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Working link: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/details.html#?des=2024%20Y... 8.1 megatons of kinetic energy. According to the Torino rating, only risk of “localized destruction” (less than “regional devastation”): https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/torino_scale.html
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The impact to society would be much greater on a sociological scale then on a physical scale, many nukes are more than 8Mt, the likelihood of it hitting a highly populated area is lower still.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
*megatons of TNT. 1 MT of TNT = 4.14*10^15 joules
So you wouldn't want to be under it, but a good-sized hill would be enough cover?
Just staying behind hill, will be not enough cover from shockwave, so people will suffer from fast pressure changes.
But shockwave quickly weakened as square of distance, and hill will make it's path longer. So, something like 100m hill could be considered as moving border of deadly zone 100m closer to epicenter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case, the context is "we face the same risk all the time, from asteroids we don't see." I'm not convinced that's reassuring. The Sagan paper concerns much larger asteroids, which are correspondingly more rare. For asteroids in the 8MT impact range, it doesn't make much military sense to launch deep space missions to divert them years in advance, rather than delivering nukes directly with ICBMs in minutes. Giv…
- "The Sagan paper concerns much larger asteroids, which are correspondingly more rare." That's a fair distinction—the paper predates the modern telescope surveys that are discovering all the small ones. - "rather than delivering nukes directly with ICBMs in minutes" You'd still need multiple years for those nukes to have a useful effect. (The change in velocity is instant; the change in position is not). They wouldn…
Like...starship?
> That'd probably trigger a new type of nuclear arms race.
Why on earth would there be an arms race on something designed to deliver nuclear payloads to deep space? The only way I could see that happening is if we had nuclear armed deep space colonies? (See, the expanse)
One thing to consider is that for a 55m asteroid like this one to do a lot of harm, it not only has to hit the earth, it has to hit it somewhere very populated. (only about 0.3% of the earth is very urban https://nunosempere.com/blog/2024/10/16/urban-share/)
The impact to society would be much greater on a sociological scale then on a physical scale, many nukes are more than 8Mt, the likelihood of it hitting a highly populated area is lower still.
I don't think I understand your comment. The yield of nukes is of no consequence if they're not being used, so I don't think the comparison stands?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, what I mean is: why would I use my rocket and nuke to divert an asteroid years in advance, when I can drop an 8MT nuke on you directly in 30 minutes with much more accurate targeting? One possible reason is plausible deniability, but that goes away if we have a good asteroid defense system with an emphasis on early detection.
Ah, I understand now. For one thing, you could weaponize asteroids as a second-strike response, if there's an imbalance where one superpower has asteroid deflection and one does not. Even if it's delayed by months, the certainty that the asteroid will eventually hit establishes a deterrent against attacking the asteroid-controlling country. If there's defenses against ballistic missiles, this circumvents those. For a…
Part of the reason the US, Russia and China have vast land based missile fields is to visibly show the enemy that they're gonna have to wipe out huge swaths of land with hundreds of nukes (and THEN sink our boomers) to have a successful first strike.
With the size of the asteroid, is this one where we could use the gravity tractor[1] or the Yarovsky Effect[2] techniques for deflection, or is there not enough lead time? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor 2. http://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021plde.confE.119A/abstrac...
Unfortunately, humanity now have only small power ready, for such far things just about 50kW, it will need decades to transfer so large energy.
Russians claimed to create nuclear reactor for space with somewhere near 200kW, but unfortunately, now these are just words, very far from real hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're calling it a "crisis" that people will be better informed of the risk they've always faced? Seems to me we should use that media coverage to build political support for a real asteroid defense system.
This. It’s a crucial step for our civilisation to be able to protect earth from any incoming dangers be it asteroids or Umuamua type objects. There must be a global effort with all countries to build such a system.