Eerie CGI Simulation of What did the dinosaurs see before the chicxulub impact ?

So it's mostly confirmed it was a long-period or rogue comet? The bulk of near-Earth asteroids have been cataloged there doesn't seem to be anything near that size out there, at least not anymore.

"In the book, she theorized that a massive comet from the Oort Cloud could have been sprung from there by a plane of dark matter and sent toward Earth, causing the catastrophe that devastated the dinosaurs."

Well, maybe the fairy godmother did it...

Most of them seem to have been quite a bit smaller than the Chicxulub impactor, and correspondingly less destructive.

If we could see it a year in advance, presumably we could do something about changing it's orbit enough to get it to miss us - better surveillance could buy us even more time, and let us get away with giving it a smaller shove.

I blame global warming.

6.8 x 10E15 kg traveling at 25 km/s??? Doesn't sound hopeful.

Not to mention they'll never get anything put together in 10 years, much less a year.

The radiant heat blast form those last few seconds of atmospheric entry would be enough to turn drought stricken California into an instant bonfire.

We appreciate your doing all that research to keep us up to date on all things gloomy.

SF gets is water from the Hetch Hechy reservoir, which is now above normal. Long hot showers inspire ideas.

It would be a good use for all those surplus h-bombs. It wouldn't be hard to have about 4 countries (plus a couple of rich dudes) send up a few hundred rockets in a few years.

The otherwise useless ISS could be a staging port for comet interceptors.

Na.. Long showers form wrinkles.

That's nothing compared to the radiant heat from all the ejecta re-entering the atmosphere a while later; a huge fraction of the Earth's surface would be heated up hot as a broiler oven from that.

I've read that some europeans don't wash daily. I don't absolutely need to shower daily in our climate (it's sunny and 56F now, at 11AM) but I enjoy it so.

The probability of a big one hitting us in the next 1000 years is low. It turns out that it wouldn't be hard to move an asteroid's orbit, or even change the earth's orbit. We almost have the technology now, and certainly will in another hundred years.

Sorry to be so optimistic.

Yeah, well, you aren't any better off with 200 pieces of 3.4x10^13 kg each, and probably worse, because a whole lot of the stuff from the big one would have been ejected along with the associated chunk of atmosphere.

Something along the lines of a fission-bomb-powered rocket would be the ticket, if you can get one up there.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Or even weekly, apparently. ;)

88F / 40% RH here at 2:30 PM. About 12 degrees above normal for this time of year.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The idea would be to nuke it from roughly a diameter off, to ablate some cubic kilometers of dust and rock off at high speed to change the orbit a little.

That's better than trying to break it up. It would be fun to watch. The asteroid mass would down-convert the neutrons and gammas more into the visible range.

I wonder how bright a megaton of nuke would look like from, say, the orbit of Mars. We need a photon budget!

One on the moon would look cool too.

Fred Bloggs snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Nice. Good thing the whole shebang didn't hit us.

That's right- and the ejecta cloud originally travels at a few thousand MPH- so there's no getting away from it.

Fred Bloggs snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Revelation says that "the lord" will return with "one foot on the land and one foot on the sea"... Sounds like a big f****ng rock to me. And then Yellowstone will pop off from the giggle.

If you watched the video for this particular case, they don't get a point of impact estimate until one week before impact. So at 50,000 MPH that's about 50,000 x 24 x 7 = 8.4 million miles off. There's trajectory curvature at play here so that's not direct distance, and dunno how that matters to an interceptor course duration. I'm pretty sure the asteroid isn't going to even notice a crummy megaton nuke, that's on the order of ppm of the energy at play, and it's too close.