Posted on 12/26/2004 8:33:58 PM PST by shadowman99
Thats what I meant; survivors from a comet and/or large asteroid strike are remote in the extreme. Those that DO survive had best be prepared to defend themselves and their supplies from those that survive the initial disaster that did not prepare.
However, I agree in principle that one should be prepared for disaster and only the prepared (and the lucky) will survive long term.
I was a 91A medic in the US Army, and I was a Boy Scout. I have food, water, shelted, weapons and ammo, commo, etc. prepared for several different senarios: 3-day, 1 month, and indefinite future.
If the worst DOES happen, you can contact me voice at 14.15 MHz. Like minded people that have prepared will be welcome in my neighborhood.
Arghhh! . . . Never mind, sez Emily Latella. The table gave the probability as 2.2e-02, and by this they meant 2.2 x 10-2. But I took "e" to mean the number "e," as in natural logarithms. :-(
I remember reading about that as a form of deep space propulsion in addition to a Bussard ramjet.
So are we essentially racing this asteroid around the sun? And it's slowly coming into our path?
It's the way people who deal with astronomically high numbers stay sane.
I think you were the only one who got it. :)
2006 pops up only one sentence, "the only surefire way to stop Hillary is in New York".
So are we essentially racing this asteroid around the sun?
Lookie here,
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/db?name=2004+MN4
They have an interactive tool, you can zoom, rotate animate and change time step. Basically it's in an oval orbit that extends from just outside venus to just outside earths orbit. It's orbit is slightly inclined to the earth's but crosses earth's orbit around the point in the earth's orbit where earth is on April 13 every year. Most years he's not there on April 13, so it's no big deal. In 2029 we both get there around the same time. Could be a big deal.
Nope. That's not that big, and it also depends on the angle of impact. a 400meter asteroid hitting mid ocean would cause a title wave but other than that the affects would be short lived. Hit on land it would throw a lot of stuff into the atmosphere, but probably not as much as Mt. St. Helens, and certainly not as much as Krakatoa.
True, and the death toll was nill as far as anyone can tell. One wonders if a 400 meter asteriod would break up or land intact.
This site has some interesting info - http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/spacegd7.html
and there is information on this site about the tsunami effect caused by asteriods.
The web site mention above says that an impact from a 2km diameter stony asteroid is thought to be at the threshold of a global catastrophe and the "damage" would go well beyond the area of direct devastation. It has been estimated that one quarter of the world's population could die from starvation and other indirect effects due to a 2 km asteroid impact.
Yup, that pretty well agrees with what I learned on this subject. The 400meter object is far from a planet killer, and the better prediction of impact area (if it does in fact hit) the better chances we have of avoiding a high death toll, as I mentioned in my #111 above.
This web site - http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/asteroid_paine_september.html
is easier for a non-scientist like me to understand compared with my earlier link. It gives the example of a 500 yard (bigger but in roughly the same ball park) asteroid producing a runup wave height of up to 120 feet at 1000 miles from impact. The actual wave height depends on the topography of the shore.
In 1815 a volcano on the Indonesian island of Tambora exploded and produced a crater similar in size to that from a 500-yard asteroid. About 20 cubic miles of ejecta was released (for comparison, the Mount St. Helens explosion in 1980 released about a quarter of a cubic mile of ejecta).
In the case of Tambora, it has been estimated that 10,000 people died directly from the explosion and 80,000 more died in the region from indirect effects, such as starvation. In addition, the ash is thought to have caused the "year without a summer" in 1816, when there were widespread crop failures across North America. The final death toll was probably in the hundreds of thousands. A similar event today might kill millions.
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