8 megatons is like the Tunguska impact, so not planet-destroying.
Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
161–170 of 374 posts
Re: Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're undercalling it, that would actually be completely normal. About 1 million US citizens die every 4 months (technically the number of American deaths would be quite a bit higher). The anomaly was that there were about 0.7 million surprise deaths over 12 months (some minority of which would have been caused by the COVID response itself, mind) You can look it up here - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of…
The hospitals were at their breaking point in 2022, many of my family were there. If we would have had the normal 1 million flu deaths + car accidents etc on top of the 1 million COVID deaths the health care system would have completely broken down and we would have had a couple more million deaths of things that would normally have been treatable but weren't because the health care system was broken.
That is also underselling the situation because that observation is pretty normal too. Typically hospitals are at breaking point, they're funded to roughly match demand. If anything unusual happens then they reach breaking point. In my experience in Australia we get a "hospitals at breaking point" announcement every bad flu season because they are funded to just-about cope with a bad flu season.
COVID was worse than a bad flu season by a big margin, but that doesn't change the fact that the blip was relatively small. You're going to see hospital capacity being forced to expend to more-than-COVID levels just to deal with the baseline number of oldies in the next decade.
Re: Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an open doubt whether a fully functional coffee machine is currently orbiting Venus, however one of these hypotheses is different than the other. Hint: expertise matters, evidence matters, and in a field where buildings/laws/fields of study get named after successful contrarians, a long streak of effectively unanimous consensus should not be undervalued.
The coffee machine has no implications on my current life span. It may be true, but who would waste their time caring about this? Show me the /unanimous/ consensus that this is an immediate /existential/ issue. I don't believe such a thing exists. When attempting to understand the difference between those who care about an asteroid and climate change, which was the question, this is the critical point to concern your…
by doubting, you've already ruled it out, haven't you?
95%+ is as good as it gets probably.
For starters, we know corals will be dead in the next few decades, home of 25% of all oceanic species.
The mass extinction event is underway and we aren't doing enough to stop it.
Re: Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parent mentioned Monte Carlo simulations, which allow you to simulate across a range possible scenario parameters and see what % result in some outcome (like a collision with Earth or the moon).
I'm sure there's a reason, but it seems like an unusual use of Monte Carlo - it's all deterministic and there is no opposing player making choices. Must have something to do with uncertainties in projected orbits or imperfect simulations maybe?
>it's all deterministic and there is no opposing player making choices
It's not deterministic, it's chaotic. That is the nature of the N-body problem. We can only approximate trajectories in such a system using numerical methods, within a certain margin of error. In principle, the object is gravitationally interacting with everything else in the solar system. But for the most part, most interactions are negligible and could be ignored (eg, other small objects far away), except of the large bodies. But there are many unknowns (as stated before), where initial conditions will affect the outcome of the trajectory simulation, and errors will certainly amplify over time. I'm guessing Monte Carlo is used to "fuzz" the simulations with randomised initial conditions to account for the range of unknowns, and see what the outcome is under these different scenarios.
Re: Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
#165Maybe it will start climbing in probability, giving us a chance to reflect, and to improve our ways. Since, if we're already doing Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, less than 100 years after we'd learned that Nazis are pure evil, then I'd understand if some higher power was ready to hit the reset button. Maybe tardigrades would evolve better. (ProTip: Be sure to send a second asteroid, to Mars, ahead of…
You just Godwin'ed the crap out of this thing. Congratulations, I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law#:~:text=Godwin'...
In a time when, apparently, it needs to be said that "Nazis are bad", that's the best way I can imagine to spend hard-earned HN Internet Points.
Re: Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, we already have steath aircraft that could slip in past air defenses and drop a nuke with next to no warning. We probably have a stealthy hypersonic that can also do so. That doesn't negate a nations second strike ability. 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…
Right; but if the enemy thinks that's likely to happen, it'd only take them 15 minutes to nuke that one airbase that stores all the B-2's. Strategic bomber aircraft aren't very useful weapons for superpowers fighting each other (or else we'd have a lot more B-2's). Space-based weapons (which are banned by treaty) are more like submarine-basing, in that the enemy isn't necessarily sure where they are; but, in addition…
Forgive my naivete, but do we really have the precision measurements and kT payload calibration needed to alter an asteroid's trajectory and speed to the point that we can target specific (even very large) country landmasses as the Earth's rotation exposes them to the oncoming projectile?
Re: Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure there's a reason, but it seems like an unusual use of Monte Carlo - it's all deterministic and there is no opposing player making choices. Must have something to do with uncertainties in projected orbits or imperfect simulations maybe?
The observations are not 100% certain. There are a variety of body states and configurations that might result in the same (few) pixels being lit up in the few measurements collected so far. As additional measurements are collected, some possibilities may be eliminated and the uncertainty of the trajectory can be reduced. This usually results in the impact probability converging toward 0%.
...or 100%. But yeah, the MC comes in this way. You have a current most probable value for the position and some distribution around it, depending on the precision of the measurement device etc. That can be a high-dimensional space. You draw some (many) random points from this space and propagate them all deterministically. Taking into account how likely a certain random point was in the first place, you can then estimate the hit probability.
MC is numerically approximating an integral. Here it replaces the high-dim integral over the start parameters.
Re: Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an open doubt whether a fully functional coffee machine is currently orbiting Venus, however one of these hypotheses is different than the other. Hint: expertise matters, evidence matters, and in a field where buildings/laws/fields of study get named after successful contrarians, a long streak of effectively unanimous consensus should not be undervalued.
The coffee machine has no implications on my current life span. It may be true, but who would waste their time caring about this? Show me the /unanimous/ consensus that this is an immediate /existential/ issue. I don't believe such a thing exists. When attempting to understand the difference between those who care about an asteroid and climate change, which was the question, this is the critical point to concern your…
Unanimous consensus is an impossible goal.
Overwhelming agreement among experts is as gold as standards get.
But FWIW, I don't think anyone believes that climate change is a quick duration species-existential event. Massive slow-roll geopolitical destabilization leading to societal collapse? That's definitely on the table.
Re: Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
#169It needs a pictogram to help understand how destructive 8Mt of energy is. Is this a cool light show? Worldwide extinction?
Re: Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
#170I work on the Near Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) writing simulation code which predicts which objects we will see. This one has drummed up a bit of interest due to its (relatively) high chance of impact. I actually spent quite a bit of time yesterday digging through archive images trying trying to see if it was spotted on some previous times it came by the Earth (no luck unfortunately). Since w…
Great post, thank you! Where does the uncertainty (1%) come from? For example, is it more from our ability to precisely determine the orbit based on limited observations, or is it because orbits for objects like this just aren't predictable years out, or something else?
Mesurement uncertainty when propagated over long periods of time leads to very large uncertainties, imperfect gravity models, space weather