OT: Something new to worry about

Hardly. Disaster without warning would put a substantial number of oracles, soothsayers, prophets, palm readers, clairvoyants, astrologers, conspiracy theorists, and climate model programmers, out of business. The resulting drop in alarmist literature and propaganda would seriously affect the world economy. We need to fear something ominous is approaching in order to be motivated to move forward. We also need someone or something to blame when disaster fails to appear as predicted. We can't have that happening. Therefore predictions of doom and alarmist warnings will continue normally.

What a horrible thought. I suggest you retract your warning (without warning, of course).

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Jeff Liebermann
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The idea would be to ablate a meter or so off the surface, from absorbed xrays and neutrons from a nuke some distance off. That would push the rock off course. Of course, the sooner we whack it, the less energy it takes to have it miss us.

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John Larkin   Highland Technology, Inc   trk 

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John Larkin

The amount of energy required drops dramatically if you get at the object earlier.

The better we map the stuff that might eventually hit the earth, the sooner we can get on with deflecting the stuff that would, and the smaller the change in velocity required.

Nukes on the international space station really aren't going to be helpful.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

"When a civilization-ending space rock bears down on us, this nuclear option might just save our species."

The problem with the big hammer (nuclear) solution is that it will probably break the asteroid into smaller pieces. It is sufficiently difficult to perform precision surface removal with a nuclear device on a solid asteroid. However, with a rubble pile, I would think that the nuclear solution is impossible and laser ablation to be very difficult. Fragmentation of the asteroid might be reduced by a stand off nuclear explosion, but that would ablate material from undesirable parts of the asteroid (unless we invent a way to focus a nuclear explosion). We have one try to get it right with the nuclear solution while laser ablation offers more time to fine tune the solution. If we need to do something immediately, the nuclear solution may be the only available option because we don't currently have the technology to build and launch sufficiently high power lasers. However, even the nuclear solution is currently a dubious proposition, because our delivery systems are designed for terrestrial war, and not for planetary defense.

Laser ablation.

Plenty of articles on Planetary Defense:

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Jeff Liebermann

Twaddle.

Al Gore's "Earth in Balance", published in 1992, talked about all kinds of problems that were going to get worse if we didn't do something about them.

Putting up taxes massively and immediately didn't form part of any of the s olutions he discussed.

We've dithered for nearly thirty years, and the problems have got worse.

Putting up taxes on activities that make the situation worse, and using the money to subsidise activities that improve things is one of the levers we can use to minimise the problems.

It's never been a central feature of climate change policy.

Cursitor Doom is looking at the debate through the distorting lens of right

-wing ideology, which sees government as a device for ripping money off the wealthy, and insists that government can never spend money in a useful way (except perhaps on defense and law and order, to protect the wealthy from people who might like to directly appropriate some of that wealth).

It's simple-minded idiocy, which is Cursitor Doom's trademark.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

"Unthinkable" suggests that they have stopped thinking. Instead, maybe the local communities should think some more:

"The Floating Island Project: French Polynesia"

"Megastructures - New Orleans Floating City - BBC"

"NOAH- New Orleans Arcology Habitat"

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Jeff Liebermann

There's always the nuclear-pumped X-ray laser.

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It didn't do well in the Star Wars tests, but that was quite a while ago.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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bill.sloman

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They went for Trump - 58.09% - versus Clinton - 38.45% - in 2016, so the majority clearly can't think all that well.

Their educational spending per student is $11,038 which isn't much below the US national average of $11,762, but if John Larkin is anything to go by the students need more help than most.

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Deplorable don't think well - when they think at all.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

If the smaller pieces miss us, that's OK too.

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John Larkin   Highland Technology, Inc   trk 

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John Larkin

do small bits not burn up in the atmosphere on the way down?

Reply to
tabbypurr

dB/dt determines the current that flows. A solar storm could potentially fry a lot of grid transformers and they have a long lead time. When the Earth's field is weaker the effects will be felt at lower more populous latitudes. Remote northern Canada/Alaska takes the brunt of it today.

Geomagnetic storms are a real risk for modern life. Electricity grid disruption and loss of GPS would be the most obvious problems.

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Did a fairly good analysis on the effects of a Carrington event on the UK's modern infrastructure - section 5 in their report. The famous huge flare and CME was in 1859 well before national grids but it caused plenty of big sparks from telegraph wires burning out some stations.

It isn't. The Earth's magnetic field has weakened and flipped poles many times before. It is one way they date rocks from the mid-Atlantic ridge.

However, this is the first time when there has been a massive reliance on electronic and electrical infrastructure which is potentially vulnerable to the wrong kind of CME hitting the atmosphere. GPS will be toast for a few days if they get enough warning to shut it down and completely if the CME sneaks up on us unawares. The latter is unlikely because SOHO routinely monitors the sun for any CME threats.

Mostly it means that the probability of seeing an aurora will go down in Canada and up in the UK. Canada's national grid does take hits from the bigger solar storms and has been outed a few times most serious one was abut thirty years ago - there have been a couple of near misses since:

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Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

agnetic

ons of

vided by

lly a

e.

our

s.

how?

things are cheaper when lead time is long. If they're needed in a rush one pays more and gets them faster. Unless you're suggesting that the transform er mfring capacity is 100%, ie that no-one else could make them.

t

so only some, back in the days when protection was nonexistant.

9-extreme-space-weather/

so it's already happened and we survived?

You still haven't put forward a clear means by which mass failure & consequ ent mass death could happen.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

Not likely. The New Orleans weak containment was a subject of several Congressional hearings (funding denied) and was at the top of the emergency-response watchlist at the time of the big floods.

'but' nothing! We want to take precautions against things that only kill half of everyone. Heck, we have enough excess capacity to fight against disasters that only take down fractions of a percent of 7.7 billion people: malaria, for instance, is at only a half million deaths annually, that's only 0.006% per annum.

Reply to
whit3rd

More current than they can possibly handle. The storm 30 years ago that took down a chunk of Canada did permanent damage to some. Mostly though their grid more or less protected itself by overload shutdown.

More to the point is the fact that whilst high latitude countries spend a decent amount on defence, strategy and countermeasures for magnetic storms those at mid latitudes historically have not bothered. It has become clear however that they do suffer some damage eg in Greece :

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The effects at lower latitudes will be more pronounced as the Earths magnetic field weakens. It will be good for aurora watchers though.

The manufacturing capacity is matched to the normal rate of failure and new build/replacement rate of the large scale transformer kit.

There is a serious lead time to obtain a new big transformer since the ones on the shop floor and order book are already allocated to existing customers. The highest bidder might be able to gazump some of them I suppose but the manufacturing capability is limited (and the time to set up a new factory operation to make transformers is also non-trivial).

Did a fairly good analysis on the effects of a Carrington event on the

You miss the point.

Of course. There was an even more extreme event about 2600 years ago and again around 774AD which shows up in the ice core isotopic record.

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There wasn't any electrical infrastructure to damage back then.

I am not saying there will be mass deaths. But there will be very considerable inconvenience with a worst case scenario of no national grid electricity for several months in populated regions of the globe.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown
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Martin Brown

Today,

precisely. Why would the overcurrent breakers not operate? Why would therma l protection not operate?

If I were running a national grid & lots of transformers died, I'd have a t eam of people calling every company out there that could do at least one of a) laimnated core assembly b) outer shell assembly c) wind wire d) supply the relevant materials e) supply protection wotsits

port

I expect so, it's not a topic I know about. But I do see some sizeable issu es with what you've said so far.

Does it really take months to find companies, have them manufacture goods, test them & install? If there's a will to do it quickly, no.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

Particulate material enters the atmosphere each day without being noticed. It's hard to see why it would do less damage if it was made into a conglomerate and released all its energy at one place and time.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

"60 Tons Of Cosmic Dust Fall To Earth Every Day"

The rain of small particles has a much higher surface area to mass ratio than the same amount of matter concentrated into a single large round meteorite. This higher air resistance would cause the rain of dust and small particles to burn up much higher in the atmosphere than a single meteorite. The rain of meteoric dust is also distributed over a much longer time period than a single meteorite, which makes it easier for the atmosphere to distribute the resultant heat. A single large meteorite would be sufficiently large to deliver all its energy and heat in one small part of the planet, while not providing sufficient surface area and flight time to distribute (dissipate) the heat and kinetic energy. Our atmosphere is really quite thin. A rock of any large size would hit the ground with very little loss of velocity as if the atmosphere wasn't even there. All the energy would be converted to heat as it plowed through the ground or water.

"Is it (or why is it) worse to break up a asteroid on a collision course with Earth?"

Long ago, I was a compulsive reader of science fiction. In about

1967, I read "Giant Meteor Impact" by J.E. Enever in "Analog 6" anthology, which was one of the first articles warning of the dangers and calculating the effects of planet Earth being hit by a big rock. It's well worth reading but all I can find online are some references, one summary, and one exert: I can scan the entire article to PDF if anyone wants to read it.
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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Jeff Liebermann

I don't think heat is the problem. The energy of the shockwave in the air, ground, or water, is what does damage.

Even if the pieces are large, the energy released in the atmosphere would always be greater than with a single mass. So more windows are broken at long range and less energy goes into the crater.

But I wasn't thinking of blowing it up a day before impact. Methods like using the gravity of a probe only deflect it enough if you have many years of advance notice. Nukes could be a good option when you have months. Even if you break it only in half, one half might not impact at all. And if it's a comet or some kind of dustball, a lot of the mass becomes harmless.

You should do that in the scifi newsgroup of the grc.com server. They'd appreciate it a lot.

Speaking of which, there was a contest for best short story or short film based on QM. The entries and winners are here:

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Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

The idea is to make it, or its pieces, miss Earth entirely.

The numbers aren't bad. Ablate a meter off one side of a kilometer-diameter rock. If the ejected stuff shoots away at 1 km/sec, the rock gets kicked about 1 m/s. That velocity is about 80 km/day. Then just wait. If you don't have enough time, hit it again.

We could park a bunch of US, Russian, British, French, Chinese, Israeli, Indian, and North Korean nuke missiles at the ISS, and launch several at an incoming rock.

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John Larkin   Highland Technology, Inc   trk 

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John Larkin

There's too much to type from the J.E. Enever essay, so I'll just provide exerts.

There are many other effects: Heat. In a large strike, the instant flare of the impact is reckoned to convert more than a quarter of the total energy into prompt heat. You should notice that in the end, almost all of the energy will degrade into heat. (...) Think of that as a 250,000 megaton fusion bomb. (...) As a result of this, the fireball will squat upon the target area, doming up into the ionosphere, but unable to rise. It will radiate terrific energy into space. Even when the fireball has at last cooled out, the target will glow for weeks and months - again radiating a good deal of energy into space.

Instant global warming.

Inverse square law. Thanks to dispersion, the energy delivered will decrease with square of the distance. If the energy is dissipated over a larger area in the upper atmosphere, more will be radiated into otter space, and less will be absorbed by the ground.

That would be nice but there's no guarantee that a bisection fracture will create the desired effect. Aiming the debris will be difficult at best with no guarantee that the resulting pieces will move in a desirable direction. Politically, that also has problems. I don't think Russia is going to trust us to deflect an incoming asteroid when we might have the ability to redirect it at Moscow.

Hardly. The energy delivered by a big rock of some mass and velocity, and a gravel cloud with the same total mass and velocity, will be identical. The only difference is WHERE that resulting energy will be dissipated. The mass and velocity will remain unchanged. Only the direction of travel will change. If the big rock hits the ground, the energy will probably create a very large lava pool. If it's a gravel cloud, the energy will be dissipated in the atmosphere and raise the atmospheric temperature sufficiently to set everything on fire.

Not a bad idea. However, I don't like Steve Gibson and really don't want to have anything to do with his web pile. I'll post the scans to my web pile and get someone else to point to it.

Thanks.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Jeff Liebermann

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