactly what we need to slow down global warming - fighting one catastrophe with another:
"In the year following the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, average Northern Hemisphere summer temperatures fell by as much as 1.2 °C (2.2 °F).[12] Weather patterns continued to be chaotic for years, and temperatures did not return to normal until 1888.[12] The record rainfall that hit Southern California during the water year from July 1883 to June 1884 – Los Angeles received 38.18 inches (969.8 mm) and San Diego 25.97 inches (659.6 mm)[13] – has been attributed to the Krakatoa eruption.[14] There was no El Niño during that period as is normal when heavy rain occurs in Southern California,[15] but many scientists doubt that there was a causal relationship.[16]
The Krakatoa eruption injected an unusually large amount of sulfur dioxide (SO2) gas high into the stratosphere, which was subsequently transported by high-level winds all over the planet. This led to a global increase in sulfuric acid (H2SO4) concentration in high-level cirrus clouds. The resulting increase in cloud reflectivity (or albedo) reflected more incoming light from the sun than usual, and cooled the entire planet until the suspended sulfur fell to the ground as acid precipitation."
http://devinit.org/post/global-humanitarian-assistance-repor...
"...the US remained the single largest donor, providing almost a third (32%) of all assistance"
Interestingly it's increased in the military since Vietnam so maybe we should let the Air Force take charge of this if it ever happens.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as...
So what you're saying is, this optimistic scenario where everyone pitches in to do the rational-but-expensive thing to save themselves is less like an imminent car crash that's unavoidably about to occur because an oncoming car has swerved into our lane, and more like... the steps we'd need to take to avoid drastic climate change?
That's the scenario where you don't believe we'd fail to do the right thing?
If we were talking about budgeting money to detect an asteroid in the first place, the analogy would be spot on. And indeed, we do suck at detection, its a tragedy of the commons, its difficult to align on, all those things you mention. Because its abstract.
But, IMO, there is a huge psychological difference between trying to sell the public on detecting an asteroid, vs diverting one we know is coming. The one you know is coming is this concrete physical threat.
This is very easy to sell. At a visceral level, almost everyone has been hit by a rock. Once you believe NASA telling you its coming - and I bet policy makers will believe that piece - the rest sells itself.
This is the difference between getting someone to pay money for health insurance, vs getting them to pay to remove a tumor. The former is a much harder conversation than the latter, though they are functionally the same.
Climate change involves explaining the impact of potential changes to a complex system.
There have been very many action movies about asteroid deflection. Its simple, its dramatic, its sudden. Its like the moon landing. Climate change is this slow creeping abstract thing, and that honestly matters hugely in terms of human factors.
Mistake #2, objects that we find which could hit us get within range of our rockets only a finite number of times. For a previously unknown large object with a several year returning orbit, that finite number is likely to be 2 - once when we found it and once when it comes back (at which point it is too late). A more realistic version would be that it is on a long trajectory that will hit Earth after 3-4 times. Which gives us a lot longer to prepare, and a clear timing on when we want to try to hit it.
I won't comment on the cultural mistakes. Except to note that "We're going to get hit but odds are good that it is over water and nobody gets hurt" might be less panic inducing than the story claims.
It also applies to asteroids, and is a standard concept used in these scenarios. See e.g. the materials from the exercise at this year's Planetary Defense Conference [1] (the story on LitHub is basically a variation on that scenario, which also features an asteroid splitting in two during the deflection attempt, a failure to use nukes, and a city destroyed by the impact: New York).
> objects that we find which could hit us get within range of our rockets only a finite number of times
There are more and less viable launch dates, clustered in launch windows, but the details vary depending on your vehicle and the orbit. JPL's NEO Deflection App [2] has several illustrative examples which you can play with, and which work pretty much as in the story.
[1] https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/pdc19/
[2] https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/nda/
I guess that the big question mark is time. If we know the path of the asteroid very precisely, and the path of the Earth very precisely, but we don't know exactly when the asteroid goes down that path, it would result in something like a risk corridor depending on where the asteroir was between leading and trailing the Earth at the point of impact. I wouldn't (in fact didn't) guess that.
Thank you for the references!
We laugh at the flat-earthers, but I think you can estimate how sane an Earthling is by its attitude towards meteor defense.
My point is most of us are "flat-earthers" after a fashion. Most people don't really internalize physics and the structure of the Universe[1], but when you do, you have these moments where your mind resolves the inconsistencies in your worldview and it expands and these mind-blowing vistas spread out before you.
One thing you realize is that the sky is fucking terrifying.
The world includes gigantic explosions that happen literally out of the blue for no real reason other than there are falling rocks in the sky and gravity.
[1] If we did, solar power would have taken off the moment someone thought of it. The Sun is awesome.
Let's assume we don't do multiple launches and orbit rendezvous.