So, there’s a 1 in 45,000 chance that we’re going to get hit by the Apophis asteroid in 2036.
Apophis would pass through a “gravitational keyhole”, a precise region in space no more than about 400 meters across, that would set up a future impact on April 13, 2036. This possibility kept the asteroid at Level 1 on the Torino impact hazard scale until August 2006. It broke the record for the highest level on the Torino Scale, being, for only a short time, a level 4, before it was lowered.
I believe that’s an election year. Probably just Republican fear tactics. We’re also possibly going to be screwed by gamma ray bursts. And then there’s that whole “sun becomes 30x bigger and a thousand times brighter” thing that will turn us into briquettes. I’m in an apocalyptic mood tonight. We’re all doomed anyway. Who cares you who vote for…
Bruce Willis will probably be dead.
In all seriousness though, Apophis is going to pass by Earth in 2029 – so close that you will be able to see it with the naked eye. No binoclars or telescope required. I think about this stuff all the time. Again, seriously, who do you think would be the presidential candidate that would consider these scenarios and do something about them? I get that no candidate has that level of scientific knowledge, but is there anyone out there who would say, “Yeah, NASA (or whomever). Here’s a few billion bucks to work with. Figure out a way to destroy an asteroid or deflect a gamma ray burst.” Personally, I don’t think any candidate, D or R, even cares about this crap. I think it is very real, and very much worth considering as an issue.
demimondian
And it’s a trifecta!
Michael D., there is, in fact, a division of NASA tasked with solving that very problem. The problem? There’s no operation we can do which would make things better, as we have no technology with which we could make sure that an asteroid would not be deflected into the Earth.
David Hunt
I don’t think that there’s anything remotely possible to do about a gammaray burst in our current understanding of science except to not be there when it hits. So, Ad Astra! Find a habitable planet in another solar system and get that generational ship built.
OTOH, I expect that we could figure out a half-dozen ways to change the course of an asteroid to avoid it hitting the Earth. I’m not sure that they’d be legal (I think we’ve got treaties against the weaponization of space), but I bet we could do if we had the politcal will. If nothing else, I bet we could land an unmanned probe with an atom bomb on an asteroid and then detonate it. Even if it didn’t destroy the asteroid, it should change its course…which could easily turn out to be the more desirable outcome anyway. As asteroid that has be blown to pieces would shatter in an unpredictable fashion and some of the pieces might hit us anyway.
Just my two cents.
Jon H
The Republican answer will be to calculate how much money they can steal from the taxpayers and transfer to the rich before the end of the world.
TheFountainHead
To answer your question honestly, and I’m sure there are more than a few out there who would vociferously disagree with this, but of all the candidates that I would want in the hotseat for an Apocalyptic scenario, I would have to choose Obama. He’s the only candidate that strikes me as the type who could really rally the kind of support necessary from all sides to mount any sort of effective strategy. At least, I don’t think the visceral reaction of the other side of the aisle would be, “Well this situation is just your point of view, and besides, it’s your fault anyway!”
Just my gut reaction.
tBone
What, are you kidding? Huckabee all the way, man. I’ll do what it takes to get my ass Raptured out of here before the asteroid hits, even if means voting Republican.
El Cid
Ronald Reagan would have deflected the asteroid with no more than a folk homily, a gentle laugh, followed by a stern warning and a steely visage.
Ted
The gamma ray burst possibility is so remote, you might as well worry about the Andromeda galaxy eventually colliding with our own in 2-3 billion years. Not to mention, as David Hunt mentioned above, there’s nothing even in the realm of science-fiction you could do to avoid it if it’s pointing at you. But that requires a supernova, black hole-producing stellar collapse, or other GRB event to be oriented so perfectly as to fire one of the two beams almost precisely at the earth.
Now the asteroid threat; that we are definitely being stupidly negligent in not developing multiple plans that are ready to go within a year or two’s notice. And not bothering to have the government fund the scouring of the skies to get that notice.
Ted
Correction, it’s being government-funded to a modest degree right now I believe, and if I remember correctly, the funding hilariously started after Deep Impact and Armageddon came out.
Randall Shane
Actually, there are several possible things that can be tried to deflect an asteroid. Blowing up an H-bomb is unlikely to destroy the asteroid, since it takes a LOT of energy to do that, and 100 MT H-bombs are a few orders of magnitude off. However, if buried correctly, you might be able to eject enough mass from the asteroid in the blast to deflect it. Another idea is to put (relatively) low-thrust ion engines on the asteroid, running over several years.
Of course, any of these schemes need to be thoroughly tested next decade (probably on small asteroids from the Asteroid Belt) to have any confidence in them. We also need a vastly expanded survey program. A crash program in 2030 isn’t going to work.
Gamma ray bursts? Probably the best (and probably the only) method is to not be within a few thousand light years of a supernova whose axis of rotation is within 30 or so degrees of pointing towards us. Hard to arrange — deflecting an asteroid is within our technological grasp, althgough tremendously resource-intensive. Spreading humanity over a several-thousand light year radius so that some might survive? That we not only do not have the technology to do, but we don’t even have any half-sensible, half-whacko theories on how it might be done.
Don’t worry about gamma-ray bursts, ’cause there nothing we can do.
dougie smooth
Riiiight. They can just leverage all that fancy Missile Defense Shield technology we paid so many billions for.
Brachiator
My gut feeling is that someone like Obama might be just the person to think the problem through and come up with a reasonable solution. Most of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates would declare war on the asteroid and blast it to bits, even though their science advisors might have warned that doing so would create millions of projectile particles that would cut through and destroy all our communications satellites or might create a cloud that would move towards Earth and disrupt the climate. Presidents who wouldn’t do anything until the baby Jesus has whispered an answer in their ear (Dubya, Huckabee) would ignore any scientist who was not born again, ensuring the destruction of the planet. A Mitt Romney type would have flip-flopped so many times on the issue that it would be too late to do anything when he finally made a decision. Curiously, I am not sure what a Ron Paul might do, though I think that whoever was smart enough to ask an Al Gore might have half a chance at getting at the best answer.
But we would also need a president capable of “thinking outside the box,” would would consider that even deciding to deflect the asteroid away from Earth might then shove it into the path of another planet with life forms, so the answer might end up being deflecting it but attaching some kind of warning beacon that might alert another civilization.
Can we vote for a James T. Kirk, someone who could say, “Hell, if I could beat the Kobayashi Maru scenario, dealing with an approaching asteroid is a piece of cake.”
RSA
Jesus, with all the garbage in the world, you spend your time thinking about asteroids hitting the Earth?
Seriously, though, 1 in 45,000 is surprisingly high. For example, it’s only three or four time less likely than your winning $100 in the PowerBall lottery (and about a thousand times more likely than hitting the jackpot), and how many people spend time daydreaming about that? A lot, I’d guess.
Jen
O/T.
This is a worthy cause.
rachel
It’s too bad Alma Geddon hasn’t updated her site of apocalyptic prophecies since 2003. Still, if you haven’t seen it, it’s good for a giggle or five.
Snarkilicious
Even if it were 100% certain that Apophis hits the Earth in 2036, I’m not so sure that much would be done to avert the disaster.
Figure 15-20 years of deriding “asteroid alarmists” as wild-eyed nutcases that want to trash our economy for their pet project. Another 6 years of bitter argument over what to do, who can extract a profit from it, etc. A few years of frantic and chaotic thrashing around after all the good options have been wasted. Then BOOM.
And God, if he exists, looks down and shakes his head, while muttering
It’s spelled “pessimism”; it’s pronouced “realism”.
jake
In a situation where we were irrevocably screwed, I’d just want who ever was in charge to say: “Since the dawn of mankind our ancestors have wondered how the end of the world will look. Well, guess what? We’re about to find out. Don’t be dicks or big babies about it and use it as an excuse to hurt people.”
If he (or she) looked at his watch and added “Looks like the Rapture has been canceled,” just to piss of the TalEvan, that would be cake.
Kynn
Does Michael D ever post about real issues or just about, like, asteroids and Fair Tax and other fantasy things?
Oh, wait, right, he’s a gay Republican. His whole political experience is a fantasy.
FAIR TAX FAIR TAX LOL
canuckistani
Why worry about GRB’s when you can worry about rogue black holes wandering into the solar system? I’m not going to worry about Apophis until they see what the modified orbit will be after the penultimate pass. Actually, I think it they 2029 pass will be a dmaned cool thing to see and I’m looking forward to it.
Peter Johnson
Is Al Gore going to make a movie about this? Maybe call it An Inconvenient Asteroid ? I’m sure the Academy would applaud such an effort.
John Thullen
Today’s Republican Party, led by their merry band of rugged Polyannas, would view a direct hit by an asteroid as a buying opportunity.
To be sure, they would campaign against gummint doing anything to rescue the human race, figuring if it can’t be done by the private sector, than it isn’t necessary.
They might go along with tax credits and letting the churches volunteer to shoot the asteroid out of the sky.
Tom Tancredo would be afraid the asteroid might be transporting illegal aliens. The rest of the motley unAmerican Republican crew would accuse we do-gooders and bleeding hearts of astromical elitism and pork-barrel spending.
Whoopy Goldberg and Larry Kudlow would whine about the fact that EVERYONE is going to die and the government will get all of their DEATH%$@$! taxes.
Glenn Beck would rail against the asteroid hoaxers as the sharp point of the asteroid came through the ceiling of his studio and struck him on the forehead and splatted him, mid-sentence, and the rest of us into pixie dust.
More would happen, but I’m tired now.
Perry Como
I smell a new meme full of lulz.
wasabi gasp
Tell ’em there’s brown people on it looking for jobs on sanctuary planet.
srv
What the Asteroid doesn’t finish, the Unix time-bug will.
Or maybe you should let Tim stick to the science stuff.
myiq2xu
Will we be out of Iraq by then? How much of the Bush deficit will we still owe?
PeterJ
Huckabee channelling Ronald Reagan FTW.
And God will. Or Reagan. By 2036 from a republican viewpoint they will be inseparable.
Psycheout
Yeah, he could probably smoke that rock. That would be heavy, man.
4tehlulz
We must fight Eta Carinae over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.
Bombadil
Thanks, Kynn — you beat me to it.
Chris
I’d like to give props to NASA for naming this thing “The Apophis Asteroid.” That’s pretty cool. I’d hate for 2035 to roll around, only to have to scream “My God! Asteroid M-219 Zeta is going to kill us all.”
I am pro-naming potentially murderous celestial objects after Egyptian Demons.
myiq2xu
And if we block the gamma rays and divert the asteroid, guess what?
We’re all gonna die someday anyway!
Buck
The trick is not to get so caught up in April 13, 2036 that we forget about 12/21/2012.
grumpy realist
Actually, considering I’ll be 75 at that point, I think getting hit by an asteroid is a pretty neat way to go.
And don’t we have to worry about the caldera under Yellowstone erupting into a supervolcano first?
4tehlulz
Apophis will hit Mexico, and the resulting tremors will set off the Yellowstone supercaldera, completely fucking us all.
Michael
So Bruce Willis may be gone, but Ben Affleck is the one you need to save the day.
Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms.
Aunt Onio
An aerospace engineering lecturer at the University of Glasgow spent two years doing a study of this very thing.
From nine different asteroid deflection methods he studied, he concluded that the most efficient one – and most launch-ready – was one called “mirror bees”. Depending on the size of the rock, it entails sending a group of satellites equipped with mirrors that swarm around an asteroid. The sun’s rays are reflected onto the asteroid with the mirrors in order to vaporize one small section, which will theoretically release a stream of gases to propel it off course. [NYT Mag Dec 09, 2007]
I’m with you Michael D., I think this is a very worthwhile problem to have solved and sitting on the shelf ready to go.
Faux News
Damn, that is a few days before my 76th birthday. So much for my AARP discount at Dunkin Donuts :-(
Cyrus
Seconded. It really makes me miss the first few seasons of Stargate: SG-1.
Librarian
Even if the asteroid doesn’t hit us, and the Yellowstone caldera doesn’t erupt, we’ll just have settle for global warming to cause global catastrophe.
Ed Drone
“So, there’s a 1 in 45,000 chance that we’re going to get hit by the Apophis asteroid in 2036.”
Well, now we know at least two things:
When the Halliburton and Blackwater no-bid contracts will run out, and
When we will no longer have troops in Iraq.
Ed
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Like the Death Star I’m building in my basement?
canuckistani
They used up all the cool mythological names for asteroids years ago. Now astronomers can pretty much name them what they want, which accounts for (793) Arizona, (9431) GraceKelly, and (9007) James Bond (note the last 3 digits in the id). I’ll just be happy if the earth isn’t destroyed by (19367) Pink Floyd, though (18610) Arthurdent might be an appropriate choice.
See here for hours of nerdy fun.
Cyrus
Hmmm, I see a whole lot of first names are mentioned. We should start going by the numbers of asteroids named after us. That would make me 7209.
Zifnab
Man, a smart Dem pol should have leveraged the ever-living hell out of the “missle shield” by now. “Hey guys! Remember when we were supposed to be pissing ourselves from Soviet ICBM Nuclear Death Machines? Turns out all they need was a suitcase and a plane ticket to turn half of America into a giant smoking crater. Republicans have been taking you for a ride since 1980. Cheers.”
Dreggas
The scary part is that asteroids do have the potential to do some serious damage to earth and have done so in the past see event, tunguska and dinosaurs, extinction of. What’s even scarier is that there are all of 10 people really studying this seriously and we don’t even no half of the NEO’s (Near Earth Objects) out there.
Yellowstone is something else we should be prepared for because, contrary to the 6k earther’s it went off 630,000 years ago and was believed to go off…every 630,000 years.
The gamma ray part I am not overly concerned about. The ones we observe now are happening an incredibly huge distance away and the likelihood of it happening in our neighborhood is pretty slim.
12/21/2012 the day that marks the end of time according to the mayan calendar and according to other prophecies will be interesting to say the least. I believe there was another asteroid scheduled to come close in 2009 that could possibly have it’s orbit shifted enough to hit earth in 2012, they even gave a rough date…take a guess what that is?
The bottom line is humanity isn’t even close to working together to prevent our own extinction and sadly we probably never will be because you’ll always have the rapture nuts praying for it and the morons with a 6th grade education denying it could even happen.
Seanly
ahh, we had a good run. Made some good art, some cool buildings, some good music, but wasted a lot of our time squabbling over stupid things.
I’ll be 68. So I could either go in the Big Smushdown or be the wise leader of a pack of post-apocalyptic survivors.
Dreggas
I’m tempted to buy and renovate one of those old gov’t bomb shelters they’re selling.
canuckistani
I’ll be Humungous’ mouthpiece/flunky from Road Warrior.
sadysadfihgakjbfv
It’s only 250 Meters wide, so that only kills a city, maybe a county. Not a State, and definitely not civilization, so who cares? Fox news would put up a chyron ” Asteriod hit opens opportunity?” or ” Liberals want end of world asteroid to hit” or something similar.
You think the candidates (gop especially) whom use ‘terrorism’ as a campaing issue would be able to hold back their glee about something else big & bad to scare you with?
So this is what ANY candidate running now would do if it were comming – nothing
No goper would either comprehend, nor believe it was happening, and the dems would be to scared to get criticized by the gop (& by default, their media) to do anything.
Then we would lose Iowa
Bombadil
Oh, man, can I be Tina Turner’s assistant?
jack fate
Eh. . . if it hits, it hits. I’d rather waste money on things like food for starving people and such. I wonder if people really spent time thinking about how tenuous our existance in the universe is, they might be a little more compassionate?
Tony Alva
For me, there is one man, and one man only who could divert this asteroid and save mankind; His name is Chuck Norris.
Nuff said…
Pb
In that case, you just have to find someone wonky enough. Gore, definitely. Kerry, maybe? Dodd? Kucinich. Then again, Kucinich would also be all like, “have as much as you want to work towards world peace”–and we can’t have that, now, can we…
LiberalTarian
Huh. Well, guess we don’t need to worry about global warming, overpopulation, or the imploding hydrocarbon economy, eh?
Funny, I just saw Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer last night at Barnes and Noble. Crazy timing. It must be a sign from The Flying Spaghetti Monster. ;o)
Tony J
Yup. Because when we divert it in 2036 with state-of-the-art wormhole technology, some shit-witted placeman at the Global Space Defence Authority will enter the codes wrong and send Apophis, the deep-space craft projecting the wormhole, and it’s entire crew, back to 4000 BC, where they’ll watch the asteroid skimshot Earth’s atmosphere before landing in Egypt to start up civillisation, bringing with them a crazy story that becomes a myth about a terrible, dark demon called Apophis and the magic-wielding gods who bravely fought him off, before settling down to marry Egyptian princesses and build these insane triangular buildings called pyramids.
Fucking temporal paradoxes, they give me a headache.
John Spragge
Hey, how do you know the Yellowstone supercaldera needs any help from an asteroid? It might just kill all of us by its lonesome.
canuckistani
Everything is a sign from His Noodly Presence, including this comment. You just need to know how to interpret them. I think they mean pasta for dinner.
r€nato
if the GOP is in charge, Halliburton will get the contract to destroy the asteroid, the program will be administered for the government by Heritage Foundation interns, Halliburton will get a $10 trillion contract to do the job, and they’ll totally fuck it up or not actually get any work done on the job.
But, there won’t be any life on Earth around afterwards to hold the toothless Democratic congressional hearings.
Do I have it about right?
Dreggas
I know, for that one they’ll need Pierce Brosnan AND Tommy Lee Jones…
Dreggas
you forgot the gang raping of female employees and the area they are working in being declared a “responsibility for criminal activity non-existent” zone.
Delia
Didn’t they already take care of this on Stargate SG-1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophis_(Stargate)?
Except that Apophis got to wear a cool cheesy costume and it took the team ages to defeat him.
Delia
Those damn link things never work right for me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophis_(Stargate)
Delia
Still didn’t. Put the stargate part in your browser if you care
Circe
embrace mass extinction! there’s a 50-50 chance that earth’s next intelligent life form will have resolved the problem of the dumbfuck gene!
LiberalTarian
No, the dumbfuck gene is permanent. No amount of howling and gnashing of teeth will do anything about it.
MNPundit
O’Neill cyllinders as a method to prepare the colonization of space. We CAN’T survive a gamma ray burst, we probably couldn’t even detect it more than a few minutes before it hit.
The best method for deflecting the asteroid is to “nudge” it aside with a nuke to follow a different trajectory. If we were able to project better, we probably would need to do it in 2029.
Nice that it’s named Apophis though, the SG-1 head villain for 5 years.
Gary Farber
There is absolutely no doubt that every right-thinking person, liberal or conservative, should call for more funding for Stargate SG-1. Protecting the solar system is fundamental.
I also call for massive funding of alternative time exploration platforms, as well as hyperspace exchanges, warp drives, and quantum alternities.
Not to mention support of Stargate Atlantis.
Lastly, we must fully fund both the war against the Ori, and the war against the Wraith.
It’s the only way to be sure.
Gary Farber
I mean, people, can’t we all get together on this?
BIRDZILLA
How about a asteriod smashing into SAN FRANCISCO or WASHINGTON D.C. anyway you have it both those places are corupt and maybe HOLLYWOOD as well