Anti-matter will make that that thing and a nuke look like childs play. CERN should provide some decent data soon on that.

-S

Tell you what, you go to congress and convince them to devote funds to building asteroid-annihilating mirrors and I'll go try to convince them to blow that same money on some generic, failure-prone social program or perhaps a huge foreign aid package to a country they have never heard of where it will be stolen by warlords and corrupt officials before it ever reaches the people. Whoever convinces them wins.


Too late I already won:rotfl:


Sadly, we will probably have to suffer a significant asteroid impact or come very,very close to one before they ever do anything about it.

If the Mirror Idea is refined I think it could be possible to convince them.

3-5 billion or so spent to move a 100 year often asteroid is very worth it and 10-50 billion to move a dinosaur killer roid is well worth it as well.

Just tell them afterwards we will spend some on a social program :P

The catch to any plan to deflect an asteriod or comet is detection. If that thing is coming straight at us, due to the enormous speed the thing will be traveling as it falls toward the sun, there is a VERY limited window where we can even think of being able to do anything.
I think I recal that the danger zone is around or just inside the orbit of Jupiter. If it's closer than that, deflecting it would be near impossible considering how long it would take to get a mission together to move it, and the enormous speed the thing is traveling as it falls toard the sun.

We really only stand a chance to move the thing if we intercept it WAY out there years before it comes in at us.

Yup, and even then there isn't a good enough way to track its heading and
velocity to calculate if it will hit us from so far out.

Would a radar tracking station on Mars give sufficient warning ? :hmm:

Dubious. Mars is on an orbit too. It may be farther away from the object than earth is.


edit-wait, was that a joke or reference?

A bit of both actually. :lol:

I bet I have a chance! Congress is so screwed up at this point, they can't even vote properly on a social program properly right now, yet might pass something weird like this much to everyones surprise! :D

-S

I did read it, but a nuke isn't a solid projectile Subman, it's an explosive, detonated on contact or just before contact. A better analogy would be a firecracker.

The point being is energy transfer. There is no energy transfer into a non solid object. You simply break it apart and in continues on as normal as even refrenced by both the Astronaut and the article above and in every simulation done on a non solid asteroid.

Put your firecracker near your piece of paper and you will put a hole in it, but you won't send it flying!

-S

I'd say that depends on the size of the firecracker more than anything else. Besides, who ever said they would only shoot ONE nuke? How about 50? 500?

Who knows. Create ever smaller rocks to hit the Earth. Probably not a good plan.

But since I don't do the data modeling myself, a better person to argue with would probably be the scientists themselves. They are the nuke engineers that study the blast damage for a living.

-S

:) I was thinking of something totally different that what Subman posted below.