Close call? or Meh....

[Bunion 2020]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...hTa?li=BBnb7Kz

On Thursday, an asteroid called 2019 OK, traveling at almost 15 miles a second, came unusually close to impacting Earth. The asteroid passed by about 43,500 miles away — closer to Earth than our moon is. It was one of the closest known approaches of an asteroid to Earth since we started closely tracking the movements of objects in space.

If you had binoculars and knew exactly where to look, you could have briefly seen 2019 OK in the sky.

NASA tracks large asteroids in order to identify any that might be on a threatening trajectory toward Earth. But 2019 OK was first seen a few days ago, and was only definitively identified as an asteroid yesterday — hours before it passed right by us.

How’d they miss it? Well, while 2019 OK could have done a lot of damage if we’d gotten very unlucky — as Swinburne University astronomer Alan Duffy told the Sydney Morning-Herald, the asteroid would have struck Earth with “over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima” — it’s not actually all that big. The asteroid is estimated to be “between 187 feet and 427 feet in diameter.” The largest passenger aircraft in service today (the Airbus A380-800) is about 240 feet long, so spotting this asteroid would have been a bit like spotting a single big commercial jet in the vast expanse of space — traveling at 15 miles a second and coming toward us directly from the sun, which makes spotting it more difficult.

Even a small asteroid like 2019 OK could potentially do a lot of damage if it’d hit Earth, rather than missing by 43,500 miles, but for it to be, as lots of outlets called it, a “city killer” asteroid, we would have needed several more unlikely things to go wrong. A 45,000-mile near-miss is very close compared to how vast space is, but it’s still a fair bit — Earth itself is about 8,000 miles across. About 0.5 percent of asteroids that come this close or closer will actually hit us.

Imagine the number of near misses in the time man has been around?

And its not like Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck could have done much to save us.

[Benny Profane]

Superman,game over.

[iceman]

I mean yeah close call, and also meh. Whaddaya gonna do? It's only 111 years since the Tunguska event, read up on that and imagine of it hit Los Angeles 2019 vs. Siberia 1908.

[hawkgt]

Can’t do shit about it so I would prefer you leave me in darkness if it does track on us.

[Kenny Satch]

Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades

[SB]

Www.spaceweather.com

[m2711c]

Can’t do shit about it so I would prefer you leave me in darkness if it does track on us.

Well, with enough notice, you could move out of the impact zone. It would probably a nice orderly evacuation....

[2FUNKY]

Can’t do shit about it so I would prefer you leave me in darkness if it does track on us.

Not me. I’d leave work. Grab the family and enjoy each other for the last few moments.

[PB]

....... and empty the liquor cabinet.

Probably do that first.

Priorities, man.

[Danno]

anyone ever read Lucifer's Hammer by Niven/Pournelle. Hypothesizes this very event. Great read.

[Game Over]

Thanks Danno.

When I read the nuke holocaust book Alas Babylon by Pat Frank in the 4th grade it blew my mind. I’m gonna give your rec a go. I love that shit to this day.

[Garth Bimble]

My guess is they knew about it well in advance but given there are so many pussies out there nowadays NASA figured that if they made a big deal out of it this would push a shit load of them off the edge so they came up with the BS story the OP pulled from MSN.

[Buster Highmen]

I blame Obama

[Harry]

This is why we need SPACE FORCE.


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[idahospud]

This is why we need SPACE FORCE.


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Yeah, but will it be led by Bruce Willis? Does Steve Buscemi factor in at any point? If the answer to either question is no, it's harder to see the value.

[irul&ublo]

Yeah, but will it be led by Bruce Willis? Does Steve Buscemi factor in at any point? If the answer to either question is no, it's harder to see the value.

[BmillsSkier]

Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades

Aerosmith works against wasps and extinction events?

Awesome.

[SumJongGuy]

NASA can land a probe on a comet when they've been tracking it long enough to plot the course. It's all this shit they haven't documented yet that can hit us with little or no warning. The moon has saved our asses several times. What's crazy is that even when they see it and track it for weeks, they still don't have the ability to say with 100% confidence if it will or won't hit the earth, much less WHERE it will hit. So, evacuating a city isn't really an option because they don't know who to evacuate before it's too late.

[jono]

Seems like anytime there is a 1/120 chance of an event measured in atomic blast units that's pretty significant. The strong meh coming from MSN feels weird.

[neufox47]

We should definitely be searching the solar system for these suckers. Imagine what we’d spend if we thought al-qaeda was going to shoot a 100 yard wide stone at America at 20 miles per second.

[old goat]

We should definitely be searching the solar system for these suckers. Imagine what we’d spend if we thought al-qaeda was going to shoot a 100 yard wide stone at America at 20 miles per second.

Who says they didn't?

[Peruvian]

I couda bin kilt!

[iceman]

Chelyabinsk was approximately 20 meters across they say. Lots of rocks out there.



There was another asteroid getting all the attention for its close approach that day and then the Chelyabinsk one came in from another direction.

[SumJongGuy]

We should definitely be searching the solar system for these suckers. Imagine what we’d spend if we thought al-qaeda was going to shoot a 100 yard wide stone at America at 20 miles per second.

And do what about it? Even when they've known about it for months or years they still can't predict where it's going to hit with enough warning to be useful.

[Bunion 2020]

Look at it this way, maybe we take a hit in the middle of some nowhere desert. The impact throws up enough dust to balance out the warming the planet "seems" to be undergoing. Problem solved.