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Killer Asteroid 221

Posted by CmdrTaco from the somebody-call-bruce-willis dept.
Scott Manley writes "Astronomers have found a mile wide asteroid which has a non-zero possibility of hitting the earth i n the next century. Asteroid 1999 AN10 was found on 13th January '99 by the LINEAR system and scientists working in Italy have predicted a close approach in August 2027 and a potential collision in August 2039. This has been kept quiet after the panic last year over 1997 XF11 whic had a similar 'remote' possibility, if 1999 AN10 were to hit it would be a real civilisation killer. " I can't believe scientists are bothing with this stuff when we all know Y2k will kill us all in less than a year anyway.
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Killer Asteroid More

Killer Asteroid

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  • Not just unix... any machine or program that uses a 32 bit time_t based on Jan 1 1970 will die. And that includes many programs and OS's besides just unix. The difference is, we unix folk know it's coming.

  • 2038 (Score:1)

    by KingKurly ( 262 )
    Now that's freaky, because Jan 19 is my birthday... 2038 is my...55th birthday. Hm, hopefully i'll die of something before then :)
  • Ouch, and doen't a shotgun do more damage than a similar sized ball? Blowing up an asteroid is not the solution. Redirecting it might help.
  • Actually, breaking an asteroid into smaller chunks would help, at least for things smaller than Texas. If we got hit with a single rock a mile in diameter, it'd still be a single rock close to a mile in diameter when it hit the ground. If we got hit with the same mass in inch-diameter pebbles, it'd mostly burn up in the atmosphere. It's a matter of friction and surface-area-to-volume ratios.

    Of course, for something the size of Texas, even if we could hit it hard enough to break it up, it'd be breaking up into the mile-wide chunks mentioned above, and getting hit with a bunch of those versus getting hit with a single Texas-sized rock is pretty much a tossup. Even a single mile-wide rock is a planet-killer, anyway.
  • When it comes by on the first pass, let's fly up to meet it. We can plant a colony on its surface, and they can make it habitable and build some big ol' engines or a solar sail or something on it, so when it comes around on the second pass, they can nudge it into Earth orbit.

    Viola! Planet-destroying disaster averted, one new satellite acquired. It'd be much safer than trying to blow the thing up, or redirect it out of the solar system... you never know where it (or its pieces) are going to end up a couple dozen orbits down the road when you do something like that. And we could use it for a space station (because the ISS probably still won't be finished by then), or even plant some equipment on it to scan the nearby sky and have it search for planet-destroying asteroids. Would seem fitting. :)
  • Running an Alpha has nothing to do with it. x86 CPUs can have 64-bit integral types just as well as Alpha CPUs can. After all, the original 32-bit time_t ran on 16-bit CPUs (and even some 8-bit ones). So, theoretically, there could be Alphas with a 32-bit time_t (with old libraries) or 486s with a 64-bit time_t (with new libraries).
  • In Linux, they're called 'jiffies' and they used to expire after about 4 years, but I think it's fixed now.
  • Posted by Nino the Mind Boggler:

    Sounds like you might have. So if this doesn't pan out, we'll just convince them that Venus is the place to be, right?
  • Obviously we must divert all our energies into life-extension technology.
  • People have been bringing up the Y2038 32-bit time_t problem in this thread. It's not a problem. Making an integer contain more bits in a program is much much easier than altering the number of characters in a string (the two-digit y2k problem). The ramifications are smaller. We won't be seeing the kinds of trillion-dollar (I say "trillion" because I am predicting for inflation and speaking in 2038 dollars) problems that y2k gives. For the software, a recompile with a bigger time_t fixes everything. For the data files, there's a bit more work, but not much.
  • And how much energy would we need to brake its orbit? I realize we don't have to actually stop it, only align it with earths orbit, but I'd hate to have to do an athmosperic brake sequence with this one.

    A few decades with some serious mass slingers might help adjust its trajectory though.
  • the y2k thingy is just the start: civ as we know it begins to collapse; people go mad because their computers and toasters and teevees and air conditioning/heating units stop working, but slowly, not all at once - you see the pattern? Banks begin to fail, people get laid off; the UN passes a global non-smoking law; airplanes fall randomly out of the sky; the weather gets worse - more frequent and stronger hurricanes in the atlantic; bigger cyclones in the pacific; monster tornadoes in the great plains, volcanic erruptions all along the pacific rim; California drops into the ocean - oh, well, the news ain't all bad! Bill Gates runs for and wins the U.S. presidency and is re-elected 4 times - after changing all the rules. By this time, the remaining 300-400 million people are in despair, wandering around with Palm Pilots that won't work any more - no more batteries for them. Then the asteroid comes and puts them out of their collective misery.

    Remember, you heard it here first!

  • Really, if the world can't get its act together in the next 25 to 40 years, at least enough to stop a big rock from annihilating life as we know it, then we probably deserve to get wiped out by an asteroid. Then in another few billion years, new life will emerge and try to create a new society without falling into the trap of creating lawyers or politicians. Or then again, the world could just become a lifeless hunk of rock like the moon. Either way, the universe will probably benefit from it. Think of it as survival of the fittest. If we can prevent ourselves from being killed, then we deserve to live. If not, then the big rock will get to make its opinion of us known.

  • Or are you just making shit up?

    Just curious.

    Mike

  • It's either December 24, 2012, or December 12, 2024.

    Or I could be wrong all together, but those are the choices that seem most plausible.

    Don Negro
  • Duh. [Feeling like an idiot.]

    Don Negro
  • Great, I hope it hits. I'll finally be able to see how close to reality the special FX were in last year's two asteroid movies.

  • Hah... they're not paid very much. The earth's asteroid early-warning system is woefully inadequate, and it's not their fault - the corrupt government + major corporations prefer profit-making ventures for investment, and happily spend billions on defense, while a few million goes the early warning network's way.

    To speak in the military's defense... they want to be involved in both asteroid defense and developing significant new technologies; this has been opposed by the Clinton administration. The military only gets something like 1/6 of the federal budget, and it's been going down through Clinton's whole administration. His "who are we going to declare war on this week" habits have only made preparedness, and money for tech development, even more scarce.

    A lot of the criticism you made of the military can be placed firmly at its commander-in-chief, who we were stupid enough to elect. We get a chance to get a new one at the end of next year. If we're not all killed by Y2K, that is.
    Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita

  • Oh ya, and THAT was an acurate portrayal.. ;-P
  • Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to track something that small millions of miles away in some cases?

    'Oh ya, I can see it right there, bob!! What, you can't see it? It's that little .00001 micron spec on the horizon..'
  • In case anyone still cares:
    • The paper had been peer-reviewed before posting on the site
    • The publicization all came from a third party who happened to find the page; authors were not consulted
    • Independent confirmation sets probability of impact in 2039 at approx. 1 in 1 billion
    • Asteroid will be easily observable again in a few months, so orbital parameters can be narrowed down and more accurate prediction released
    • Was not publicized in order to prevent overreaction and to await verification in a few months.
    Source: Paul W. Chodas, Research Scientist, NEO Program office
  • Wrong again. My mother is French and half my family live in France. Nick
  • And you're an ignorant racist idiot. If you want to cut down on pollution you have to look no further than North America and Europe---we are responsible for the vast majority of pollution. If you want to cut down on pollution, walk or cycle to work instead of sitting your fat arse behind a steering wheel, don't keep your house so hot in the winter and so cool in the summer and try to eat less meat. It's simple really. Oh, and try to watch your mouth. Nick
  • Unfortunately, prijks, McDonald's spends more on a single restaurant each year than is spent by the entire planet in the search for earth-crossing asteroids.
  • I agree. When NT is not in the process of rebooting or getting ready to need rebooting it tracks time perfectly. :P
  • Its smaller than fairly small.
  • 2300 hours EDT? I'm ususlly running a game around then...Could you make it 2330 hours? We usually wind down by then

  • Having a two-digit year does not necessarily make something non-Y2K compliant.

    To be non-compliant you'd need to DO something with the two-digit year which would create a problem; eg. compare two values, keep adding values etc. If the code doesn't manipulate the data you don't have a problem (other than stupid users, which is another story altogether).

    If 99 is just a tag for this current year, and the next year is tagged as 00, and no code tries to presume any kind of numerical order, it's not a problem. You could just as well tag this year as "Bob" and next year as "Fred".



  • why 32 bits? it depends on the compiler and especially the library... nothing to do with hardwarearchitecture... if you only use time functions in the library to manipulate your time variable then you are safe, if you do arithmetic on it and the time_t is not an integer you're making bad things :o)
    anyway 32 bits or not, if someone want to put a double or a char structure or whatever in the library for the time_t and you ONLY use time function from this library it'll work!
    --
  • why 32 bits? it depends on the compiler and especially the library... nothing to do with hardware architecture... if you only use time functions in the library to manipulate your time variable then you are safe, if you do arithmetic on it and the time_t is not an integer you're making bad things :o)
    anyway 32 bits or not, if someone want to put a double or a char structure or whatever in the library for the time_t and you ONLY use time function from this library it'll work!
    --
  • No quiero Taco Bell. Yo quiero Amasita's. (Amasita's es un poco restaurante Mexicano que es cerca del laboratorio del sciencia computacion. Sus enchiladas queso con chile rojo son MUY delicioso, y son borrachos!)
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
  • Too bad this thing isn't hitting now. Let's hope it smacks SE Asia or India. Too many people and, damn, do they pollute.... Then again, maybe we can line up all the trash in this country and have them wait in that special place! We need something to wipe out half the people on this planet. We're doomed one way or another. A plague or other disaster would do the world a lot of good.
  • Relax, junior. CAn't take much sarcasm and dark humor, huh? Besides, you obvioulsy missed the part about getting rid of all the trash (i.e. white trash) and placing them in ground zero.
    You did make me remember one other point. Wouldn't it be great to see it hit France???????
    And, btw, I bike quite a lot and do my fair share of pollution prevention and cleanup.....
  • Yeah - 23 January this year there was a big one - the estimated energy release was equivalent to converting twice the mass of the sun into energy.

    This was the first GRB to be observer in the optical during the burst - they build a special fast tracking telescope that could point anywhere on the sky in 3 seconds.

    Best bit is.... the computer hardware running this is running linux.
  • We're wprking on the subject... but the limitation is the observations...
  • Ahhh... slight problem is that all that kinetic enery that the asteroid has is still contained in all those pebbles.

    So all that energy is conveniently dumped into the atmosphere, superheating hte air and turning the air into an oven.

    Rememebr the second fragment in deep impact? Rememebr it getting broken up?
    Rememebr everyone escaping into the mountains?


    Now imagine everyone spontaneously combusting due tot he heat in the air .... imagine all teh forests cathing fire.... imagine all teh ozone being destroyed... imagine the real nuclear winter afterward

    ;-)
  • Hey - read 'Nemesis' by Bill Napier - same idea - a High Tech Thriller - and the only work of fiction to mention linux. (except for MS press releases)
  • Hardly - in the UK we've been trying to get the UK to spend 10 million pounds over the next 10 years for a telescope and centre to look for the killer rock.

    How many cruise missiles to lauch against serbia does that buy you? 5?

    LINEAR and NEAT are the only government funded programmes, NEAT isn't really up to the task, and there are persistent rumours of LINEAR restricting information.
    And they're both in the USA - so when it's daytime there nobody is looking.
  • explorezone.com [explorezone.com] has a news article on this which includes and interview with the astronomers.

    My map of Near Earth Objects [arm.ac.uk] has 1999 AN10 marked on it, and will be updated daily. It's Currently the red object near mercury.

    And Benny Peiser's Cambridge Conference [uga.edu] network mailing list broke the news [uga.edu] of this to it's readers - readers like Arthur C Clarke, Bill Napier, Mark Bailey and other big names in the field.
  • The problem is that there is a significant chance that an extinction-class impact will happen within our lifetimes. The chance isn't large, but it has been calculated by astronomers to be approximately equal to the chance of the average person dying in a commercial airline crash.

    The number of people actively engaged in looking for these killer rocks is fewer than the number of people who work in your local McDonald's. That's the _global_ total.

    The reason for this is a lack of funding. It is pure coincidence that this particular rock was observed; the number of known-trajectory asteroids is small compared to the total number in the solar system, and most of the sky is unwatched most of the time.

    That's why the chance of this asteroid hitting us on a near approach is about the same as being hit by one we haven't observed.

    Lots of governments spend lots of money ensuring airline safety. I don't have the numbers at hand, but it is my understanding that a fairly comprehensive sky survey would cost significantly less.

    Personally, I'd feel awfully silly being killed by a rock we could have nudged in a different direction with a few years of warning. If we discover one with only a few months of lead time, NASA says we're pretty much screwed.

  • 2038 (Score:1)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    Even freakier, I dated three different women who had birthdays on January 19th. Then I wised up and my wife's birthday is January 17th.

    I like to think that the course of my life has been completely determined by the birthday paradox.
  • Just have the nurse roll my wheelchair over to the window of the Old Fogies home so I can watch it happen.

    Chuck (40+ and lovin' it)...

  • ok, but for an undiscovered asteroid to hit us any given day (say tomorrow) it would mean that asteroid is really fast, or a whole bunch of scientist people are being paid a lot of money to look into space and miss the obvious (like a big asteroid)

    hmmm... then again, i know more of coding than i do of astronomy, so i'll be quiet now...
  • I used to have one of those!
    But the damn joysticks kept jamming :P
  • Sunday, December 23rd, 2012, Approx noon (don't know where they got noon from)

    The video's I saw on this said that according to the Mayan's, time just "stops" or something here.

    The end of the world better be more exciting than that!
  • Actually, it's smalled then smaller then smaller then fairly small. It might even be smaller.
  • When does the UNix Clock run out?

    And when is the end of the Mayan calander?

    It would be interesting to see if the intersect with this rock.

    Soem one call up Bruce willis and that Liv Tyler babe, they ned to make a sequal..
  • Or the gamma ray burst from a quasar on the edge of the universe.

    That one [nasa.gov] did get my attention. So besides the known big bad nasties out there, there are a lot more bigger, badder, nastier ones we have no clue about...

    fun thought ;)

  • hey bill... did you order a planet-killing asteroid lately?

    8Complex
  • April! April! I mean!
  • Hail? In March? It was nice and sunny in Adelaide today. Weird.
  • Oops! I replied to the wrong article. I was pointing out that DEC Unix does indeed have this problem. A previous poster claimed that Alpha's were immune.

    peter
  • Not if you're running DEC Unix. Don't know about Linux, but sizeof(time_t) is 4 on DEC Unix.

    peter
  • Unless I'm mistaken (and I very well may be) I believe that POSIX requires that time_t be an integral data type, and that it represent the number of seconds since 1970. OS/2 used^Hs a double for time_t, but it's not POSIX.

    So anyone working with POSIX systems only is justified in treating time_t like a number.

    You certainly couldn't use a structure, since time_t is defined to be an arithmetic type by the ANSI C spec.

    peter
  • This is an excellent point that wasn't handled as well as possible in both last year's movies. Actually, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Meteor, and NBC's Asteroid all depicted so-called 'calving' of the object so that there are lots of smaller impacts, but none of them specifically blamed the efforts of humans for this.

    In fact, the best way to handle an incoming asteroid is to deflect it into a non-Earth-crossing orbit. Note that the best such orbit is off the solar system plane, so "up" or "down" is better than "left" or "right" deflections. And the earlier you do this deflection, the less energy required for it to be successful. If we find an asteroid early enough (and yes, we are talking on a multi-decade scale here), it's possible that a modest ion engine like on the Deep Space 1 mission could do everything required, with no blasting at all.

    But you have to start early, so no complaining about this being yadda years in the future.
  • Surely this will spawn a couple more movies about heroic Americans saving the earth from a terrible. No other country is capable of movie-heroism.
  • Forget about near misses!! This is our chance to capture an asteroid. Put the sucker in an elliptical orbit circling the Earth-Moon system and start the mining operations.

    Once we demonstrate the value of finding and capturing near earth asteroids, we will get a lot more eyeballs looking for them. We also get to practice rendevouing and redirecting them, so when the real doomsday rock comes, it can be diverted and turned into an asset not a disaster.

    We have 39 years in which to create viable rocket systems. Let's get started.

  • But the first thing that crossed my mind was to copy the text, change the dates to this year or next, and send it off to some of my less science literate friends.

    It was in the internet, it has to be true. (You should see the fun I have with doctored press releases, put Reuters or AP at the beginning of any bit of text and people will believe nearly anything.) ;-)
  • If you had only listened to your mother. If only you had lived your life right, ate the proper food, read the right books, went to church and stopped playing with yourself.

    But nooooooooo...
    You had to play the rebel and now the whole planet has to pay for your mistakes.

    Well, I hope your satisfied.

  • Coincides with the nice signed 32-bit POSIX/C overflow of 99.9% of the world's systems. :->

  • Well, I am doubtful regarding the necessity of this post, but, with regard to whomever seems to think that the alignment of the planets is an important event, I am wont to state that even if the 6 planets outside of Earth's orbit aligned with the Earth (i.e., such that the pull of Mercury and Venus would not counteract them), then their combined gravitational pull could be negated by sitting down (well, lowering yourself about a foot closer to the Earth, anyway).
    And as to another planet 'bumping' into us because of an asteroid impact, it would indeed need to be a massive asteroid, given that with the exception of Pluto, the orbits of the planets in our solar system do not appear to be particularly elliptical or perturbed, even given something like 10 billion years of bombardment by asteroids and comets.
  • Duh,

    Who do you think he is? He's not a shrink, he's the sniper.

    He's just trying to flush his victim out.
  • Actually it HAS happened. One off the Yucatan 65e10^6 yrs ago, hudson bay, gulf of mexico, and probably a few others.

    Hell, there was even a small one in Russia in about 1912.

    It will happen again.
  • I have an idea, let's make a movie about an astroid that is going to kill everyone that is left over after the y2k bug killed most of us. We can have Jon Katz write a book about it first then of course make it into a movie. That is the year that all the 32-bit unix systems will die right. Isn't that also the year when evidence that has been sealed by the Warren commission will be released about the JFK killing. It is going to be an exciting year. I will be 66 years old and wont even know my own name much less care about any of this, I will have had my brain fried from reading Slashdot for 40 years and slashdot's subliminal messaging will have taken it's toll on my sanity.

    Keep up the good work.
  • The UNIX clock on 32bit systems dies sometime in 2038.

    The Mayan calendar is divided into four or fixe epochs all of which end in MOST life on our planet dieing out. (Think the great flood)

    The last epoch, the epoch of the sun/fire ENDS on December 23rd 2012 when we all meet our firey doom.

    There is no epoch after this. This is the end.

    I'm glad I could make your day brighter. :)


  • Im performing an experiment on my laptop (Dell Latitude LX4100D) to take windows to the 49.7 day mark. Im already up to 34 days. Check out the page here. [uidaho.edu]

    Its got an uptime counter on it, as well as a research-paperesque introduction page.

    -----------------------------------
    Whats so hot about chili?
  • 2037-2039!!! Isn't that about when the clocks run out?
  • While I may be running a particular app in 2038, I seriously doubt i'll be running NT v4.0, or my current linux which only does 32bit, or even a 32-bit cpu.

  • What an optimist. You'll probably be hit by a bus tomorrow!

  • He daren't go out. He'll get killed!

  • No, you'll hit my car...
  • Has that been fixed in 2.6? I hope so...
  • Watch out for that inverse error (or whichever logical fallacy this is). Just because it happened in a movie doesn't mean it can't happen in real life too. Of COURSE, it's not any more or less likely to happen because they made a movie about it than if they hadn't!
  • Does anybody remember the episode where there was an asteroid headed for a planet, and they were trying to tractor-beam the thing off course, and somebody suggested blowing up the asteroid, but Data said that all that would do is disintegrate the asteroid, but it would still have the same mass except be made up of tons of smaller particles? That seemed to make sense to me, and contradicts the two horrible movies of this summer. Of course, I don't usually base my opinions on TV, but the point seems valid. So we can't blow it up, what the hell could we do?

    Deep Impact was much worse than Armageddon, I thought. Everybody died except the people I had hoped would

    -Begin Evan's Dumb Signature.....

  • Wow, I guess that other posting about hackers being anti-social misfits was right - you sure seem to prove the point.

  • Is it just me or have we seen this crap in old movies such as: Armageddon, Deep Impact, and so on? Why do we worry it won't happen.
  • i would say that it is even smaller than smaller than fairly small
  • I remember hearing a stat that at any given time, only 10 percent of the sky is being observed. (Sorry, no source). Not much money is spent on this.
  • >Sometimes I really believe that if you don't think about it, it's really not a threat.

    In the last sixty million years, it seems like there has been at most one truly planet-affecting asteroid collision: the one that may have doomed the dinosaurs. More recently, there was a doozy that carved a sizeable crater in Arizona about 50,000 years ago, and one in Siberia about 100 years ago; no doubt there were a number of others over that same time period. There's no reason to believe that asteroid collisions will change in their frequency, so a truly world-affecting asteroid should be an extremely rare event based on previous history. A Siberia class one is rather more likely, but the question is just how much of our resources do we devote to something that we may not be able to detect in time anyway, may not be able to stop anyway, and may have the unfortunate side-effect of making us even better at killing each other? Reagan's Star Wars speech was in 1983, and 16 years and billions of dollars later it still hasn't come close to realization. I can't see a system that has to go far out into space and blow up something huge (and spread the debris far and wide) doing a whole lot better.
  • Please don't call it World War III. "World War III" has traditionally referred to a nuclear exchange between superpowers, while the present situation would more likely lead to a fully-informed air- and ground-forces escalation than to the panicked, uninformed, "get them before they get us" escalation to nuclear exchange of the classic WWIII scenario.

    Given the political importance in the present conflict of international bodies such as NATO and the UN, as well as ethnic and political factions within nation-states, it seems like the present situation would more likely escalate into something resembling a global civil war.

    Besides, "Global Civil War" is what it was called in Robotech. Maybe the "asteroid" is really the SDF-1. :)
  • Ya, but the biggest trouble would in the licensing of the planet.


    The Open Earth Initiative (OEI) would write an open letter stating their belief in the new Living Earth Public License (LEPL).


    The Free Space Foundation (FSF) will challenge the OEI's position while claiming that they're not against some company from selling space ships for the great exodus, but that it is necessary for all people to have free access to shuttles. The bar service and food service would cost though.


    "Free Shuttle, not Free Beer" they're heard to say.


    They also insist that since the actual shuttles are licensed under the GPL as derived works (from a GNU editor in the 20th century - see: emacs), that the destination planet be called GNU/World.


    There are currently 15 licenses in the making, and no real work has commenced outside of angry letters and a couple small border skirmishes. The Asteroid is now easily visible in the day sky in the northern hemisphere.


    The latest trajectory reports place the impact in the Western United States near Seattle Washington.

  • This will happen on 5-5-2000.

    But the planets' gravitational pull on our planet is smaller than the moon's, so planetary alignment cannot cause global catastrophe.

    The last time an alighnment similar to the 5/5/2K event happened was like 2-4-1963, and somehow the planet survived. Also there was an April-1982 alignment that was supposed to destroy us as well.
  • I've heard several dates for it:
    12-22-2011, 12-23-2011, 12-23-2012, and 12-24-2012.

    Don't know which is correct
  • There's always the chance that our war heads will slightly alter the path, and make a collision with earth more likely.
  • You forgot the pole shift of 5-5-1900!

  • Two things come to mind: A Jupiter sized asteroid could not crash into earth, earth would crash into it. For an idea of relative sizes, take a basketball and a large (shooter marble).

    Also, I'm sure that a Jupiter-sized asteroid would be considered a 'planet'
  • The scientific community will not be taken seriously on this for thirty years, then a five year study will take place, then remaining four years, special interests will stall the project.
  • So, now that the Soviets went to that great James Bond villian scene in the sky (Stalin is having cocktails with Ernst Blofeld right about now) we now get to sit around and fret about the 'cosmic hammer' doing us in like it did the dinosaurs.

    Actually, I think this fits human tendencies really well. Besides hitting on the human fear of sudden death, I think down deep most folks like the idea of 'we were such kings of the globe, it took a COSMIC DISASTER to do us in!!!'. I think some must also like the idea of our fossilized bones being dug up one day, mounted in museums, and captioned with tidbits like 'they once ruled the earth...'.

    Oh well... if we really wind up having to depend on a yutz like Bruce Willis to save us, maybe being a set of fossilized remains isn't so bad after all...
  • How do you get random information out of emacs?
  • That was one of the sillier things in that movie. "The size of Texas" puts the asteroid at somewhat bigger (1.5 to 2 times, IIRC) than the asteroid Ceres, largest known in our solar system.
    There's no way you're going to blow that up with any mere collection of nukes, and even if you did, there's no way to avoid having a rain of multi-mile wide chunks falling on you anyway. (Consider - the size of Texas - call it a diameter of 600 miles - means about 40 million mile-wide chunks, distributed evenly).

    The other asteroid movie - "Deep Impact" - at least had the physics a bit more reasonable.
  • What a comet. Apollo asteroids come close periodically but we have had the same orbit for millions of years as have they and I would think that we would have been hit by the ones that will hit us by now, the orbits would have to be just perfectly skewed so that we could orbit for millions and millions of years before an impact. I'd worry more about a comet, they find new ones all the time. A comet has much much more kinetic energy than an asteroid so a smaller comet could hit us and mess things up pretty bad.

    Like that Shoemaker-Levy commet, it screwed up Jupiter's crap. The largest recorded explosive release of energy man has ever witnessed (other than the Crab (or was it the horse?) nebula which burned as bright as the sun during day light for a couple weeks a little over 1000 years ago, can you imagine seeing two suns for a couple weeks? That was a spiritual experience back in those days...)

    I would think that the odds of a comet hitting the planet would be pretty good compared to asteroids. It would/will be crazy too, people are packing up and heading for the hills because of y2k, imagine what would happen when they get on the news and say a comet is heading for us and it looks like it will get her in about 6 months...

  • It's true. And if you've spent your whole life looking at the stars waiting to be a real live professional astronomer, are you going to want to look for rocks that might hit the earth or are you going to want to look at starts and galaxies?

    Planet killer asteroids only have to be about a cubic mile in size and with the very best telescopes they can be extremely difficult to see. Some of them orbit the sun in really odd planes and we have to practically stare at the sun to see them, it's very difficult to do.

  • Hmmm.. 2039. That makes me about 64 years old. About 9 years after my pension matures.

    Let's see.. 9 years of Golf, seeing the sights, watching daytime 3D-TV, and complaining about how things were better in my day.

    Yep. I'll be (a) bored enough by then, and (b) have the money to take a cruise to the Bahamas and watch the fireworks about three seconds before I'm nuked.

    That's if I haven't died of sexual exhaustion (here's hoping), or more likely unfitness and cardiac arrest by then.

    Ah well, it's been a hard day. Perhaps I'm being cynical. =)
  • I long for a world of Open Source orbits and a non-monopolistic galaxy where I am free to live on the planet of MY choice, not the planet I was pre-installed on!

  • Somewhat? (Score:3)

    by raistlinne ( 13725 ) <lansdoct@NoSpAm.cs.alfred.edu> on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @01:53PM (#1935966) Homepage
    Somewhat consists of something like 500 billion years, if I got the calculations correct. Let's see, 2^64seconds * 1minute/60seconds * 1hour/60minutes * 1day/24hours * 1year/356.25days == ; + 1970 (to adjust for the fact that the UNIX date starts january 1st, 1970) == 584,542,048,061. So for those of us on Alphas (and some other platforms), the date will run out some time in the year 584,542,048,061. 584,542,048,061 - 2039 (to be generous) == 584,542,046,023. You call a difference of 584,542,046,023 years "somewhat"?!?
  • Only if you're on a 32bit system. Those of us fortunate enough to run Alphas (and some other architectures, but I forget them at the moment) should be good until the year, hm, I forget the calculation, but it's something like 500 billion, or so.

  • Please remember to init 0 your machines! (Score:3)

    by jerodd ( 13818 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @03:28PM (#1935968) Homepage
    It might be a good idea to set up a cron job or something similar to make sure you shutdown your system before the asteroid hits. (Perhaps we could include `doomsday.chron' and then use rdist(8) to distribute that file from a central astronomical observatory.) We want to avoid filesystem corruption on the last disks/machines ever to exist.

    I'm personally far more worried about spending the rest of my life under opressive government rule (like 99% of the world's past denizens have spent their lives) than I am about sudden destruction. Hey, it ends quickly; persecution doesn't.

  • The important part (Score:3)

    by Fizgig ( 16368 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @01:16PM (#1935969)
    The important part of the article:


    None of these encounters can result in an impact, except one in August 2039: the probability that the true asteroid actually follows a collision course for that date is less than the probability of being hit by an undiscovered asteroid within any given day.

    There, we can go back to worrying about the ones we can't see.

  • probably not (Score:3)

    by JEP ( 28735 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @01:14PM (#1935970) Homepage

    ...August 2039: the probability that the true asteroid actually follows a collision course for that date is less than the probability of being hit by an undiscovered asteroid within any given day.

    Given this, I fail to see the big deal.

    --

  • Don't dismiss the article! (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Shepherd ( 17338 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @01:24PM (#1935971) Homepage
    It's pretty hard to worry about something we can't see =)

    But this asteroid we can see...

    And it passes close enough to our own planet that they perturb each other, and it passes nearby often enough in the next 600 years that we cannot predict if it will hit us or not, or when.

    After each near miss, of course, we can observe the movement of the asteroid and get a better understanding of its motion, but until it misses we actually don't know if it's going to hit!

    And I quote
    "Among the possible orbital solutions
    there are some that undergo a close approach in August 2027, but no impact is possible. However, the period of the asteroid may be perturbed in such a way that it returns to an approach to the Earth at either of the possible encounter points."

    It goes on to note that their accuracy isn't good for more than a decade after each pass, and that each successive pass makes it worse...

    Not something you want to ignore when there is a greater danger from it, than say, Y2k or something...

    AS

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