Now THIS Is What Scares The Piss Out Of Me!

WTF??? That's two near-misses in as many days!

Forget about all the petty squabbling over politics and the economy. If just one of these fuckers sneaks past us, it's game over for Planet Earth. The fact that there isn't a single government on the planet that is fervently working to develop a system to protect us is quite telling in the level of stupidity that has infected today's society.

Someone get Bruce Willis on the phone, stat!!!

It's probably just debris arriving ahead of the big-ass rock that's gonna fix all our problems.

Not from rocks that small. Though the bigger one would have made a very impressive crater and caused a lot of damage if it had touched down.

A .25KM diameter asteroid hitting the ocean would create a tsunami the size of the one that hit Fukushima.

Holy fuk!

There's all sorts of stuff like that that could wipe us out without much, if any warning. Best not lose too much sleep over it, because if any of them happen, there isn't much anyone could do about it.

69 Feet is the length of a rail car.

If you think a 69 foot asteroid would be "game over" for earth you're smoking crack.

69 feet? that's either going to be one pissed off city block, or one wet coast, depending on where it hits and how much burns off in atmosphere, not an extinction level asteroid

This has been a problem for mankind throughout its history. And with the exceptions of Tunguska and the Biblical destruction of Soddam and Gomorrah, we've been pretty damn lucky to not have gotten ourselves wiped out by an asteroid impact.

But what pisses me off is that here we are in the 21st Century, and our space agencies are being GUTTED. We have the technology to develop an anti-asteroid defense, whether it be nukes to blast smaller asteroids to booster rockets to push the big ones out of the way. But as a society we don't have the will do to anything about it. Our politicians are too busy appeasing the masses and grabbing for power, when they should be tasking our military and Space Agencies to get a system up and operational ASAP.

No, but it would take out all of lower Manhattan, or kill thousands (if not millions) of people if it hit the right target.

And what happens if a 69 mile-long asteroid falls on us?

It's from all you fuckers trying to summon the gorram Asteroid! Quit calling it, no matter how fucked up things get!!!

[action=Uncle Albert]wishes for it even harder. [/action]

Actually, there's lots we could do about it, even without going all Bruce Willis on the thing. Evacuating the coastal areas when you know a .25KM asteroid is heading your way would save a lot of lives.

And a rock that size would have about 1700 times the mass of the biggest of the two that just "near missed" us. Which is why I said that there is no way even the biggest of them would imply a planet-wide disaster.

But the big one still could have made quite a mess locally, wherever it touched down.

How do you know what it's mass would be? Could be made of corbomite for all you know.

I had Spock do a rough estimate for me.

Spock said no, we don't need to worry about that.

Are you doubting Spock's word?

Jellystone!!!

Regardless, can we send Bruce Willis to an asteroid just on general principles?

How 'bout you just send Liv Tyler to my house, and we call it even?

Lots we could do about small asteroids, maybe. But that wasn't what I was saying. There's lots more things out there that could wipe us out that there is absolutely nothing we could do about it. A large coronal mass ejection, for one.

And by the way, isn't there a program or programs out there that are constantly monitoring these asteroids? Like anything else, it's a question of cost/benefit ratio. Some small ones might get through and do significant damage, but it's unlikely an extinction level one would go undetected, so we would have lots of time to do something about it.

I had a short dream once in which The earth suddenly (like instantly) tilted to the point where it rotated along the equator as it's axis instead of the poles. Oh, and it was spinning about 100 times faster too.
It was less than pleasant to say the least.

The earth's magnetic field also tends to "flip" every so often and I believe it's due. But I don't think it's known how long that process takes or what it entails. That could be a problem...

I could have sworn that the program "the universe" has said something to the effect that a very high percentage (99+) of the extinction level asteroids have been catalogued. I honestly don't know.

But if you want to sleep a little less soundly at night, watch "the universe" on H2. They are constantly talking about/showing all the ways the earth could be doomed.

There's been talk of the Earth's poles shifting in the past (the actual poles, not the magnetic poles). Even if the earth's axis shifted a few percentage points, it would be a complete disaster. The icecaps would melt before they refroze in their new configuration, and in that time the coastal flooding would be catastrophic.

Anyone wanna do calcs and determine if spinning "100 times faster" would rip the earth apart?

One revolution would take 14 minutes and 24 seconds.

I guess the calc needed is what the centrifugal force would be at the rim of a wheel 8,000 miles in diameter rotating in this time.

If it exceeds 1g, earth would disintigrate.

Even if it doesn't exceed it, but is a major fraction of it, earth would reshape itself into an ovoid shape instead of the near-sphere it is today, with a new equilibrium shape based on the opposing forces of gravity and centrifugal force.

To anyone on the surface of the earth, at any given point on the new ovoid earth's surface, the ground underneath would still appear to be "down" and level, but the process of the reshaping would cause cataclysms the like of which the earth has never seen. Miles-high tsunamis, earthquakes beyond measure on the richter scale, ancient extinct volcanoes belching to life all over the place. You get the idea.

Why?
You believe in an afterlife, right?