1 Good Lt.,
I for one don't believe the Almighty Creator put us on this plant just to watch us get whacked by a meteor.
I think He's got other plans for us :-)

2 This "cosmic catastrophes" gibberish is too Al Gorish for me.
 
You post too much useless shit, Good Leftenant.

3 As long as we're looking for things to scare us into wetting our pants, how about Yellowstone erupting?

4 A scientist named Stephen Holland left this on the gamma-ray-burst thread:


GRB 060218 was not the nearest gamma-ray burst.


That honour goes to GRB 980425, which was ten times


closer. The reality is that gamma-ray bursts are


not much of a risk to us. On would need to be very


close to use to pose a threat, and it would need to


be pointed directly at us, which is unlikely because


gamma-ray bursts are highly beamed. Worry about


Yellowstone erupting, or a comet striking us before


you worry about gamma-ray bursts.

5 Bush did it.

6 #3 nailed it. An eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera would END the United States and Canada. Period. Exclamation point. Ellipsis... ;^)

In 2036 I'll be 78, so what I'll probably do is take a lawn chair out of my ranch house in the State of Baja, pop open a US-brewed Tecate, put a US-grown lime in it, and watch the show with a line of US-distilled Heradura Reposado shots at the ready (No training wheels).

Oh, I might pop some corn for the show.

I'm wondering if the view would be better from the "States Formerly Known as Canada"?

7 I for one don't believe the Almighty Creator put us on this plant just to watch us get whacked by a meteor.

But if you read Revelation it talks of a star named "Wormwood" coming down and laying waste to the place.  Sounds like a meteor to me.

8 Note that NASA scientists want to get the UN involved in protecting us from asteroids.  Sounds like another global warming type scare in the making.  It is a wonderful opportunity for the  UN to increase its purview.
 
bb
 

9 Shit!
I've been stocking up on ammo and old C-rats in my bomb shelter,buying up all the gold I can and laying in a stock of VHS and DVD's to watch on my kerosene powered FlatScreen after the Moooooslims destroy civilization with their AllahBomb and now I gotta worry about freakin space rocks and gamma rays???
Anyone wanna chip in and build a SpaceArk???
 
DAMN YOU,DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!!!!!!!!!!

10 From what I saw on the Discovery Channel, a Yellowstone eruption would definitely be on a scale that we've never seen but not big enough to take out the US and Canada.  The researchers they quoted said a few hundred (up to 1000 maybe?) mile radius.  I just remember thinking that I was safe here in Texas.

11 FireFireFire made me giggle.

12 I can see the headline now: Asteroid hurtles toward Earth, Bush does nothing.

13 Celestial bodies are a very real danger. No other country has what it takes to counter them. Moon bases and orbital weapons platforms are a necessity.

14

I'd think a 50 megaton nuke could take out a twenty megaton rock ... . But if you wanted to save it one piece for some useful reason, you could employ a large blanket of photon-reflective material and aim some of tha new laser technology at it. It would take awhile, but I think it would still be quicker than using their 'gravity' idea. 

As far as solar/magnetic sail technology goes, some satillites are moved with versions of the same thing. So far it hasn't been used as the main propulsion system on any orbiter, but as I understand it, they have proven it works. Unless I misunderstood, this kind of technology is related to the tech behind solar panels. If that is true, why not create rolls of "solarsail" ? (remember the article on solar panel film/sheets?)  Then send up a shuttle to spread out the 'sail' and let the big rock drift sideways off course. Hit it with a big laser to speed the process. Or am I writing science fiction?

Anyway, I think we are more likely to nuke ourselves than we are to succumb to any other global danger.

USA, all the way!

15 Henny Penny!

I wonder...if we blew that shit up it would probably peg us in the ass with millions of radioactive asteroids, no?

Michael...I heard something about a "moderate" muslim recently:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariq_Ramadan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1344-2004Sep6.html

Ever heard of 'em?

16 Mike:


Large yield nukes break huge celestial bodies into multiple celestial bodies--that have the same overall trajectory. You've been watching too many movies. Blowing the big one into several chunks only exacerbates the problem.

17 Holy shit. Miracles do happen...did Jeff and I just agree on something? I think I believe in God now.

18 Osamabinpunked:


Even a moronic troll like you has to believe the truth once in a while.

19 Jeffbinlibbin:

"Even a moronic troll like you has to believe the truth once in a while."

Stop talking about yourself. It's boring and obvious.

20

Well I was thinking that if you did the math 1 ton of tnt is going to pretty much turn a one ton rock into sand. So 50 MT of nuke should blast a 20 mt rock into sand just as handily.What isn't blasted to sand might well be vaporized in the half a million degrees of heat.  Sand burns up on re-entry, and is unlikely to be an extinction event. Any chunk with appreciable mass would only be a minimal hazard as oppossed to a global threat, and even if there were more than one, they would be dispersed by the blast into a larger area. Even if the overall tradjectory isn't changed (not even a little ...?) the density of the remainder would be thinned out, and probably provide nothing more than an entertaining periodic night show.

Now until someone actually tries this, we won't be sure. So far we have movies with unrealistic effects, and ground based nuclear tests with unbelievable effects. I'm not sure how many tons of matter were vaporized by the "Tzar" bomb, but if I could locate the crater demensions, I could calculate it well enough to get an idea. Maybe I'll try that.

What about the solar sail? You just skipped right on by that part didn't you? What? Solar sails to boring?

USA, all the way!

21 MODERATE MUSLIM ??? I'll follow that, and let ya know what I think
 
Thanks.
 
 
USA, al the way!

22 Stoopid "L" Key sticking again ... USA ALLLLLL the way!

23 Michael: I haven't read everything on him yet, but you might owe me that friggin' unicorn if I found you one!

24 I already posted a unicorn. Did you want another?  USA, all the way!

25 Mike:


I've read a lot of theoretical scenarios for deflecting large celestial bodies, and few of them are encouraging when using available technology.


Explosives do not work the same way in a vacuum that they do in an atmosphere--not even nuclear ones. A vacuum cannot be compressed into waves. Most celestial bodies are moving at speeds far in excess of any missile or rocket. They are moving so fast that they're clocked at miles per second, instead of miles per hour. Not even the most powerful nukes can negate their velocity.


The prevailing theory is that they need to be deflected. At present, this cant be done from earth based launch sites. Orbital platforms and sites on other planets or asteroids are necessary. The dangerous bodies need to be struck from the proper angle, and their speed prohibits a reliable strike from planetside.


You're wrong about this one.

26 Ok Jeff ... I can accept that.  I still think the magnetic, or solar sail idea could work. It IS used on a smaller scale with satilites now, so why not develop the tech for adjusting asteroids?     USA all the way!

27 The real threat from gamma ray bursts is there potential effect on the attmosphere. While all known current causes of gamma ray (with the exception of twin neutron stars) do not exist within a close enough range to actually vaporize the Earth, there may very well be unknown ones lurking within a just a 20 or 30 light years away that would ionize our attmosphere and almost certaintly kill off mankind.
it would basically do it by obliterating the ozone layer leaving us totaly unprotected against cosmic rays (extreamly deadly forms of raidiation). The only concievable defense against this would be to build a very powerful magnetic net around the earth and some sort gas manufacturing system to replace any damage. Actually this may not be as crazy as it sounds. If even a partial technological singularity occurs sometime in the next thousand years it may very well lead to a way to easily construct such structures. I doubt we will be hit within that kind of time limit.
 
Astroids present a more subtle problem. really big astroids could be spoted with a fair degree of acuracy and preperation if we just invested a tad more into watching space. Decades of preperation would likely be enough to thwart that. But... What about smaller astroids? In the past seventy years at least three astroids big enough to obliterate New York have hit the Earth in (what used to be) remote areas. A rock hitting us like this is far more likely to come without warnig and could potentialy start a nucular war or confuse a counties missle tracking systems to the point of large scale panic. Those are the things I am worried about in the current time frame.