Fifty Meter Asteroid Might Hit Earth In 2098

eldavojohn writes "The Bad Astronomer brings word of an asteroid discovered with a tiny chance of hitting Earth. While it's only 50 meters wide, it could have the impact of a 20 megaton bomb. It's still twenty million miles away so if it hits us, it won't happen until 2098. The real story here is how a remarkable telescope, dubbed Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, that went operational in May found its first potential target in our growing impact alert system for Earth."

Key Words:

[Rip Dick]

"...might... ...tiny chance... ...could... ...if..."

Re:Well...

[Chowderbags]

Steamboat Willie will still be copyrighted.

And...

[WED Fan]

IPv4 address should run out by then, or not, things will be hotter, or colder, social security may have crashed, or not, the USA will be a socialist nightmare, or not, God will make a sudden appearance, or not, and the Beatles may reunite, or not.

Re:Is it REALLY that bad?

[Drakkenmensch]

Well, for one thing they never tested in the middle of a heavily populated area, if the stone should choose to fall in a city and not the ocean. A bigger concern would be if said explosion happened in a nation with a paranoid dictator who lets the nukes fly because he thinks he's under attack, cascading into everyone following suit.

Re:You gotta love this guy.

[gmuslera]

How you measure the unknown? It IS optimist, saying that we now finally have tools to start discovering this kind of threats. Anyway, that we are getting aware that things could get close don't mean that anything will hit us (in last century nothing similar to that size, so odds should be pretty low).

Re:Is it REALLY that bad?

[ceoyoyo]

Not much. Kind of a bummer if the asteroid isn't nice enough to land in an uninhabited part of Siberia though.

Re:Is it REALLY that bad?

[cowscows]

It wouldn't be an extinction level event or anything like that, but it would almost certainly ruin the day of anyone nearby where it did hit. And even if we could get advanced warning of where it would hit and evacuate all the people, if it heads towards a city, that's a lot of property/infrastructure/housing that will be obliterated. So not necessarily catastrophic, but probably not particularly great either.

Although if we figured out that it was going to hit somewhere basically unpopulated and un-utilized (middle of a desert or something), it could actually be kind of cool. We could probably get some excellent satellite video footage of it.

Re:A catalyst for world peace

[ColdWetDog]

Not fair smoking something that good and gloating about it.

the odds will only get smaller....

[scharkalvin]

They JUST found this thing. The amount of data available to determine it's orbit isn't enough to know exactly where it is going. HOWEVER when they dig up some old sky photos they will find earlier positions of this thing. The more earlier data points the better they will be able to predict it's path. Usually this means that the odds of an Earth impact will go down. It's happened before with other newly discovered objects.

Re:Rush Limbaugh Might Become U.S. "President"

[Hatta]

HW was a weak showman but also a weak leader, so I think that counts. Clinton was always a showman, and quite a good one. W was pure PT Barnum, he actually had people believing that he was a Texas cowboy and not a Connecticut Yankee. "There's a sucker born every minute" is the only way to explain Bush's two terms.

Re:Rush Limbaugh Might Become U.S. "President"

[eleuthero]

Can it not be that all politicians are showmen on some level and that when a given politician wins, he's convinced a plurality of voters that he is the best of bad choices (and various other voters that he is a good choice)?

Re:A catalyst for world peace

[phantomfive]

It always intrigues me when people say we will have never-ending war. Have you actually looked at the statistics to see what has happened to war in the past three decades, or the past century? The number of wars has dropped dramatically and consistently. I know it is hard sometimes for a person from the US to see this, since it feels like we've become more warlike since the 90s, but if you actually look at the numbers that's more of an illusion.

As the remaining fighters realize they have more to gain from trade than from fighting, then wars will continue to cease.

Re:The moral of this story is:

[geekoid]

Nobody is panicking, no one is running around with their hands in the air.

Stop exaggerating to make incorrect predictions.

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Past events and geologic timespans

[Just Some Guy]

I was thinking recently that we were lucky that most of the ecosphere-killing events in our history were astoundingly long ago and that our local space should be pretty clear by now. And then I realized that the dinosaur extinction event that happened 65 million years ago took place when the Earth was about 98.6% as old as it is now. If the Earth was now a day old, the dinosaurs were wiped out at 11:40PM. Suddenly those past catastrophes seemed not as comfortingly ancient.