remember this? nukes deflect asteroids

It doesn't matter if it is broken up; all that matters is that the orbit of the bits is changed.

Absolutely.

It will still take a huge amount of energy to deflect a large object. Nukes have more energy than anything else available, by a huge factor.

Breaking it up doesn't help the people on the ground much. Missing Earth entirely helps a bit more.

Why not nukem too?

John

How big a steel ball would you need to make a, say, kilometer diameter sort-of-hemispherical crater? It would be easier to use a 4x bigger nuke.

As long as they cover the cost I'd say, good riddance.

robert

The movie was first-rate Verhoeven stuff. He made his share of crap, too, but Starship Troopers was great.

robert

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

a REALLY BIG traffic cone. In a pic I saw of a MIRV bus(AWST or "AvWeek"),the WHs were almost as tall as a person.Most traffic cones are less than 3 ft tall.

"Mike" didn't HAVE nukes,all he had was mass-driver payloads of moonrock. They had the added benefit of no radioactive fallout. (they were cheaper than nukes,too)

"20 mile diameter fireball"?? I doubt that.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
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D from BC wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

well,there's "hard" Sci-Fi,and then there's fantasy "sci-fi";lacking much of the "sci".

James P.Hogan is a good,"hard" sci-fi writer. His "Cradle of Saturn" is an interesting read.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
kua.net

A little comparison here:

Martin

Well, some people just can't google.

This was a 10 megaton ground shot. The fireball would be bigger from an aerial blast.

John

Assuming you had never read the book, and therefore weren't constantly screaming at the screen "Are you a f***'n idiot!" since the director had no clue what the book was about!

Charlie

Well forgive me for being Devil's Advocate here, but if this asteroid is coming out of the muzzle of a mass driver that's big enough to throw an asteroid, I don't think a couple of ICBM's would make much difference. ;-)

IOW, I was referring to an asteroid (or comet, or meteor or moonlet or minor planet or whatever) that's only in orbit, not something shot out of a cosmic cannon. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

One of the major arguments against nuking something like that is the likelihood of it just shattering the object into a whole bunch of smaller pieces, so it'd be more like, as someone noted elsethread, would be like the difference between a shotgun blast and a rifle bullet. Would it be less worse to have one big impact, or hundreds of smaller, but still catasctophic, impacts?

Thanks, Rich

If your calculations (and measurements) are accurate enough you can try to predict the location of the hit and argue about who's going to pay for whatever action is possible until it's too late to do anything.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
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Who are you to dictate that I can't dictate that?

Actually, nature dictates. Any manned space program is doomed from its longterm combination of uselessness and lethality.

John

A bit like life on Earth then?

Martin

It is those bodies that leave their regular orbit that are the dangerous ones. Unfortunately everything that moves in space has a difference speed to us that compares to your cosmic cannon. Even if they are slow out there in the cuiper belt, they gain an incredible amount of speed when they are coming into the inner solar system.

Rene

I'm not dictating anything. I'm asking you from where you get the authority to dictate what you seem to be advocating, i.e., preventing people from exploring space of their own free will.

This sounds like the same kind of attitude that's enabling the warmingists' dogma.

As I've said, if you want to wallow in angst and nihilism until you fade away, that's your right, but whether other people do or not isn't really your call.

Have Fun! Rich

Yeah, but when one of them decides to leave its orbit, it doesn't, like, zoom in at earth with like a few hours' notice!

Cheers! Rich

The word for today is: WOBBLE.

3.9 billion years ago, Jupiter caused the asteroid belt to wobble in its orbit so badly that it pelted the moon with a shower that accounts for nearly every impact you see there.

Nuking a pile of rocks will change its orbit just like nuking a solid rock. I don't really care if a single asteroid misses Earth, or a bunch of small rocks miss Earth.

John