1883 the year the world almost ended

bobbymike

bobbymike

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http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/11/23/how-the-world-almost-ended/

I think this is the reason we should build a huge heavy lift booster with gigaton nukes but that's just me ;)
 
Yeah, right. When just a single new vapor jet can double the brightness of a comet, nobody saw the enormous brightening that would accompany the massive burst of water and other volatile vapor that would accompany the sudden exposure of all that fresh ice to sunlight as a comet breaks apart near the earth.
 
chuck4 said:
Yeah, right. When just a single new vapor jet can double the brightness of a comet, nobody saw the enormous brightening that would accompany the massive burst of water and other volatile vapor that would accompany the sudden exposure of all that fresh ice to sunlight as a comet breaks apart near the earth.
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I don't know what point you're making it does say 1883, 130 years ago. The comet was seen I think its nearness was re-interpreted.
 
chuck4 said:
the massive burst of water and other volatile vapor that would accompany the sudden exposure of all that fresh ice to sunlight
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Depends very much on the comet. Some "fresh" comets that haven't passed by the sun too many times are mostly volatiles. "Stale" comets that have gone round and round many times have largely evaporated and are little more than clumps of gravel held together with frost. For every comet, there is a *last* time of flaring up as it goes around the sun.
 
For how long would a huge heavy-lift booster with nuclear warhead(s) be operational to destroy the extinction-level event comet? 20 years? 30 years? When would the engines need to be refurbished and the booster refueled?
 
Triton said:
For how long would a huge heavy-lift booster with nuclear warhead(s) be operational to destroy the extinction-level event comet? 20 years? 30 years? When would the engines need to be refurbished and the booster refueled?
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Aerojet's 260" solid booster should do the trick or maybe just the shuttles solid rocket. I am assuming they can last a couple of decades or more like the MMIII.
 
I think the current consensus on dealing with asteroids/comets that might impact the Earth is that nukes are not the best thing to use - at best they'll fragment the rock leaving the same amount of mass on track for impact. Current ideas for dealing with potential impactors is to slowly change their course over a long time. Of course, if you don't have that time then it might be better to use nukes to fragment the rock and keep firing them at the debris to try and get some of the debris cloud to miss the Earth.

IMHO an Orion tug would be the best option in both cases - but that's wishful thinking these days... :(
 
Laser-driven ablative trajectory alteration is the current en vogue in asteroid avoidance, I believe. But it's all hypothetical, and indicative of our collective failure to correctly assess risk. Cow flatulence is a more pressing problem.
 
the world did not end in 1883. A new paper reinterpreting old astronomical data argues that a massive comet disintegrated near Earth and its fragments passed as close as 600km from us in August of that year.
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August 1883 ? definitively a bad month then, since the Sunda Straits Krakatoa volcano exploded that very month - killing 36000 people in an explosion so huge it was heard 2500 miles away. Imagine if the comet strikes added to that mess... :eek:
 
You can't safely turn it back or volatilize it with nukes, no; but you might - by targeting the explosions all on one side - nudge it just enough off course to turn a hit into a near-miss. Bonus points if you can arrange a hyperbolic no-return orbit or a path close enough to the sun for it to fry and boil off completely.


Anyone who wants to reduce the world's nuclear arsenal to minimal or zero levels is IMO a traitor to the human race. The window for launching a nuclear-ablative course shifting mission vs. the window for building new warheads just aren't compatible.


Plus, the Western democracies need more than enough to maintain the deterrent AND to stop at least one of these things without asking for help from potentially less charitable nations.
 
Archibald said:
the world did not end in 1883. A new paper reinterpreting old astronomical data argues that a massive comet disintegrated near Earth and its fragments passed as close as 600km from us in August of that year.
Click to expand...

August 1883 ? definitively a bad month then, since the Sunda Straits Krakatoa volcano exploded that very month - killing 36000 people in an explosion so huge it was heard 2500 miles away. Imagine if the comet strikes added to that mess... :eek:
Click to expand...


Yeah, current estimate also says truly huge volcanic eruptions hundreds of times larger than Krakatao, and whose climate impact that could kill hundreds of millions of people within a year, happen somewhere on earth once every one hundred thousand years or so, tens to hundred of times more often than comet strikes capable of doing similar damage.

As yet no solution involving nuclear weapons have yet been proposed, AFAIK, to stop such eruptions.
 
Theoretically, I suppose, you could vent it to the surface before it blew its top catastrophically. But there are NO WORDS for how right you would have to be about what you were doing and how & why you were doing it.


"We destroyed the world in our efforts to save it." Oh well, at least with nobody around to hear them, the apologies would be unnecessary.
 

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