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NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

jpl.nasa.gov

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Re: NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

#11

Post by papito »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #5

This is HN, I can be cynical, right? Allow me to air one of my pet peeves: articles that make the threat of an asteroid collision with Earth something we should be afraid of. (Oh, and films of course.) I never understood why anyone should give it any more than even a passing thought. As a layman my understanding is that the last great extinction event from an asteroid was like (Wikipedia tells me) 66 million years ag…

The fact that it happened so long ago makes it more likely to happen sooner. Also, my understanding is that we don't really have a good grasp of what's out there outside of of the immediate vicinity of Earth. There are millions and millions of them hurling through our system. A planet-killer can show up on our radar any day.

Re: NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

#12

Post by JKCalhoun »

papito wrote: post #11
JKCalhoun wrote: post #5

This is HN, I can be cynical, right? Allow me to air one of my pet peeves: articles that make the threat of an asteroid collision with Earth something we should be afraid of. (Oh, and films of course.) I never understood why anyone should give it any more than even a passing thought. As a layman my understanding is that the last great extinction event from an asteroid was like (Wikipedia tells me) 66 million years ag…

The fact that it happened so long ago makes it more likely to happen sooner. Also, my understanding is that we don't really have a good grasp of what's out there outside of of the immediate vicinity of Earth. There are millions and millions of them hurling through our system. A planet-killer can show up on our radar any day.

Wait, isn't that the Gambler's Fallacy?

Re: NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

#13

Post by moonchrome »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #12
papito wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it happened so long ago makes it more likely to happen sooner. Also, my understanding is that we don't really have a good grasp of what's out there outside of of the immediate vicinity of Earth. There are millions and millions of them hurling through our system. A planet-killer can show up on our radar any day.

Wait, isn't that the Gambler's Fallacy?

Gamblers fallacy is about independent probably - there are cyclical natural catastrophes.

Re: NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

#14

Post by paranoidrobot »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #5

This is HN, I can be cynical, right? Allow me to air one of my pet peeves: articles that make the threat of an asteroid collision with Earth something we should be afraid of. (Oh, and films of course.) I never understood why anyone should give it any more than even a passing thought. As a layman my understanding is that the last great extinction event from an asteroid was like (Wikipedia tells me) 66 million years ag…

We don't know when the next big one is coming, because we don't have perfect knowledge of all objects in (or travelling through) our solar system.

On the scale of things to be concerned about, I'd agree that Climate Change is definitely something that we should be proportionally spending more resource on.

We have the capability of solving multiple problems at once, though - it's not an all-or-nothing thing. So I think running observation/detection systems is worth it, even with the occasional news release about significant close-approaches.

Re: NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

#15

Post by lisper »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #5

This is HN, I can be cynical, right? Allow me to air one of my pet peeves: articles that make the threat of an asteroid collision with Earth something we should be afraid of. (Oh, and films of course.) I never understood why anyone should give it any more than even a passing thought. As a layman my understanding is that the last great extinction event from an asteroid was like (Wikipedia tells me) 66 million years ag…

In between the extinction-level asteroids and the mostly harmless ones is a medium-size class of asteroids about the size of a football pitch. Those are the scary ones. They are small enough to be hard to spot, and there are enough of them that one of them hits earth every 10,000 years or so. They have not been a big deal in the past. They don't cause mass extinctions, but they are more than big enough to bring about the end of civilization. If one of them hits an ocean (which is the most likely scenario) it will cause global tsunamis that will make the Fukushima event look like a small ripple. We're talking waves many hundreds of meters high. Not a single coastal city bordering the ocean where the asteroid hits would survive.

Re: NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

#16

Post by kitsunesoba »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #14
JKCalhoun wrote: post #5

This is HN, I can be cynical, right? Allow me to air one of my pet peeves: articles that make the threat of an asteroid collision with Earth something we should be afraid of. (Oh, and films of course.) I never understood why anyone should give it any more than even a passing thought. As a layman my understanding is that the last great extinction event from an asteroid was like (Wikipedia tells me) 66 million years ag…

We don't know when the next big one is coming, because we don't have perfect knowledge of all objects in (or travelling through) our solar system. On the scale of things to be concerned about, I'd agree that Climate Change is definitely something that we should be proportionally spending more resource on. We have the capability of solving multiple problems at once, though - it's not an all-or-nothing thing. So I thin…

> We have the capability of solving multiple problems at once, though - it's not an all-or-nothing thing. So I think running observation/detection systems is worth it, even with the occasional news release about significant close-approaches.

Well said, I agree. This applies to a lot of things that people often ask, “but shouldn’t we focus on X instead?” about.

We have both the people and the resources to do multiple things at once, and we should, if only because it doesn’t help anybody to tell people who’ve spent a large chunk of their lives working on asteroid defense, rockets, crewed spaceflight, etc that their job is gone and they have to start over from scratch and work on X instead.

Re: NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

#18

Post by guerrilla »

moonchrome wrote: post #13
JKCalhoun wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, isn't that the Gambler's Fallacy?

Gamblers fallacy is about independent probably - there are cyclical natural catastrophes.

> there are cyclical natural catastrophes

That sounds very made up.

Re: NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

#19

Post by boringg »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #3

The article includes an inline embedded version of Eyes on Asteroids ( https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/asteroids/#/asteroids ), which is an amazingly impressive interactive live visualization of asteroids in the solar system. Dragging the time slider at the bottom lets you wind time backward and forward and watch the power-law relationship between orbital speed and radius (v ~ 1/sqrt(r)) in glorious fluid animation of cou…

Eros in June 2028 looks pretty close to earth.

Re: NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

#20

Post by andrehacker »

lisper wrote: post #15
JKCalhoun wrote: post #5

This is HN, I can be cynical, right? Allow me to air one of my pet peeves: articles that make the threat of an asteroid collision with Earth something we should be afraid of. (Oh, and films of course.) I never understood why anyone should give it any more than even a passing thought. As a layman my understanding is that the last great extinction event from an asteroid was like (Wikipedia tells me) 66 million years ag…

In between the extinction-level asteroids and the mostly harmless ones is a medium-size class of asteroids about the size of a football pitch. Those are the scary ones. They are small enough to be hard to spot, and there are enough of them that one of them hits earth every 10,000 years or so. They have not been a big deal in the past. They don't cause mass extinctions, but they are more than big enough to bring about…

This is an excellent way to do what-if scenarios https://neal.fun/asteroid-launcher/
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