Odds of asteroid YR4 hitting Earth just went up again, reaching new high
The asteroid, big enough to wipe out an entire city, now has a higher chance of smashing into our home planet in 2032, according to NASA.
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Is there any way we can speed it up?
Let's point all our magnets towards the sky!
🧲🌠
Probably a carbonic asteroid rather than ferrous
No worries! We’re working on that, too!
Melting the ice caps shifts mass, and therefore, gravity, away from the largely unpopulated poles and nearer to where the people live.
But this problem will not solve itself with any one solution. We must also petition our government to act now to stage a mission to nudge the asteroid into earth’s orbit! With modern science, we can do this.
I believe in humanity’s power to defeat humanity!
Gonna take a bit more than a nudge. Even if we put it on a collision course, it would only be travelling ≈ 17,000 kph, on impact. Barely even moving in intrastellar space. That's only 0.0000157024 times C. We'd need to get it moving to at least 0.0001 C to get it to be a world killer, maybe even 0.001 C. So somehow we need to figure out how to get the thing moving at ≈ 170,000 kph to ≈ 1,700,000 kph for it to have enough energy to be a world killer. Right now it's a measly little one megaton explosion.
A large enough impulse could knock it onto an impact trajectory in 2028. "Large enough" would be absolutely gigantic though, and we have to catch up with it, making it quite impractical. It would be cheaper to just build some more multi-megaton nukes for the same effect.
Having seen Scott Manley's video on the topic, it seems well within the realm of possible.
That's for changing the trajectory of the 2032 encounter by a few thousand km, not changing the 2028 encounter by 8 million km. And if we're changing the 2032 encounter we can smack it as it goes by in 2028 instead of playing catch-up before then.
The one mentioned above is 2024 YR and is slated to pay a visit in 2032. The 2028 one is 1997 XF11, and poses no risk.
(But I was confused, too - I only looked up because of the 2028/2032 discrepancy. I made a joke to my wife about emailing a state senator and suggesting they fund a mission to knock the asteroid into earth, so that they can help their constituents by ensuring that they no longer have a state to be a senator over. 2028 is during their term, and god willing, 2032 won’t be.)
2024 YR4 has a close(ish) encounter with the Earth every 4 years; it will pass within 8 million km in 2028 before the very close pass/potential impact in 2032. You can see info for close encounters here.
Well, huh. TIL.
Serves me right for half remembering something and assuming the first search result explains it.
What's up with the school shooter mentality? You know that if you want to die you can just kill yourself and don't need to take bunch on innocent people with you?
A massive reduction of human life in earth would have insanely positive benefits for the future of human kind and life on earth.
Just quantifiable proveable net benefits.
Those facts are uncomfortable, but it would dead end a lot of much worse outcomes
This is a city killer, not a continent killer. Wishing for few hundred thousand innocent people to die is just pure evil - it has no effect on overpopulation.
Overpopulation is eugenicist propaganda anyway
Owls and rabbits aren't the ones burning fossil fuels. Since I was born, 74% of the animals have gone.
Yeah, overpopulation is long past, we're at apocalyptic now.
Sounds like a capitalism overconsumption problem more than population
JFC you're a child. Who do you think is doing all the consuming? Hint: It ain't rabbits.
I'm so grown up that I don't have to resort to slinging insults. Obviously it's humans doing the consumption. I'm saying that 1, overpopulation has been a eugenicist talking point forever; and 2, that cold blooded, infinite growth, profits-over-planet consumerism is what makes our society unsustainable, not necessarily the population.
I'm so tired of the "overpopulation is a eugenicist talking point" argument. Just because a group of nasty people see a potential problem and propose inhumane solutions for it doesn't mean the problem itself isn't real. There's nothing unethical about acknowledging that an ecosystem can only support a certain quantity of an organism in a sustainable way. If people are allowed to pursue their natural desire to have a comfortable lifestyle, the world can't sustain the population we have. Regardless of what anyone wants, some combination of three things will happen:
Most people focus on #3, but I see no way, in timeframe we have available, to even come close to achieving what's needed to prevent a total ecological collapse that way. We're on track to see 1 and 2 happen. The only people who make it through relatively unscathed will be the ones with the most access to resources (i.e. wealth), so by allowing wealth inequality to exist, we're effectively choosing to cull the poor, which is not meaningfully different from eugenics. But without extreme authoritarian measures, we also can't stop people from trying to improve their lifestyles in unsustainable ways. OTOH there are mountains of evidence showing that, just by educating women and letting them have bodily autonomy, we can completely halt population growth.
I fear it's too late, though for that to save us, because the world population is already far too big. We probably can't convince enough people to stop reproducing to bring the population down fast enough, and even if we could, it would cause a demographic collapse where they're aren't enough young people to support the elderly population.
In short, I think we're fucked, but it would be really nice if the survivors would remember that we got here in part through unchecked population growth, and that it could be prevented from happening again by people voluntarily limiting their reproduction. We as a species are remarkably resistant to leaning though, so I didn't have high hopes on that front either.
Well, it's a problem that will solve itself. Most estimates say that the world's popularion will peak around 2080 and start to decline after that.
I hadn't seen those numbers, is it a result of anthropogenic climate change?
More a result of countries managing to get over the industrial revolution population spike, and getting into the modern age. Once you have access to modern medicine, and the birth mortality and child mortality rates plummet, people stop having so many kids.
Depends on how fast its going when it hits
It's currently moving at about 12,000 kph and will be slightly sped up to 17,000 kph if it actually hits us. That is not a significant enough portion of C to be anything but a city killer. This thing isn't even a Tsar Bomba in terms of energy output. More like a Mark 17.
https://lemmy.world/comment/15180729
Regrub just said can we make it go faster, so i guess it would need to be increased much much more than 17,000 kph, which seems slow for galactic/cosmic speeds.
Wonder how much more energy it would need.
Someone get Randal Monroe on this stat!
Lol
I think you'd need to nearly double the velocity for it to be remotely close. I think I saw something like 30-40k km/h before it's at that level
Y’all don’t have loved ones? Just kill like 2700 billionaires and the world is a better place already. Fun fact, all dear leaders are on the same list.
Can we strap a bunch of spacex rockets to it to achieve the needed speed? Probably not but the irony would be great
Bro, Thanos quotes are so 2020