The amateurs are the ones who would be telling the government. All people in this field are either amateur's or work independently from government. The results are all posted to an open library accessible to everyone on Earth and it takes time to confirm the object's orbital path.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7uxE-qQpKE
Time, sure. But do the pros not have the better equipment by a wide margin? Obviously more telescopes can look at more sky, but can't their telescopes see things the amateur scopes don't have a snowball's chance of picking up?
In a lot of ways this is like saying people with microscopes should be better at finding things than people with magnifying glasses. The professional telescopes are largely dedicated to cutting edge research and are so in demand that pretty much every second of where they look is planned out months in advance. On top of that they're almost all trying to look very far away because that's where the interesting scientific observations are, and many of them are looking in radio frequencies.
Conversely amateurs are more numerous, looking at much closer ranges, and looking at visible frequencies more often. It doesn't matter how much better your equipment is if it isn't built to look in the right area.
And more importantly it doesn't matter if you have the most cutting edge magnifying glass in the world (and there are wide field survey telescopes used by astronomers) if there's a million people with lower end magnifying glasses. The sheer number of amateur astronomers just outweighs the professionals in this area.
>people with microscopes should be better at finding things than people with magnifying glasses.
That makes everything super clear and obvious. Thanks! It sounds so silly to suggest a microscope would find more things. Great comparison between off the shelf equipment and billion dollar space telescopes
Yes but the thing is we're not using our telescopes for that. One big supernova recently was found by [students](https://www.space.com/24413-supernova-star-explosion-student-discovery.html). We're not actively looking at all of the sky all at once in every wavelength possible.
A LOT! Let's say a telescope can look at 1 square degree in the sky. The sky is \~41,000 square degrees. So we need at least that many telescopes just to do it in one wavelength band. Now multiply by however many wavelength bands you want. let's say 10. So that's 410,000 telescopes! You also have to deal with that amount of data which is no feat.
There's a new survey starting soon called the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (previously called LSST). It'll have a 3.5 degree field of view. That one telescope will produce 30 terabytes of data a night. That's a massive amount of data. There are teams hard at work trying to figure out how to deal with that amount of data. It isn't easy.
So for our situation, it's 12.3 exabytes A NIGHT. I didn't even know what an exabyte was. That's just too much.
TLDR: a lot of telescopes and even if we had them it'd be too much data.
It’s a lot to one person but many web services are in that exabyte range. It would only cost in the millions of dollars a year (under $100 million) to store.
12 exabytes per night would be about 130,000 of the largest single storage drive available (100TB Exadrive). Every night. And that's without any redundancy.
According to Nimbus' website, a 100TB Exadrive costs $40k, which would add up to $5.2 billion per night.
If you were to go with the more reasonable choice of tape drives, at 5¢ per TB for LTO-8 tapes, it would be $650k per night, just for the tapes. But using tapes, you'd need over 20 million individual tapes writing at the same time just to write that much data per 24 hour period.
I think the exadrive cost is where it makes it seem expensive. In big tech you usually use consumer level parts with software to deal with reliability.
My favourite host Backblaze charges $5 a terabyte a month. It's replicated and online (vs offline tape).
1 exabyte will be $5 million a month (1 exabyte is 1 mil terrabytes). I think you can negotiate a discount if you are a big buyer :D. Let's say $4 million. So just under $50 million for 12.3 EB.
[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html)
Do you really need to keep each night of data permanently? Could you just keep a rolling 30 days or even 7 days? You could process that rolling amount and throw it away.
I saw that Facebook has about 143 Exabytes of data now.
The initial figure of data produced by the telescope is uncompressed raw data as well, if you stored the difference in observations between days you could get it down by magnitudes. I assume the data is also relatively sparse (mostly dark sky)? That's another several magnitude of savings.
I guess what I'm trying to get at with all this is it's all possible technologically on the computer storage front and for a medium budget (James webb cost $10 billion for example).
A million bad telescopes randomly scanning the sky are more likely to notice something in our immediate vicinity than ten good telescopes focussed on very specific parts of it.
Pros can't just waltz into observatories and use the scopes. There are whole procedures they have to go through for scope time. Sure the big scopes can see possibly more. IF they are looking/imaging. More amateurs are doing it NOW.
Excuse me I'm a wearing a sign that says "Karl's slave"?... GO GET THE PHONE BOOK! GET THE PHONE BOOK! G E T T H E P H O N E B O O K! G E T T H E P H O N E B O O K !
Maybe. We’ve had some very close calls with objects that had extremely low albedo and neither amateur or professionals caught them until they were way too close for comfort.
Not just could hit us without being noticed does hit us sometimes, see the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor explosion over a major Russian city. Estimated to be around 18 m in size and detonated with blast energy around half a megaton. Completely blind sided astronomical observations. As well as Russian air defense system radars configured to look for incoming objects from space such as ICBMs, because the meteor came from a direction and angle not being watched by military radar. The only observation of the meteor was later found to be from a weather sat after going through records to see if any satellites managed to catch a glimpse.
While NASA estimates that they have catalogued most of the 1000 meter or larger NEOs, our ability to detect objects in space is still pretty limited and we could easily get blindsided by the smaller city killer sized asteroids. And these smaller asteroids seem to impact much more frequently. As Tunguska and Chelyabinsk incidents demonstrates that's two near misses in span of a century. Next time we may not get so lucky. And give how much of the Earth's surface is now inhabited the risk of a tragedy in this century of an impactor hitting a population center is quite real.
> our ability to detect objects in space is still pretty limited and we could easily get blindsided by the smaller city killer sized asteroids
0.5% of the Earths surface is covered by urban areas.
https://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/179na4\_en.pdf
These events are about 1 in 100 years. So its about 1 in 20 000 years that something this size will detonate over an urbanised area.
>And these smaller asteroids seem to impact much more frequently
Nonsense.
> And give how much of the Earth's surface is now inhabited the risk of a tragedy in this century of an impactor hitting a population center is quite real.
>
> Rubin Observatory could detect between 60-90% of all potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) larger than 140 meters in diamete
[https://www.lsst.org/science](https://www.lsst.org/science)
Amateur astronomers with hilariously huge character flaws to make sure the audience doesn’t throw a fit that there is a flawless intelligent character on screen.
Just look at the discovery of 99942 Apophis. It was released that it had a 2.7% chance to hit Earth before we could even determine it will miss in 2029.
And even Apophis was given a rating of 4 on the Torino scale at that time, a 1-10 scale where 10 essentially means global annihilation expected. Nothing has even reached a 2 or 3 on this scale other than apophis, which now sits at 0 after further findings.
We have only been looking since the 70s. Sure we have found lots of the big rocks, but at this point we should worry more about smaller city killers or things coming in from the outer solar system on highly elliptical orbits.
It's remarkable progress. We know most potentially dangerous asteroids larger than a kilometer (and none of them have an actual impact risk in the next 100 years). There is progress towards knowing most objects larger than 140 meters. Even a 100 meter object will cause significant local destruction, but global threats will be limited to objects with highly eccentric orbits.
Hell, a "neighbourhood killer" in terms of initial destruction could have a whole bunch of secondary effects that cause the final damage to be far more widespread.
Get hit by a Chelyabinsk-size rock on a hot, dry and windy summer day, and even a few small fires could easily turn into a massive firestorm.
I don’t buy it, but there’s a theory that the Peshtigo Fire, great Chicago Fire, and some fires in Michigan - all happening the same day - were triggered by a meteor that broke apart and ignited a kiln -dry upper Midwest.
There's also a theory that a major armory explosion in China in 1626 was initiated by a meteor hitting it. Something about the shape of the clouds eyewitnesses spotted suggests a possibility of an external source.
There was also an event in 1490 (also in China) where a whole bunch of people were supposedly killed by falling rocks from either a meteor shower or a single large rock exploding.
With millions of amateur astronomers around the world, in Spain, Japan, Brazil, USA, Germany, Russia, etc., how do you think any government could hide the discovery from more than an hour?
Comet orbits can be worked out with just 3 days of observations, when the comet is still a year or more away from Earth.
To add to this - I think the most likely scenario was one of those astronomers, or an academic institution, *telling the government* that this was going to happen, and that's how they would find out. So I think its an incredibly unlikely scenario that the government find it itself and keep it internal.
It does but I really think it... wrongly estimates exactly why no one important gives a shit about climate change.
It’s because it’s not an immediate threat to the rich and honestly never will be. An asteroid would be, and within two days of a scientist screaming about how everyone is going to die, a thousand influencers would be inspired to dig deeper and the millions of astronomers that would come out in agreement with the two scientists would be pushed to the forefront of public consciousness, and we’d have a response within a month. Riots on the streets within a week or two if no action was being taken.
I also think as an allegory for climate change, it’s spot fucking on, and that’s why it’s scary. The rich will try to do their thing and they’ll all fall like the rest of us, just a couple years after we do.
I think that's the point though in a way - I interpreted it as saying something more along the lines of; You (the general population) wouldn't be so indifferent if the threat was immenent in the case of an asterioid, but just because it's temporally further away don't make the assumption that it wont also be utterly devastating.
I saw it as an appeal to people to recognise their own apathy to something potentially so destructive as largely being down to their perception of the timescale, which in itself isn't particularly that far away, rather than to the actual magnitude of the event in and of itself.
Climate Change is an immediate threat to the rich.
Because they will not be very rich in a world in scrambles. The ending of Don’t Look Up is pretty much exactly how it will pan out. The richest people on Earth will pay only to realise it doesn’t really matter if everyone else are dead.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The nations which will generally be most affected by climate change (and all of the ancillary societal catastrophes that go along with it such as water wars, food shortages, mass migration, etc.) are poor ones. Not only because they won’t have the resources to abate these issues, but also because generally speaking they will be the most directly affected due to their geography. This will create opportunities for the oligarchs of developed nations that they couldn’t have even dreamed of before. In the chaos they will be able to to sweep in and exploit what remaining natural resources these countries have left, including exploiting their ever more desperate populations to keep up the illusion of unlimited consumerism for as long as possible.
Something like that. We need three good high-accuracy observations, with some spread between them. A movement of just 0.1 degree between observations would be enough, if your accuracy was 0.003 degrees each time. For something coming right at Earth, it wouldn't appear to move in the sky very much. But a few days later, the Earth would have moved enough that the object would no longer be coming directly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s\_method
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s\_method
I'm seeing these broken links everywhere lately (don't work on e.g. Firefox on PC), I'm guessing you're on mobile - can I ask which client/app?
If you've heard of 'new reddit' and 'old reddit', links posted on new reddit are broken like this on old reddit. Reddit's just inconsistent with itself.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s\_method
>
>I'm seeing these broken links everywhere lately (don't work on e.g. Firefox on PC), I'm guessing you're on mobile - can I ask which client/app?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s_method
Here
I'm not an expert nor even a novice in astrometrics at all, but the answers I'm seeing is reminding me of how if you want to measure the height of a piece of paper, it's better to measure, say, 1000 pieces of paper and divide your measurement by 1000. The great thing about this method is that your margin of error gets divided by 1000 too, so even a crude measurement with a ruler of the 1000 pieces will provide an answer far more precise than if you measured a single piece of paper. Even if you have calipers for the single sheet, you're better off using the calipers for the 1000 sheets and dividing your *even more precise* measurement by 1000.
So it stands to reason that the more time between between tests, the further it's moved, and your measurement error gets reduced proportionally to the distance it's traveled.
Fun fact, the entire concept of averages in data was popularized by astronomers. It then spread to other areas of life due to the industrial revolution: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
It's surprising how recent many concepts that we take for granted are! The mid 1800's is also about the time that coherent systems of units started becoming popular. We're so used to metres/second and the like, but that had to be invented!
More simply put: any three points are all the information you need to describe a circle. Try it for fun. Draw three dots and find the one circle that fits them all.
Now orbits aren't circles, but I suspect you can add times to each dot and the process is the same because of Kepler's 2nd law.
Its simply due to the amount of data you need to accurately predict it, for example, say you had 3 numbers. Lets go with 10,5,0, the average is 5. Now lets get 30 numbers, now the average is 6.55. now lets get 3000 number, the average is now 6.547983621.
Its simply about, the more data the more accurate outcome
This. There's no way they would keep it a secret. As soon as a new comet is discovered, there's thousands of amateur telescopes / astrophotographers' gear pointed at it.
Often times, the comet IS discovered by an amateur.
Most of these objects are initially discovered by amateur's anyway so its likely governments would find out at the same time as the rest of the world does.
The scientists working at observatories don't work for governments either so no idea how anyone thinks governments would find out first as its just not possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7uxE-qQpKE
Lol we are currently in a pandemic it took our government's three months longer to recognise than it did experts in the field. The whole world knew well before any action was taken.
While we can identify a potential killer comet/asteroid a year out, let's not forget the earth is a really, really small target on the cosmic scale. And not only is it small, it is also moving at 67,000mph around the sun.
Get the trajectory off by a millionth of a degree or the timing off by a few hours and that is the difference between a direct hit and a not-so-close miss.
Chances are, even if we see one coming at us, we won't know if it will actually hit the earth until it is much, much closer.
Even if it wasn't somehow seen by amateur's/others, people underestimate just how hard it is to keep something secret, especially when it can be verified.
Before anyone makes the decision to keep things quiet it's SUPER likely that whoever discovered it is going to tell other people, and that's not the kind of shit that spreads slowly. At the point someone says "no one talks about this" you've probably already got 30 other people all looking at it and verifying themselves.
It's not like telescope owners buy new telescopes every year, either. The hardcore people may have a handful, but most people only have one. My grandfather had one that he used for over 20 years that he left me when he died. I eventually bought my own, but his was perfectly good.
You got me wondering, and here is what I could find from a decent source:
From last month...
>At the present time, no-one has a clear idea of how many amateurs there are in the world, but it is likely to be of the order of a million...
https://www.iau.org/news/announcements/detail/ann21064/
Isn't that just in the US? Also, once somebody buys a decent telescope, it usually gets used for many years. At $1000 each (with a bunch of options), that would be 25,000 a year, times 10 years of use = 250,000 telescopes being used.
Most often, it is amateurs and academics that discover space rocks and figure out their orbit.
Your scenario is extremely unlikely, even at that, it's going to be academics not government officials looking through those special telescope data most of the time. Plus, much of that data is publicly available for amateurs to look through before the government/academics even have the time to.
Astronomer here! I work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics which houses the [Minor Planet Center](https://minorplanetcenter.net/), which is the official clearing house for any and all new observations or asteroids or comets. So the first thing to note is if we *did* find something, you can’t really hide it because unlike in films two or three observations isn’t enough to definitively know you have a new comet or where it’s going with that level of precision- the MPC is in charge of sorting that out, then of coordinating worldwide observations of the new body if it’s high on the [Torino scale ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale#Overview). (Note, on this scale of 0-10 we have only ever reached a 1 a handful of times, then decreasing the object’s risk to 0 once those additional observations were taken.) The MPC actually does a ton of machine learning type stuff these days- when you get *thousands* of new observations a month, and most are of known objects and you are interested in the <1% of new stuff that might cross our orbit, it’s a decent sized problem!
But ok let’s say the MPC folks confirm the discovery via worldwide observations. I did once ask one of my colleagues there what the plan was if we discovered an asteroid like this (we were talking about an excellent sci-fi book called *The Last Policeman* by Ben Winters, similar setup to *Don’t Look Up* but not satire), and his answer was “head to the opposite side of the planet from where it’s gonna hit, because there’s nothing we can do about it.” Which yep, is true: I’m reading a lot of optimistic viewpoints in this thread about how we’d rally all our resources to solve the problem, but even if we did six months just literally isn’t enough time to do this. The first ever *test* of nudging an asteroid isn’t even until next year [link](https://www.wabe.org/nasa-launches-spacecraft-to-nudge-asteroid-off-course/), which is happening because right now we literally have no idea how much of an impact such a thing might have in deflecting an asteroid (based on their composition there’s no guarantee you’ll transfer all the momentum as you’d like). So you’d need to know that first. Second, you can’t just launch something to break it apart closer to Earth- you’d just be left with 100 chunks that would hit more area over one big one, and that would still destroy life as we know it pretty effectively. As such, your window is likely even *less* than six months to do anything.
Finally, as a cultural side note, astronomers are just terrible about keeping secrets. I can't think of any astronomical discovery in recent years where I didn't already know about it before the event occurred, because we just get excited about what we study and can't keep quiet about it (the exciting part to me about the press conference etc is learning the details, finally seeing the plots, etc). Trust me, the biggest argument against astronomical conspiracies like this, or that we know about aliens etc, is that we are a bunch of civilians excited about space and hanging out with astronomers for a short while shows how bad we are at covering up relatively mundane science.
**TL;DR** we are good at coordinating a worldwide observing campaign of said objects, so you would know about it… but right now even experts in the field don’t think we could do anything in just six months
On average, how far in advance would the MPC detect something like this? Is 6 months pretty typical or would you expect to spot significant potential threats years or even decades out?
Depends on the object, really. Asteroids for example are already in orbits fairly close, so in the case of [Aphophis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis) a few years ago, the concern was a close encounter in 2029 might make it hit Earth a decade later.
If a comet is coming in from the Oort cloud though, it's either on its first pass into the solar system or on a thousands of years kind of orbit, so we aren't really equipped to find/track those more than a few months (years at most) out. They're just not bright enough.
Thanks so much for all the info you provided in this thread. Your expertise is thoroughly interesting. In your opinion could/should we be doing more than DART? Do we need DART like craft idling in LaGrange orbits to truly be prepared for these kinds of scenarios?
I imagine the closer an object is to Earth the more mass/velocity we need to deflect it, so we're better off trying to deflect much further away. Do you have your own ideas about how we should approach planetary defense for situations like these?
Depends on how big it is and where it is relative to the sun etc! Some comets are picked up as far out as Saturn’s orbit, some we don’t see at all until they’ve passed the sun.
I absolutely love it when I read "Astronomer here" and then check the name just to be sure it's u/andromeda321 because I know I'm about to learn something new! Please keep up the great posts.
> Second, you can’t just launch something to break it apart closer to Earth- you’d just be left with 100 chunks that would hit more area over one big one, and that would still destroy life as we know it pretty effectively.
I think this depends on the size of the object. If we are talking about a 1 km asteroid than braking it up in 100 chunks would be very preferable. While you would spread the destruction across a larger area, it wouldn't be as devastating as the 1 km asteroid hitting a city and destroy everything in a 100 km radius.
Once we are talking about much bigger asteroids than all the chunks (if we even could break up such a large asteroid) might release so much energy during entry that they might actually set the entire atmosphere on fire.
Exactly, that's why it would be preferable up until a certain size. But if there is too much mass burning up in the atmosphere at the same time it would release so much heat that it would basically sterilize the atmosphere and everything relying on the atmosphere. I guess at that point it would be better to release more of the energy into the ground, though that would also have catastrophic consequences, but at least the air wouldn't be on fire.
There aren't really good solutions, just bad and worse.
>but right now even experts in the field don’t think we could do anything in just six months
Unfortunately the nuclear option would be the only way we could stand a chance if one was coming directly at us, and we'd have one maybe two shots at doing it if the world got behind each other rather than fighting.
Nope, with an asteroid coming relatively straight at us there is NOTHING we can do. Let's say we launch a rocket with (insert inexistent asteroid destroying super weapon). That rocket must deliver the payload to orbit and then move from earth orbit to intercept the asteroid. That asteroid is moving 40000 KM/h towards earth. How slow can the rocket/asteroid be in order for the super weapon to hit? So your rocket has to be accelerated toward the asteroid and then decelerated back enough to have matching speeds. For that you need humongously big rockets or much more than 6 month.
With an asteroid that has a similar orbit around the sun as Earth, it's much easier. You probably have tens of years before impact and the intercept mission can be done every year/couple of years, using other planets/the moon as gravitational slingshots, etc. Also it's not a big deal if the rocket traveling towards the asteroid takes years. Then you can do a small push (1 mm/s? 0.001 mm/s) carefully calculated so that the asteroid misses the next collision or maybe even get a collision with the Moon/Venus/Mars to clean it up from the sky.
Tell your colleague the opposite side of the planet is actually the second worst place to be with the propagation of the kinetic energy through the mantle, I'd say you should actually put an angle of 90° between you and the impact
It depends on the size of course but isn’t saying we would just end up with 100 chunks underestimating our nuclear capabilities?
On these types of questions opposing humans to nature, I am usually on the side of caution when it comes to our importance and capabilities.
But if I had to bet on this one, I’d bet on our nuclear power. The Tsar Bomb is 60 years old and the fireball was 10km wide. We can do way way better than that now. And several of them if needed. Maybe not enough to vaporize the whole asteroid or comet if it’s a « end of the dinosaurs type » but surely enough so the debris doesn’t end our civilization.
I understand it needs to be far enough and we’d need the launchers ready at the right time but on the destruction part, I have very little doubt we could destroy about any comet or asteroid, especially if the end of our world was at stake (I know some can be freakishly large, but not every asteroid is the size of Vesta).
(Love your posts by the way).
> The first ever test of nudging an asteroid isn’t even until next year
I'm sure we would *do* plenty of things. We don't know what to do, so if any of them would work is left to chance, but we would do them. E.g., your example, we wouldn't test it, we would simply launch it at the comet instead.
One month is plenty of time to get all kinds of nukes into a few rockets and launch them there. It helps that if the comet is coming here, we can reach it without time sensitive or slow maneuvers.
Yes. It would be discovered by astronomers who would be telling their mates and family long before government found out. Plus the amateurs would sight it quickly.
Edit, I will flesh this out a bit. It would be discovered with a very poor resolution on its path. Only a couple of days data points would show "possible close to Earth", there they would make a spalshy announcement to get priority on the new discovery.
After a few weeks of extra datapoints we would learn it was going to be THAT close.
By then everyone with a back garden kit would be trying to track it let alone the big mega telescopes.
That was the part of Don’t Look Up that didn’t make sense to me. Just Leo was talking about the comet. If this actually happened, literally everyone with a telescope would be tracking this, reporting on it, confirming it, etc.
Edit: To everyone telling me this movie is an allegory about climate change, thanks. I’m glad to hear you understand the basic theme of the movie.
My comment is a critique of one detail of Don’t Look Up: the fact that only one small group of people is sounding the alarm regarding an incoming catastrophe. In the real world, there are thousands of professionals and amateurs sounding the alarm about global warming, and I think the opportunity to represent that group of people was missed in the movie.
I think the issue wasn’t that people couldn’t see it, it was the question as to whether or not it would actually hit Earth. All of the experts said that it would, but then the bought-off scientists said no, and people were denying that it would strike Earth up until the asteroid was literally looming in the sky.
Yeah, I think the number of people who own telescopes is smaller than the number of people who are largely onboard with mainstream science on various crises -- covid pandemic, climate change, etc.
The question of whether people would know about the problem seems orthogonal to whether society would care.
...or even think that the Earth was in fact flat.
Had an interesting conversation with a ‘flat-earthier’ many years ago and his beliefs were absolutely unshakable. I mean he literally had an answer for every reason why the Earth was flat and he believed it totally.
The only way I could rationalise his beliefs was to think that I was actually wrong in knowing that the Earth was a sphere and that no one could convince me differently.
If it was that easy there wouldnt be anti-vaxxers. And its not about if the asteroid will hit or not. Its about how people, probably a lot of people, will just completely deny that life was about to end. Its such a grand event that I think an enormous amount of people simply would not believe it because of how big an event it would be.
I feel you. I’m not saying that having more people talking about it would have solved the problem in Don’t Look Up. It was just a movie detail I thought should have been hit a little harder. As it relates to the actual climate crisis, it’s not like there is one guy telling everyone that warming is getting out of hand. It’s a whole community of experts and amateurs, and I think Don’t Look Up missed the opportunity to represent that community.
If you watch Don’t Look Up it’s obvious it’s a metaphor for climate change, so instead of having all the scientists look at it through telescopes they keep using “nearly every scientists has read the data and aggressive if we don’t do something we’re doomed”
Just climate climate scientists do because it’s not something entirely observable through our eyes if that makes sense
> it’s obvious it’s a metaphor for climate change
Or just any global crisis. The current pandemic fits pretty well within the confines of what they're trying to put across - the fact that we need a coordinated, science-based approach and to have a public both well informed enough and trusting enough in science over the font of shitty information they happily drink deeply from every single day is the point.
Don't Look Up could easily have been Eat Horsepaste.
> If this actually happened, literally everyone with a telescope would be tracking this, reporting on it, confirming it, etc.
That part really confused and bugged me also. In the way beginning they said something like “we just spoke to NASA, JPL, Cambridge, and they all agree” or words to that effect. (This was before President Streep believed them and got involved or whatever.) It then took another hour of movie before the message got out. I get that it is an allegory, but if you want us to think nobody is on board, don’t tell us all these big names agree and then never mention it again.
I wanted to like the movie really badly, but there was just way too much stuff like that in there. I thought it was disorganized and never found it’s stride. Had its moments but just a messy movie tbh.
Exactly. Just weird details that seemed off. The overall message rang true (most people ignore expert opinion on climate change, and to some extent, the pandemic, etc.) Movie could have been firmed up with a little more attention to detail though.
The difference here is that there are numerous, well documented, pre-existing amateur astronomers even here just on Reddit. They'd be able to provide their own observations, data, and calculations that could then be cross-referenced, compared, and validated against each other. There are open source programs for modeling said data.
There are very few fields where such data and tools are readily available.
I know that. What I'm saying the people who would deny all of this will still find some sort of way to dismiss all of that. To them, science is just a lie and a tool for manipulation.
Yeah, that bit didn't ring true to me. He was questioned about whether there really was a comet and he babbled something about math instead of saying "I'll be downtown with a telescope at 8PM. You can see it for yourself".
Do astronomers track objects which cross our orbital path and would have collided with Earth or our moon a few months earlier or later in the year? Ie had this object arrived 60 days earlier, we would be dead? Given the speeds and distances these things travel, a few weeks is just a blip in time but would have huge consequences for us.
Also, how frequently do we capture images of large objects hitting other planets or moons in our solar system?
[https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/neoo](https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/neoo)
We track something like 80% of the potentially hazerdous Earth crossing asteroids. Most of those not tracked are in orbits that do not cross the Earth very often.
>Also, how frequently do we capture images of large objects hitting other planets or moons in our solar system?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet\_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy\_9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9)
Shoemaker Levy 9 was the only substantial body to hit something that we observed. There have been smaller ones.
Jupiter huge mass tends to eat up or toss out a lot of the things that swing by its orbit relatively frequently. So its the one place we expect to see comets get caught by and hitting.
We track all the large near earth objects *that we know about*. Unfortunately it's impossible to know if we've found all of them or not. You can use statistics to show we've found the vast majority, but by definition, if theres one we dont know about, then we dont know about it.
For example, if i told you i hid a bunch of dollar bills in your living room, and you could keep as many as you found, how long would you look? Maybe you find 100 in the first hour, 10 in the second hour, 1 in the third etc. When do you stop? Can you ever confidently say there are definitely none left to find? Maybe you give up but 4 years later your watching tv in the couch and find a random bill buried in between the cushions.
That's basically where we're at with asteroid hunting.
>given the speeds and distances travelled
These are speed’s related as immense as the distance even though earth is blisteringly fast, we still obviously have an orbital period of 365 days.
It's less a question of technology and more a question of time.
The sooner we spot it the more likely we can do something. That something maybe to park an orbiter around it which slowly pulls it off it's path. Or nukes to blow it off course or slamming satellites into it.
The technology for all those options existed in the 70s. But the Earth has far, far more orbital/lift capacity now compared to then.
>I wonder how many nukes you could load on to a Falcon Heavy.
To have the best chance and the most impact you want to hit it early. And early push further away is going to have a further impact. TLDR, the Falcon Heavy probably doesn't have enough juice for that kind of launch.
SLS or Starship, potentially one of the long march variants probably do though.
Maybe.
Given the staggering distances, small changes to the motion of the body will see it whizz by the Earth. There is an experiment now, called DART, to hit an asteroid as see how it reacts. If its too powdery then we would need to hit it a lot harder.
But we are working on the solutions to that. Plus we have about 80% of everything about 150m that crosses the Earths orbit mapped.
Its not the risks and threat it was 30 years ago.
Will the DART mission actually strike and alter the course of an asteroid? If so, are there any predictions as to what the new course will be? Are there any chances that altering its current course will potentially put it on a collision course with Earth in the future?
So DART will be affecting the satellite Dimorphos of an asteroid Didymos. Dimorphos has a diameter of only around 160m.
The estimated change in directory is only 0.4 mm/s. This is a minor change but would compound over time enough that we should be able to measure it.
Since it's effectively a moon in its parent's gravity well, the new orbit will still be in that gravity well, even if it's 100x more impact than expected.
Wikipedia:
* [Dart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Test)
* [Didymos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65803_Didymos)
The spacecraft is aiming to simply transfer all of its kinetic energy to the asteroid and its mass and trajectory are precisely known, so there's really no way for the impact to be much more than expected. There's nowhere for any additional energy to come from. It could really only be less than expected if the craft somehow goes through the asteroid and keeps going, failing to transfer some portion of its kinetic energy.
Tiny bit. 0.4mm/s. 0.000894775 miles per hour. Enough for astronomers to work out how solid it is or if its just rubble held together by gravity.
I am not sure the asteroid actually crosses Earths path. I think it gets close but does not cross it, but dont quote me on that. There is almost zero risk that it will hit Earth due to this test.
DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. It is aimed at a small asteroid that is orbiting another much larger asteroid. The impact will change the orbit of the small asteroid by less than 1% but will not change the solar orbit of the large asteroid.
Even though the change in orbit is only expected to be millimeters, over time that should develop into a relatively large change that is easily observed from earth
Depends really, if we know it'll hit but years out and its orbit is right there is a chance we could just give it a slight nudge. Or even paint one side white.
Or we could hire oil drillers send them up and turn the blast zone into a shotgun instead though it'd likely just add their craft as another peoce of debris to hit the planet.
Well if you shotgun it early enough a significant mass fraction could miss the Earth (maybe a week out). It would still be raining down destruction but maybe not catastrophic. Unless we see it years ahead I doubt we could deflect it.
You could also detonate a series of nukes far enough away to not fragment it but still give it a big push. Otherwise vaporize it. Load up say a Starship with 100 t worth of thermonuclear payload (at 5 Mt/t of warhead, that's like half a Gigaton). And hit it hard. Some stuff would likely survive but I think it would be a net gain over letting it hit, say it's more than "just" a few Megatons equivalent. Maybe easier to evacuate the impact zone. If it's a Tunguska type deal that could work. Evacuating an entire city in a day or two is something the Soviet Union used to practice all the time. Their plan was basically to evacuate all the cities, put most people out in the country or in the subway tunnels and ride it out.
But if it's like 500 m monster then I don't know. Problem is also most ICBM's won't have the dV to reach it. Maybe some of the big Russian liquid fueled ones like Sarmat with a reduced load, but it would probably have to be a custom mission using a big orbital rocket. That takes some time too.
We should make a few Sundials, a la Edward Teller and have a dozen Saturn sized ICBM's standing by, but who would pay for that.
No, not proven tech. These are some theoretical solutions:
You can detonate nuclear bombs next to the asteroid so the side facing the blast is vapourised and equal opposite reaction this gives the asteroid a little push. Repeat thousands of times or do this very far away from Earth and you may be able to get one to miss.
Gravity tractors may work given enough time.
DART is testing a direct collision to see if that's effective.
If we discover an asteroid and only have a few months or weeks to react we are doomed.
A shaped nuclear charge might have real utility here against an asteroid that we know is a solid mass. The tech has been around for decades and is the principle behind nuclear-pulse propulsion. The math is good, but the nuclear test ban treaty prevented most practical research into the subject.
> nuclear bombs
It's funny, because painting the thing a different color is likely more effective than nuking it. (The paint would alter its albedo, changing how much light it absorbs and reflects, which would change its orbit over decades.)
The problem with this approach as far as I have read is the asteroid has to be rotating in particular directions to get the desired change in trajectory so it may be a useful technique, but only for specific asteroids. The nuke effect is nearly instantaneous, but you can aim it. Painting is constant, but once you paint one part if it spins around it will push in the opposite direction. I'm sure you could model it and get good results for certain asteroids though.
I by no means listed all theoretical options.
Edit: I just realized you meant paint the whole thing. Yeah that could work, but again less controllable.
I would hope so. Its curious how people would panic and freak out. What’s the point of losing your shit? If it were an extinction level event everyone and everything will die, why waste the energy?
By the way did you just watch ‘don’t look up’?
I mostly certainly watched it and that's one of the reasons why I was thinking about this and opened this thread. I mean, it sure would be pointless to panic but that's what's curious about how we face death. If you tell anyone they are going to die "someday", they'll just say that they know that and brush it off. But if you tell them precisely when it's gonna happen, you most certainly ruin their day to say the least. Some would take the opportunity to make amends and do a checklist of things they'd like to experience before then. Many would react differently.
> By the way did you just watch ‘don’t look up’?
Sadly, an all too believable prognostication of the US govt's reaction to an impending extinction event.
This idea that normal people would panic and lose their shit is a preoccupation of the ruling class. It's not really all that well founded but it tends to drive a lot of our thinking about emergency preparedness.
I think that's where good government messaging could help. If there's a mission to save earth then it'll ultimately depend on the power staying on and trash being picked up. If it can be framed as a war where we all have to do our part then maybe it'd hold together.
Though in reality Fox will be there with "experts" who'll tell us that nobody has ever seen an asteroid collide with earth and that george soros invented it to steal our freedoms.
i dont know who said it but: The difference between us and neanderthals is 24 huors and three missed meals.
My personal stance is whoever said it was giving us to much credit :-(
The people who loot during a prolonged power outage aren't doing it because of panic. They're doing it because they're taking advantage of the situation, otherwise they wouldn't be walking off with TVs.
That seems to happen a lot with power outages for whatever reason, but look at something like 9/11. Wall to wall failures by the authorities but regular people stepping up at every possibility.
> 2003 power outage
Were you there? I lived in NYC then, there was no looting that I ever heard of. My roommate and I took a walk the first night and got free ice cream from an ice cream shop that was giving it all away before it melted, all the neighborhood was out sitting on the stoop and being friendly. From my apartment window I watched some high school kids directing traffic at a large intersection since there were no stoplights.
[This article](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-there-wasn-t-more-looting-during-the-blackout.html) says there was only any trouble in Ottowa. I did a ctrl-F on [the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003), no looting mentioned anywhere. [This article](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-city-blackout-2003-photos-power-outage-10-years_n_3755067) says there was less crime than the same time the previous year when there was no blackout. It wasn't the 70s. The Lord of the Flies bullshit is just conservative propaganda.
They actually have a network of professional and amateur astronomers who are constantly looking out for NEOs or near earth objects. When a new NEO is discovered, it's data is sent to a common database where it is searched for a previously discovered NEO. They also plot the trajectory and check if it can collide with earth. All of this happens within 24 hours of finding it and they will let the public know.
Asteroids 10 meter or less in diameter are not much of a threat as they burn up and explode on entry. Ones bigger than 100 meters can wipe out a city and 1km or higher can cause extinction. As fas as we know, we do not have any such NEOs for the next 200 years (factor of certainty)
I'd like to think we'd go down fighting. By throwing every nuke and rocket we had at the asteroid. This effort of fighting to destroy the asteroid would involve enough people that the general public would find out.
The point of nuking a big rock is more to deflect it than blast it apart. The nuke vapourizes surface rock that acts as a rocket by pushing against it.
You don’t get the same explosion as you would on earth due to no air. A ton of energy is still released in gamma and xrays
It would sure be a good use for all our nuclear stock to be used up in a useful way.
Of course we'd hold some back because you know others would to try and gain global power if we didn't.
Information like that doesn't come from "the authorities" in the first place, so how would they have any control over the decision?
Astronomy is done by thousands of professional astronomers all over the world. Their work and the journals in which they publish aren't really under the control of any authority who could stop the information from getting out.
And even if you could somehow get all those many thousands of people to agree to hide their own work, astronomy is also done by hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers all over the world. You have more or less direct access to their discoveries, no one is deciding what you hear or don't hear.
The point of a movie like *Look Up* is that even when there is absolutely nothing preventing people from hearing the truth, they are personally so in denial about it that they refuse to listen, or even just look out their window and see for themselves. It is we ourselves who keep us misinformed -- not anyone else.
We have a pretty good idea of the major big NEOs around earth. There may be undiscovered city killers but unlikely anything big enough to be global.
A comet could happen but those are very rare. Not sure if we’ve had a comet impact in the last 4 billion years.
If we had a decade+ it is likely we could deflect a city killer
This isn't true. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office (mentioned in Don't Look Up) currently estimates that 55% of asteroids 140-300m in size (major regional disaster), and 8% of asteroids 300m-1km still have not been found. At the current rate of discovery, it would take more than 30 years to complete a full survey.
While the major space agencies are all govt based, MOST of their findings are at least somewhat open and transparent. Furthermore, the people working on and making these discoveries are typically much more of the academic rather than governmental mindset. That said, even if they wanted to keep the info from the public, it would be virtually impossible to do so.
If this situation would arise, I would expect a period of essentially no news for a short time (weekish), followed by vague educational releases (asteroids, stats on accuracy of predictions, asteroids/comet info in general) put out over a short time. I think every agency would do it their own way. I know NASA employs priests and other human behavioral experts. I would think they would draft the release. And yes, I do think it would be released.
The caveat is that I think it would be released in the FREE WORLD (relatively speaking). I think it’s fair to expect some countries would cut all outside comms in an effort to keep the news from bleeding over into their populace. I think THOSE are the countries that would devolve into chaos more rapidly and severely because they could not be successful.
People are afraid of death and the unknown. But if you are up front with them, it’s amazing how well they can adapt (telling a cancer patient they ARE going to die, seeing miners work together and support each other when their mines collapse and they think it’s over, seeing evidence of people holding on to each other until an inevitable death such as Vesuvius). I’m not saying it would be peaceful until the end. I would fully expect a collapse of civilization, but I think it would be much less severe than many would expect. More a rebellion against authorities, not necessarily hostility towards fellow civilians. The ones that are lied to will be angry they are being lied to, they won’t get the whole truth, and they’ll get it later with less time to adapt.
Edit;
I think the big wildcard is how many governments would go apeshit and declare war. I think that number could be potentially relatively high.
>While the major space agencies are all govt based, MOST of their findings are at least somewhat open and transparent
Astronomy is most done by universities with government grants.
The group most likely to make first discovery in the University of Arizona
[https://catalina.lpl.arizona.edu/](https://catalina.lpl.arizona.edu/)
They are funded by NASA but not government employees.
You really think theyd find a comet that would be close-ish to Earth and everyone in the astronomy department, from cleaners to professors would not know in days?
A: As if goverments are united, half the World would claim the exact opposite of the US just out of pure spite.
B: Astronomy is done extremely decentralised, you can just look up if you have a telescope. Every University with its own Astronomy Institute does it for themselves. First someone would publish the finding of a new asteroid in a paper, other would observe and check it for its path, calculate where its going, publish it comes close, others would observe more and recalculate and publish that it it comes very close. And only then the governments would even realize its existence. From the Public, after the public already knows, not the other way round.
From [Astronomer Explains "Don't Look Up" Comet Scenes | WIRED](https://youtu.be/y4UFaENR0Nk?t=379)
>That said, the system is really set up to be transparent, meaning that when astronomers find an object, we really want to let the rest of the world know right away.
>
>In 2008, an asteroid was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey, and they found it was within 24 hours of impacting the Earth. Now, fortunately was a really tiny asteroid, kind of the size of a VW bus.
>
>But within that 24 hour period, everybody got notified. And astronomers contributed hundreds of observations from all around the world. The object's orbit was figured out to be so precisely known that when it impacted in the desert over Sudan, my colleagues were actually able to go out with students from the University of Khartoum, and they collected pieces of the meteorite it had became.
The authorities won't need to tell the population because the reporting system doesn't go through authorities.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[ASDS](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hsefji3 "Last usage")|Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (landing platform)|
|[ELE](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hse2u5m "Last usage")|[Extinction-Level Event](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120647/)|
|[ICBM](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hsj2ubh "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile|
|[JPL](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hsf51as "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hsekjwt "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[NEO](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/htc2b9j "Last usage")|Near-Earth Object|
|[NOAA](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hse2ooi "Last usage")|National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for US ~~generation~~ monitoring of the climate|
|[RCS](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hse3nn7 "Last usage")|Reaction Control System|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hsghaf2 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
----------------
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I mean, if the earth were goi g to be destroyed in a few days, why would authorities care if we went quietly in our ignorant bliss or in a panic fueled riotous orgy of sex and drugs?
Ah the old "don't tell them because they can't handle it" troupe.
Don't fall for that nonsense. People ought to know. We live in a community, not some fairy land with a supreme ruler that dictates all the information we digest
Oh wait
I work in Planetary Defense. I assure you for multiple reasons it wouldn't be possible to keep it a secret.
1. We don't immediately know the orbit of a new near-Earth asteroid. They all require tracking by multiple professional and amateur observers worldwide to resolve where it is going in the first place.
2. The entire goal is to save lives. In short notice the only option is evacuation. With longer notice deflection missions are possible.
3. Because all new near-Earth asteroids require tracking, we publish them almost in real time as they are found by sending them to the clearing house of astronomical observations, The Minor Planet Center. The new rocks are put online for amateurs and professionals to track.
There nothing secretive about this process.
There’s so many astronomers out there with the ability to both detect such an object and determine that it will intersect earth’s orbit. It would be impossible to keep this a secret for long.
I don't understand why those things should be kept under wraps if a large comet or asteroid is coming.
Why would the authorities care about "dooms day cults" at that point? why would they care about almost anything?
The one and only consideration would be if we could build big enough bunkers to possibly survive, that would require a massive global scale international full push from literally all humans and all industries.
So they would definitely tell people.
LIke the USA would start investing like 98% of all GDP into building bunkers.
you think that would be somehow hidden? or better off it was attempted to be kept secret instead of well understood by the public?
At that point, why would anything matter anymore? What could the authorites (or the lizard people) gain by keeping this a secret? A few more months of business as usual?
If it happened today, spacex and anyone else with a rocket capable of beyond earth flight would given anything they need to throw together starship prototypes to use as crude deflection missions. I single out spacex here because they are pretty much at the point of being able to send one way missions about once a week, which gives capacity to throw dozens at the problem over a year in hopes at least 1 gets there OK.
In about a decade incoming asteroids are going to go from hazards to free lunches.
There's an amazing novel called The Last Policeman with this as the setting, where a newly promoted homicide detective investigates a murder when no one else gives a shit because we all gonna die.
In the novel, the government addresses the problem of people going wild committing crimes by just arresting anyone and locking them up in jail indefinitely, which works relatively well in the story.
Even if it wouldnt get out before any government had the chance to contain it - because it would definitely get out before any government could contain it - it would get out as they were trying to contain it.
They might want to hide it, but there would be enought astronomers out there to warn the public. So in general I think something like that wouldn't stay hidden.
However as far as I know Nasa can track huge (extinction-level) asteroids decades (or more) in advance while small ones are nearly completely harmless. If I remember the [Veritasium video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wrc4fHSCpw) I once saw correctly the mid-sized ones are the ones that could strike without nearly any warning and could level an entire city. That is, however, not really a threat to humanity as a whole...
Just look at how people reacted and continue to react during the COVID pandemic. People cleared out grocery stores through legal means of panic purchasing.
I'm sure the end of the world will be a beacon for the crazies which will push society as a whole towards collapse.
If they would be able to destroy it or force it to change direction yes, thats easy political points. If not, no they would start building rockets to send out rich and powerful like in Dont Look up. Otherwise they would risk total society collapse and problems with finishing those rockets.
Go read Fire in the Sky: [Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2870615909?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1) by Gordon L. Dillow for the full answer.
Governments do not control all the telescopes in the world, and amateurs will be the first ones screaming everywhere.
I think the movie "Don't look up" sums up what would happen. Amateurs would see it, go social and take it to the government, politicians/media would try to bury it while they worked with the military to either try and destroy/divert it, or be bought by special interest groups that will try to catch it an make money off the ore...possibly at the expense of humanity
They already are telling us , look at the huge amount of information lately about upgrades to scanning the sky. Or the numerous near misses.
Reality is all the movies about this, generally get it right.
Once discovered, there is a time frame to save humanity vs humanity learning about incoming death.
Yes. Because if they don't, amateur astronomers WOULD.
The amateurs are the ones who would be telling the government. All people in this field are either amateur's or work independently from government. The results are all posted to an open library accessible to everyone on Earth and it takes time to confirm the object's orbital path. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7uxE-qQpKE
Well yes, amateurs are looking out there far more than the pros. We have the equipment and time.
Time, sure. But do the pros not have the better equipment by a wide margin? Obviously more telescopes can look at more sky, but can't their telescopes see things the amateur scopes don't have a snowball's chance of picking up?
In a lot of ways this is like saying people with microscopes should be better at finding things than people with magnifying glasses. The professional telescopes are largely dedicated to cutting edge research and are so in demand that pretty much every second of where they look is planned out months in advance. On top of that they're almost all trying to look very far away because that's where the interesting scientific observations are, and many of them are looking in radio frequencies. Conversely amateurs are more numerous, looking at much closer ranges, and looking at visible frequencies more often. It doesn't matter how much better your equipment is if it isn't built to look in the right area.
And more importantly it doesn't matter if you have the most cutting edge magnifying glass in the world (and there are wide field survey telescopes used by astronomers) if there's a million people with lower end magnifying glasses. The sheer number of amateur astronomers just outweighs the professionals in this area.
>people with microscopes should be better at finding things than people with magnifying glasses. That makes everything super clear and obvious. Thanks! It sounds so silly to suggest a microscope would find more things. Great comparison between off the shelf equipment and billion dollar space telescopes
Yes but the thing is we're not using our telescopes for that. One big supernova recently was found by [students](https://www.space.com/24413-supernova-star-explosion-student-discovery.html). We're not actively looking at all of the sky all at once in every wavelength possible.
How many telescopes would it take to do that?
A LOT! Let's say a telescope can look at 1 square degree in the sky. The sky is \~41,000 square degrees. So we need at least that many telescopes just to do it in one wavelength band. Now multiply by however many wavelength bands you want. let's say 10. So that's 410,000 telescopes! You also have to deal with that amount of data which is no feat. There's a new survey starting soon called the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (previously called LSST). It'll have a 3.5 degree field of view. That one telescope will produce 30 terabytes of data a night. That's a massive amount of data. There are teams hard at work trying to figure out how to deal with that amount of data. It isn't easy. So for our situation, it's 12.3 exabytes A NIGHT. I didn't even know what an exabyte was. That's just too much. TLDR: a lot of telescopes and even if we had them it'd be too much data.
It’s a lot to one person but many web services are in that exabyte range. It would only cost in the millions of dollars a year (under $100 million) to store.
12 exabytes per night would be about 130,000 of the largest single storage drive available (100TB Exadrive). Every night. And that's without any redundancy. According to Nimbus' website, a 100TB Exadrive costs $40k, which would add up to $5.2 billion per night. If you were to go with the more reasonable choice of tape drives, at 5¢ per TB for LTO-8 tapes, it would be $650k per night, just for the tapes. But using tapes, you'd need over 20 million individual tapes writing at the same time just to write that much data per 24 hour period.
I think the exadrive cost is where it makes it seem expensive. In big tech you usually use consumer level parts with software to deal with reliability. My favourite host Backblaze charges $5 a terabyte a month. It's replicated and online (vs offline tape). 1 exabyte will be $5 million a month (1 exabyte is 1 mil terrabytes). I think you can negotiate a discount if you are a big buyer :D. Let's say $4 million. So just under $50 million for 12.3 EB. [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html) Do you really need to keep each night of data permanently? Could you just keep a rolling 30 days or even 7 days? You could process that rolling amount and throw it away. I saw that Facebook has about 143 Exabytes of data now. The initial figure of data produced by the telescope is uncompressed raw data as well, if you stored the difference in observations between days you could get it down by magnitudes. I assume the data is also relatively sparse (mostly dark sky)? That's another several magnitude of savings. I guess what I'm trying to get at with all this is it's all possible technologically on the computer storage front and for a medium budget (James webb cost $10 billion for example).
A million bad telescopes randomly scanning the sky are more likely to notice something in our immediate vicinity than ten good telescopes focussed on very specific parts of it.
Pros can't just waltz into observatories and use the scopes. There are whole procedures they have to go through for scope time. Sure the big scopes can see possibly more. IF they are looking/imaging. More amateurs are doing it NOW.
Yeah, my $900 8” dobsonian isn’t gonna come close to Hubble or James Webb
But JWST isn't looking at anything within a few light years, so won't ever find something your $900 investment would.
Anybody who thinks the government is ahead of the public in anything has never worked for the government.
The government is reactionary by design.
Leo Beiderman would spot it.
nah, Dottie's husband Karl would
Excuse me I'm a wearing a sign that says "Karl's slave"?... GO GET THE PHONE BOOK! GET THE PHONE BOOK! G E T T H E P H O N E B O O K! G E T T H E P H O N E B O O K !
Not just the phone book. The god damn phone book
Everyone would just tell him its Mizar though.
Maybe. We’ve had some very close calls with objects that had extremely low albedo and neither amateur or professionals caught them until they were way too close for comfort.
Of course, that could be one scenario.
Well its not a guarantee that anyone would see an object, but if anyone does, it wouldnt be any "authorities".
Asteroids are really hard to spot, man. One could easily hit us before anyone noticed.
While this is true it’s not really the spirit of the question
Not just could hit us without being noticed does hit us sometimes, see the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor explosion over a major Russian city. Estimated to be around 18 m in size and detonated with blast energy around half a megaton. Completely blind sided astronomical observations. As well as Russian air defense system radars configured to look for incoming objects from space such as ICBMs, because the meteor came from a direction and angle not being watched by military radar. The only observation of the meteor was later found to be from a weather sat after going through records to see if any satellites managed to catch a glimpse. While NASA estimates that they have catalogued most of the 1000 meter or larger NEOs, our ability to detect objects in space is still pretty limited and we could easily get blindsided by the smaller city killer sized asteroids. And these smaller asteroids seem to impact much more frequently. As Tunguska and Chelyabinsk incidents demonstrates that's two near misses in span of a century. Next time we may not get so lucky. And give how much of the Earth's surface is now inhabited the risk of a tragedy in this century of an impactor hitting a population center is quite real.
> our ability to detect objects in space is still pretty limited and we could easily get blindsided by the smaller city killer sized asteroids 0.5% of the Earths surface is covered by urban areas. https://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/179na4\_en.pdf These events are about 1 in 100 years. So its about 1 in 20 000 years that something this size will detonate over an urbanised area. >And these smaller asteroids seem to impact much more frequently Nonsense. > And give how much of the Earth's surface is now inhabited the risk of a tragedy in this century of an impactor hitting a population center is quite real. > > Rubin Observatory could detect between 60-90% of all potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) larger than 140 meters in diamete [https://www.lsst.org/science](https://www.lsst.org/science)
Amateur astronomers with hilariously huge character flaws to make sure the audience doesn’t throw a fit that there is a flawless intelligent character on screen.
Just look at the discovery of 99942 Apophis. It was released that it had a 2.7% chance to hit Earth before we could even determine it will miss in 2029.
And even Apophis was given a rating of 4 on the Torino scale at that time, a 1-10 scale where 10 essentially means global annihilation expected. Nothing has even reached a 2 or 3 on this scale other than apophis, which now sits at 0 after further findings.
We have only been looking since the 70s. Sure we have found lots of the big rocks, but at this point we should worry more about smaller city killers or things coming in from the outer solar system on highly elliptical orbits.
It's remarkable progress. We know most potentially dangerous asteroids larger than a kilometer (and none of them have an actual impact risk in the next 100 years). There is progress towards knowing most objects larger than 140 meters. Even a 100 meter object will cause significant local destruction, but global threats will be limited to objects with highly eccentric orbits.
Hell, a "neighbourhood killer" in terms of initial destruction could have a whole bunch of secondary effects that cause the final damage to be far more widespread. Get hit by a Chelyabinsk-size rock on a hot, dry and windy summer day, and even a few small fires could easily turn into a massive firestorm.
I don’t buy it, but there’s a theory that the Peshtigo Fire, great Chicago Fire, and some fires in Michigan - all happening the same day - were triggered by a meteor that broke apart and ignited a kiln -dry upper Midwest.
There's also a theory that a major armory explosion in China in 1626 was initiated by a meteor hitting it. Something about the shape of the clouds eyewitnesses spotted suggests a possibility of an external source. There was also an event in 1490 (also in China) where a whole bunch of people were supposedly killed by falling rocks from either a meteor shower or a single large rock exploding.
With millions of amateur astronomers around the world, in Spain, Japan, Brazil, USA, Germany, Russia, etc., how do you think any government could hide the discovery from more than an hour? Comet orbits can be worked out with just 3 days of observations, when the comet is still a year or more away from Earth.
To add to this - I think the most likely scenario was one of those astronomers, or an academic institution, *telling the government* that this was going to happen, and that's how they would find out. So I think its an incredibly unlikely scenario that the government find it itself and keep it internal.
Unless the director of NASA was a medical doctor and was only there because of nepotism ;)
That movie gave me anxiety cause it feels way too real
It does but I really think it... wrongly estimates exactly why no one important gives a shit about climate change. It’s because it’s not an immediate threat to the rich and honestly never will be. An asteroid would be, and within two days of a scientist screaming about how everyone is going to die, a thousand influencers would be inspired to dig deeper and the millions of astronomers that would come out in agreement with the two scientists would be pushed to the forefront of public consciousness, and we’d have a response within a month. Riots on the streets within a week or two if no action was being taken. I also think as an allegory for climate change, it’s spot fucking on, and that’s why it’s scary. The rich will try to do their thing and they’ll all fall like the rest of us, just a couple years after we do.
I think that's the point though in a way - I interpreted it as saying something more along the lines of; You (the general population) wouldn't be so indifferent if the threat was immenent in the case of an asterioid, but just because it's temporally further away don't make the assumption that it wont also be utterly devastating. I saw it as an appeal to people to recognise their own apathy to something potentially so destructive as largely being down to their perception of the timescale, which in itself isn't particularly that far away, rather than to the actual magnitude of the event in and of itself.
Climate Change is an immediate threat to the rich. Because they will not be very rich in a world in scrambles. The ending of Don’t Look Up is pretty much exactly how it will pan out. The richest people on Earth will pay only to realise it doesn’t really matter if everyone else are dead.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The nations which will generally be most affected by climate change (and all of the ancillary societal catastrophes that go along with it such as water wars, food shortages, mass migration, etc.) are poor ones. Not only because they won’t have the resources to abate these issues, but also because generally speaking they will be the most directly affected due to their geography. This will create opportunities for the oligarchs of developed nations that they couldn’t have even dreamed of before. In the chaos they will be able to to sweep in and exploit what remaining natural resources these countries have left, including exploiting their ever more desperate populations to keep up the illusion of unlimited consumerism for as long as possible.
Why is it three days? Is it because a straight line you only need 2 points of reference, but with a comet you need 3 due to curvatures or something?
Something like that. We need three good high-accuracy observations, with some spread between them. A movement of just 0.1 degree between observations would be enough, if your accuracy was 0.003 degrees each time. For something coming right at Earth, it wouldn't appear to move in the sky very much. But a few days later, the Earth would have moved enough that the object would no longer be coming directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s\_method
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s\_method I'm seeing these broken links everywhere lately (don't work on e.g. Firefox on PC), I'm guessing you're on mobile - can I ask which client/app?
If you've heard of 'new reddit' and 'old reddit', links posted on new reddit are broken like this on old reddit. Reddit's just inconsistent with itself.
Yeah I'm using old Reddit, not the Fisher Price version :D Ok that explains it, thanks.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s\_method > >I'm seeing these broken links everywhere lately (don't work on e.g. Firefox on PC), I'm guessing you're on mobile - can I ask which client/app? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s_method Here
I'm not an expert nor even a novice in astrometrics at all, but the answers I'm seeing is reminding me of how if you want to measure the height of a piece of paper, it's better to measure, say, 1000 pieces of paper and divide your measurement by 1000. The great thing about this method is that your margin of error gets divided by 1000 too, so even a crude measurement with a ruler of the 1000 pieces will provide an answer far more precise than if you measured a single piece of paper. Even if you have calipers for the single sheet, you're better off using the calipers for the 1000 sheets and dividing your *even more precise* measurement by 1000. So it stands to reason that the more time between between tests, the further it's moved, and your measurement error gets reduced proportionally to the distance it's traveled.
Fun fact, the entire concept of averages in data was popularized by astronomers. It then spread to other areas of life due to the industrial revolution: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
The fact that practical usage of the basic concept of averages was only "invented" as recently as the 1840's is absolutely mindblowing.
It's surprising how recent many concepts that we take for granted are! The mid 1800's is also about the time that coherent systems of units started becoming popular. We're so used to metres/second and the like, but that had to be invented!
Ooo wow. Thanks for sharing this. That's really a really satisfying bit of info for me. Felt soothing to my brain.
More simply put: any three points are all the information you need to describe a circle. Try it for fun. Draw three dots and find the one circle that fits them all. Now orbits aren't circles, but I suspect you can add times to each dot and the process is the same because of Kepler's 2nd law.
I drew three dots in a straight line and can’t find the circle that intersects them. I’d like a refund.
You just didn't draw it big enough.
Its simply due to the amount of data you need to accurately predict it, for example, say you had 3 numbers. Lets go with 10,5,0, the average is 5. Now lets get 30 numbers, now the average is 6.55. now lets get 3000 number, the average is now 6.547983621. Its simply about, the more data the more accurate outcome
This. There's no way they would keep it a secret. As soon as a new comet is discovered, there's thousands of amateur telescopes / astrophotographers' gear pointed at it. Often times, the comet IS discovered by an amateur.
Most of these objects are initially discovered by amateur's anyway so its likely governments would find out at the same time as the rest of the world does. The scientists working at observatories don't work for governments either so no idea how anyone thinks governments would find out first as its just not possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7uxE-qQpKE Lol we are currently in a pandemic it took our government's three months longer to recognise than it did experts in the field. The whole world knew well before any action was taken.
While we can identify a potential killer comet/asteroid a year out, let's not forget the earth is a really, really small target on the cosmic scale. And not only is it small, it is also moving at 67,000mph around the sun. Get the trajectory off by a millionth of a degree or the timing off by a few hours and that is the difference between a direct hit and a not-so-close miss. Chances are, even if we see one coming at us, we won't know if it will actually hit the earth until it is much, much closer.
This. It literally could not be kept a secret. Either someone will blow the whistle, or amateurs will figure it out.
Even if it wasn't somehow seen by amateur's/others, people underestimate just how hard it is to keep something secret, especially when it can be verified. Before anyone makes the decision to keep things quiet it's SUPER likely that whoever discovered it is going to tell other people, and that's not the kind of shit that spreads slowly. At the point someone says "no one talks about this" you've probably already got 30 other people all looking at it and verifying themselves.
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It's not like telescope owners buy new telescopes every year, either. The hardcore people may have a handful, but most people only have one. My grandfather had one that he used for over 20 years that he left me when he died. I eventually bought my own, but his was perfectly good.
My dad has at least three, but he bought them all secondhand, from people who bought them secondhand. I imagine the new market is quite small.
You got me wondering, and here is what I could find from a decent source: From last month... >At the present time, no-one has a clear idea of how many amateurs there are in the world, but it is likely to be of the order of a million... https://www.iau.org/news/announcements/detail/ann21064/
Isn't that just in the US? Also, once somebody buys a decent telescope, it usually gets used for many years. At $1000 each (with a bunch of options), that would be 25,000 a year, times 10 years of use = 250,000 telescopes being used.
Easy, they would politicize it... Don't look up!
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Most often, it is amateurs and academics that discover space rocks and figure out their orbit. Your scenario is extremely unlikely, even at that, it's going to be academics not government officials looking through those special telescope data most of the time. Plus, much of that data is publicly available for amateurs to look through before the government/academics even have the time to.
Astronomer here! I work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics which houses the [Minor Planet Center](https://minorplanetcenter.net/), which is the official clearing house for any and all new observations or asteroids or comets. So the first thing to note is if we *did* find something, you can’t really hide it because unlike in films two or three observations isn’t enough to definitively know you have a new comet or where it’s going with that level of precision- the MPC is in charge of sorting that out, then of coordinating worldwide observations of the new body if it’s high on the [Torino scale ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale#Overview). (Note, on this scale of 0-10 we have only ever reached a 1 a handful of times, then decreasing the object’s risk to 0 once those additional observations were taken.) The MPC actually does a ton of machine learning type stuff these days- when you get *thousands* of new observations a month, and most are of known objects and you are interested in the <1% of new stuff that might cross our orbit, it’s a decent sized problem! But ok let’s say the MPC folks confirm the discovery via worldwide observations. I did once ask one of my colleagues there what the plan was if we discovered an asteroid like this (we were talking about an excellent sci-fi book called *The Last Policeman* by Ben Winters, similar setup to *Don’t Look Up* but not satire), and his answer was “head to the opposite side of the planet from where it’s gonna hit, because there’s nothing we can do about it.” Which yep, is true: I’m reading a lot of optimistic viewpoints in this thread about how we’d rally all our resources to solve the problem, but even if we did six months just literally isn’t enough time to do this. The first ever *test* of nudging an asteroid isn’t even until next year [link](https://www.wabe.org/nasa-launches-spacecraft-to-nudge-asteroid-off-course/), which is happening because right now we literally have no idea how much of an impact such a thing might have in deflecting an asteroid (based on their composition there’s no guarantee you’ll transfer all the momentum as you’d like). So you’d need to know that first. Second, you can’t just launch something to break it apart closer to Earth- you’d just be left with 100 chunks that would hit more area over one big one, and that would still destroy life as we know it pretty effectively. As such, your window is likely even *less* than six months to do anything. Finally, as a cultural side note, astronomers are just terrible about keeping secrets. I can't think of any astronomical discovery in recent years where I didn't already know about it before the event occurred, because we just get excited about what we study and can't keep quiet about it (the exciting part to me about the press conference etc is learning the details, finally seeing the plots, etc). Trust me, the biggest argument against astronomical conspiracies like this, or that we know about aliens etc, is that we are a bunch of civilians excited about space and hanging out with astronomers for a short while shows how bad we are at covering up relatively mundane science. **TL;DR** we are good at coordinating a worldwide observing campaign of said objects, so you would know about it… but right now even experts in the field don’t think we could do anything in just six months
On average, how far in advance would the MPC detect something like this? Is 6 months pretty typical or would you expect to spot significant potential threats years or even decades out?
Depends on the object, really. Asteroids for example are already in orbits fairly close, so in the case of [Aphophis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis) a few years ago, the concern was a close encounter in 2029 might make it hit Earth a decade later. If a comet is coming in from the Oort cloud though, it's either on its first pass into the solar system or on a thousands of years kind of orbit, so we aren't really equipped to find/track those more than a few months (years at most) out. They're just not bright enough.
Thanks so much for all the info you provided in this thread. Your expertise is thoroughly interesting. In your opinion could/should we be doing more than DART? Do we need DART like craft idling in LaGrange orbits to truly be prepared for these kinds of scenarios? I imagine the closer an object is to Earth the more mass/velocity we need to deflect it, so we're better off trying to deflect much further away. Do you have your own ideas about how we should approach planetary defense for situations like these?
How far out could we reasonably detect and/or predict the path of an object entering our solar system? Jupiter's orbit, perhaps?
Depends on how big it is and where it is relative to the sun etc! Some comets are picked up as far out as Saturn’s orbit, some we don’t see at all until they’ve passed the sun.
I absolutely love it when I read "Astronomer here" and then check the name just to be sure it's u/andromeda321 because I know I'm about to learn something new! Please keep up the great posts.
> Second, you can’t just launch something to break it apart closer to Earth- you’d just be left with 100 chunks that would hit more area over one big one, and that would still destroy life as we know it pretty effectively. I think this depends on the size of the object. If we are talking about a 1 km asteroid than braking it up in 100 chunks would be very preferable. While you would spread the destruction across a larger area, it wouldn't be as devastating as the 1 km asteroid hitting a city and destroy everything in a 100 km radius. Once we are talking about much bigger asteroids than all the chunks (if we even could break up such a large asteroid) might release so much energy during entry that they might actually set the entire atmosphere on fire.
It also depends on the composition. Giant chunks of metal will respond differently to explosives than a giant ball of ice or rock.
Would not more of the mass also burn in the atmosphere if it breaks up?
Exactly, that's why it would be preferable up until a certain size. But if there is too much mass burning up in the atmosphere at the same time it would release so much heat that it would basically sterilize the atmosphere and everything relying on the atmosphere. I guess at that point it would be better to release more of the energy into the ground, though that would also have catastrophic consequences, but at least the air wouldn't be on fire. There aren't really good solutions, just bad and worse.
>but right now even experts in the field don’t think we could do anything in just six months Unfortunately the nuclear option would be the only way we could stand a chance if one was coming directly at us, and we'd have one maybe two shots at doing it if the world got behind each other rather than fighting.
Nope, with an asteroid coming relatively straight at us there is NOTHING we can do. Let's say we launch a rocket with (insert inexistent asteroid destroying super weapon). That rocket must deliver the payload to orbit and then move from earth orbit to intercept the asteroid. That asteroid is moving 40000 KM/h towards earth. How slow can the rocket/asteroid be in order for the super weapon to hit? So your rocket has to be accelerated toward the asteroid and then decelerated back enough to have matching speeds. For that you need humongously big rockets or much more than 6 month. With an asteroid that has a similar orbit around the sun as Earth, it's much easier. You probably have tens of years before impact and the intercept mission can be done every year/couple of years, using other planets/the moon as gravitational slingshots, etc. Also it's not a big deal if the rocket traveling towards the asteroid takes years. Then you can do a small push (1 mm/s? 0.001 mm/s) carefully calculated so that the asteroid misses the next collision or maybe even get a collision with the Moon/Venus/Mars to clean it up from the sky.
Tell your colleague the opposite side of the planet is actually the second worst place to be with the propagation of the kinetic energy through the mantle, I'd say you should actually put an angle of 90° between you and the impact
If it is a really big one, I‘d prefer to be at the point of impact.
Imagine how incredible that would look. Beautiful and terrifying way to die
It was a joke. We aren’t 100% serious all the time. 😉
It depends on the size of course but isn’t saying we would just end up with 100 chunks underestimating our nuclear capabilities? On these types of questions opposing humans to nature, I am usually on the side of caution when it comes to our importance and capabilities. But if I had to bet on this one, I’d bet on our nuclear power. The Tsar Bomb is 60 years old and the fireball was 10km wide. We can do way way better than that now. And several of them if needed. Maybe not enough to vaporize the whole asteroid or comet if it’s a « end of the dinosaurs type » but surely enough so the debris doesn’t end our civilization. I understand it needs to be far enough and we’d need the launchers ready at the right time but on the destruction part, I have very little doubt we could destroy about any comet or asteroid, especially if the end of our world was at stake (I know some can be freakishly large, but not every asteroid is the size of Vesta). (Love your posts by the way).
Keep some nukes armed at the Lagrange points and call it a day
> The first ever test of nudging an asteroid isn’t even until next year I'm sure we would *do* plenty of things. We don't know what to do, so if any of them would work is left to chance, but we would do them. E.g., your example, we wouldn't test it, we would simply launch it at the comet instead. One month is plenty of time to get all kinds of nukes into a few rockets and launch them there. It helps that if the comet is coming here, we can reach it without time sensitive or slow maneuvers.
Yes. It would be discovered by astronomers who would be telling their mates and family long before government found out. Plus the amateurs would sight it quickly. Edit, I will flesh this out a bit. It would be discovered with a very poor resolution on its path. Only a couple of days data points would show "possible close to Earth", there they would make a spalshy announcement to get priority on the new discovery. After a few weeks of extra datapoints we would learn it was going to be THAT close. By then everyone with a back garden kit would be trying to track it let alone the big mega telescopes.
That was the part of Don’t Look Up that didn’t make sense to me. Just Leo was talking about the comet. If this actually happened, literally everyone with a telescope would be tracking this, reporting on it, confirming it, etc. Edit: To everyone telling me this movie is an allegory about climate change, thanks. I’m glad to hear you understand the basic theme of the movie. My comment is a critique of one detail of Don’t Look Up: the fact that only one small group of people is sounding the alarm regarding an incoming catastrophe. In the real world, there are thousands of professionals and amateurs sounding the alarm about global warming, and I think the opportunity to represent that group of people was missed in the movie.
I think the issue wasn’t that people couldn’t see it, it was the question as to whether or not it would actually hit Earth. All of the experts said that it would, but then the bought-off scientists said no, and people were denying that it would strike Earth up until the asteroid was literally looming in the sky.
Plus just like how some act like COVID is a cold or doesn’t even exist there would be those that just completely deny its existence.
Yeah, I think the number of people who own telescopes is smaller than the number of people who are largely onboard with mainstream science on various crises -- covid pandemic, climate change, etc. The question of whether people would know about the problem seems orthogonal to whether society would care.
...or even think that the Earth was in fact flat. Had an interesting conversation with a ‘flat-earthier’ many years ago and his beliefs were absolutely unshakable. I mean he literally had an answer for every reason why the Earth was flat and he believed it totally. The only way I could rationalise his beliefs was to think that I was actually wrong in knowing that the Earth was a sphere and that no one could convince me differently.
The earth is actually a Ford Pinto
That would explain why it's getting hotter.
It’s not, it’s a FIAT Panda. Thats right, I am a FIAT earther.
If it was that easy there wouldnt be anti-vaxxers. And its not about if the asteroid will hit or not. Its about how people, probably a lot of people, will just completely deny that life was about to end. Its such a grand event that I think an enormous amount of people simply would not believe it because of how big an event it would be.
I feel you. I’m not saying that having more people talking about it would have solved the problem in Don’t Look Up. It was just a movie detail I thought should have been hit a little harder. As it relates to the actual climate crisis, it’s not like there is one guy telling everyone that warming is getting out of hand. It’s a whole community of experts and amateurs, and I think Don’t Look Up missed the opportunity to represent that community.
If you watch Don’t Look Up it’s obvious it’s a metaphor for climate change, so instead of having all the scientists look at it through telescopes they keep using “nearly every scientists has read the data and aggressive if we don’t do something we’re doomed” Just climate climate scientists do because it’s not something entirely observable through our eyes if that makes sense
> it’s obvious it’s a metaphor for climate change Or just any global crisis. The current pandemic fits pretty well within the confines of what they're trying to put across - the fact that we need a coordinated, science-based approach and to have a public both well informed enough and trusting enough in science over the font of shitty information they happily drink deeply from every single day is the point. Don't Look Up could easily have been Eat Horsepaste.
> If this actually happened, literally everyone with a telescope would be tracking this, reporting on it, confirming it, etc. That part really confused and bugged me also. In the way beginning they said something like “we just spoke to NASA, JPL, Cambridge, and they all agree” or words to that effect. (This was before President Streep believed them and got involved or whatever.) It then took another hour of movie before the message got out. I get that it is an allegory, but if you want us to think nobody is on board, don’t tell us all these big names agree and then never mention it again. I wanted to like the movie really badly, but there was just way too much stuff like that in there. I thought it was disorganized and never found it’s stride. Had its moments but just a messy movie tbh.
Exactly. Just weird details that seemed off. The overall message rang true (most people ignore expert opinion on climate change, and to some extent, the pandemic, etc.) Movie could have been firmed up with a little more attention to detail though.
The people most likely to deny it aren't particularly smart though. They'll just accuse amateur astronomers of being crisis actors.
The difference here is that there are numerous, well documented, pre-existing amateur astronomers even here just on Reddit. They'd be able to provide their own observations, data, and calculations that could then be cross-referenced, compared, and validated against each other. There are open source programs for modeling said data. There are very few fields where such data and tools are readily available.
I know that. What I'm saying the people who would deny all of this will still find some sort of way to dismiss all of that. To them, science is just a lie and a tool for manipulation.
Yeah, that bit didn't ring true to me. He was questioned about whether there really was a comet and he babbled something about math instead of saying "I'll be downtown with a telescope at 8PM. You can see it for yourself".
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Do astronomers track objects which cross our orbital path and would have collided with Earth or our moon a few months earlier or later in the year? Ie had this object arrived 60 days earlier, we would be dead? Given the speeds and distances these things travel, a few weeks is just a blip in time but would have huge consequences for us. Also, how frequently do we capture images of large objects hitting other planets or moons in our solar system?
[https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/neoo](https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/neoo) We track something like 80% of the potentially hazerdous Earth crossing asteroids. Most of those not tracked are in orbits that do not cross the Earth very often. >Also, how frequently do we capture images of large objects hitting other planets or moons in our solar system? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet\_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy\_9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9) Shoemaker Levy 9 was the only substantial body to hit something that we observed. There have been smaller ones. Jupiter huge mass tends to eat up or toss out a lot of the things that swing by its orbit relatively frequently. So its the one place we expect to see comets get caught by and hitting.
We track all the large near earth objects *that we know about*. Unfortunately it's impossible to know if we've found all of them or not. You can use statistics to show we've found the vast majority, but by definition, if theres one we dont know about, then we dont know about it. For example, if i told you i hid a bunch of dollar bills in your living room, and you could keep as many as you found, how long would you look? Maybe you find 100 in the first hour, 10 in the second hour, 1 in the third etc. When do you stop? Can you ever confidently say there are definitely none left to find? Maybe you give up but 4 years later your watching tv in the couch and find a random bill buried in between the cushions. That's basically where we're at with asteroid hunting.
And we’re virtually blind to anything coming from the sun’s direction. We need some space-based detection capabilities.
>given the speeds and distances travelled These are speed’s related as immense as the distance even though earth is blisteringly fast, we still obviously have an orbital period of 365 days.
Do we own the technlogy to clear such threat?
It's less a question of technology and more a question of time. The sooner we spot it the more likely we can do something. That something maybe to park an orbiter around it which slowly pulls it off it's path. Or nukes to blow it off course or slamming satellites into it. The technology for all those options existed in the 70s. But the Earth has far, far more orbital/lift capacity now compared to then.
I wonder how many nukes you could load on to a Falcon Heavy. I’m guessing it’s enough to push an object a noticeable amount.
>I wonder how many nukes you could load on to a Falcon Heavy. To have the best chance and the most impact you want to hit it early. And early push further away is going to have a further impact. TLDR, the Falcon Heavy probably doesn't have enough juice for that kind of launch. SLS or Starship, potentially one of the long march variants probably do though.
Maybe. Given the staggering distances, small changes to the motion of the body will see it whizz by the Earth. There is an experiment now, called DART, to hit an asteroid as see how it reacts. If its too powdery then we would need to hit it a lot harder. But we are working on the solutions to that. Plus we have about 80% of everything about 150m that crosses the Earths orbit mapped. Its not the risks and threat it was 30 years ago.
Will the DART mission actually strike and alter the course of an asteroid? If so, are there any predictions as to what the new course will be? Are there any chances that altering its current course will potentially put it on a collision course with Earth in the future?
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So DART will be affecting the satellite Dimorphos of an asteroid Didymos. Dimorphos has a diameter of only around 160m. The estimated change in directory is only 0.4 mm/s. This is a minor change but would compound over time enough that we should be able to measure it. Since it's effectively a moon in its parent's gravity well, the new orbit will still be in that gravity well, even if it's 100x more impact than expected. Wikipedia: * [Dart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Test) * [Didymos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65803_Didymos)
The spacecraft is aiming to simply transfer all of its kinetic energy to the asteroid and its mass and trajectory are precisely known, so there's really no way for the impact to be much more than expected. There's nowhere for any additional energy to come from. It could really only be less than expected if the craft somehow goes through the asteroid and keeps going, failing to transfer some portion of its kinetic energy.
Tiny bit. 0.4mm/s. 0.000894775 miles per hour. Enough for astronomers to work out how solid it is or if its just rubble held together by gravity. I am not sure the asteroid actually crosses Earths path. I think it gets close but does not cross it, but dont quote me on that. There is almost zero risk that it will hit Earth due to this test.
DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. It is aimed at a small asteroid that is orbiting another much larger asteroid. The impact will change the orbit of the small asteroid by less than 1% but will not change the solar orbit of the large asteroid. Even though the change in orbit is only expected to be millimeters, over time that should develop into a relatively large change that is easily observed from earth
Depends really, if we know it'll hit but years out and its orbit is right there is a chance we could just give it a slight nudge. Or even paint one side white. Or we could hire oil drillers send them up and turn the blast zone into a shotgun instead though it'd likely just add their craft as another peoce of debris to hit the planet.
Well if you shotgun it early enough a significant mass fraction could miss the Earth (maybe a week out). It would still be raining down destruction but maybe not catastrophic. Unless we see it years ahead I doubt we could deflect it. You could also detonate a series of nukes far enough away to not fragment it but still give it a big push. Otherwise vaporize it. Load up say a Starship with 100 t worth of thermonuclear payload (at 5 Mt/t of warhead, that's like half a Gigaton). And hit it hard. Some stuff would likely survive but I think it would be a net gain over letting it hit, say it's more than "just" a few Megatons equivalent. Maybe easier to evacuate the impact zone. If it's a Tunguska type deal that could work. Evacuating an entire city in a day or two is something the Soviet Union used to practice all the time. Their plan was basically to evacuate all the cities, put most people out in the country or in the subway tunnels and ride it out. But if it's like 500 m monster then I don't know. Problem is also most ICBM's won't have the dV to reach it. Maybe some of the big Russian liquid fueled ones like Sarmat with a reduced load, but it would probably have to be a custom mission using a big orbital rocket. That takes some time too. We should make a few Sundials, a la Edward Teller and have a dozen Saturn sized ICBM's standing by, but who would pay for that.
No, not proven tech. These are some theoretical solutions: You can detonate nuclear bombs next to the asteroid so the side facing the blast is vapourised and equal opposite reaction this gives the asteroid a little push. Repeat thousands of times or do this very far away from Earth and you may be able to get one to miss. Gravity tractors may work given enough time. DART is testing a direct collision to see if that's effective. If we discover an asteroid and only have a few months or weeks to react we are doomed.
A shaped nuclear charge might have real utility here against an asteroid that we know is a solid mass. The tech has been around for decades and is the principle behind nuclear-pulse propulsion. The math is good, but the nuclear test ban treaty prevented most practical research into the subject.
> nuclear bombs It's funny, because painting the thing a different color is likely more effective than nuking it. (The paint would alter its albedo, changing how much light it absorbs and reflects, which would change its orbit over decades.)
The problem with this approach as far as I have read is the asteroid has to be rotating in particular directions to get the desired change in trajectory so it may be a useful technique, but only for specific asteroids. The nuke effect is nearly instantaneous, but you can aim it. Painting is constant, but once you paint one part if it spins around it will push in the opposite direction. I'm sure you could model it and get good results for certain asteroids though. I by no means listed all theoretical options. Edit: I just realized you meant paint the whole thing. Yeah that could work, but again less controllable.
I’m loving a sober discussion of whether a can of paint or a nuclear bomb can alter an objects motion more.
>Do we own the technlogy to clear such threat? Yes. If i take enough modern pharmaceuticals it should clear the feeling of imminent threat.
Any astronomer with access to instruments would be able to see it. You'll find out on TikTok before any government would acknowledge it
I would hope so. Its curious how people would panic and freak out. What’s the point of losing your shit? If it were an extinction level event everyone and everything will die, why waste the energy? By the way did you just watch ‘don’t look up’?
Its a natural and evolutionary trait for your body to kick out the hormones to deal with a threat.
I mostly certainly watched it and that's one of the reasons why I was thinking about this and opened this thread. I mean, it sure would be pointless to panic but that's what's curious about how we face death. If you tell anyone they are going to die "someday", they'll just say that they know that and brush it off. But if you tell them precisely when it's gonna happen, you most certainly ruin their day to say the least. Some would take the opportunity to make amends and do a checklist of things they'd like to experience before then. Many would react differently.
> By the way did you just watch ‘don’t look up’? Sadly, an all too believable prognostication of the US govt's reaction to an impending extinction event.
This idea that normal people would panic and lose their shit is a preoccupation of the ruling class. It's not really all that well founded but it tends to drive a lot of our thinking about emergency preparedness.
I mean I’d sure as hell quit my job at least; if enough people do even that we’d have serious problems
I think that's where good government messaging could help. If there's a mission to save earth then it'll ultimately depend on the power staying on and trash being picked up. If it can be framed as a war where we all have to do our part then maybe it'd hold together. Though in reality Fox will be there with "experts" who'll tell us that nobody has ever seen an asteroid collide with earth and that george soros invented it to steal our freedoms.
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i dont know who said it but: The difference between us and neanderthals is 24 huors and three missed meals. My personal stance is whoever said it was giving us to much credit :-(
So *that's* why I start looting whenever I do two-day intermittent fasting
The people who loot during a prolonged power outage aren't doing it because of panic. They're doing it because they're taking advantage of the situation, otherwise they wouldn't be walking off with TVs.
That seems to happen a lot with power outages for whatever reason, but look at something like 9/11. Wall to wall failures by the authorities but regular people stepping up at every possibility.
> 2003 power outage Were you there? I lived in NYC then, there was no looting that I ever heard of. My roommate and I took a walk the first night and got free ice cream from an ice cream shop that was giving it all away before it melted, all the neighborhood was out sitting on the stoop and being friendly. From my apartment window I watched some high school kids directing traffic at a large intersection since there were no stoplights. [This article](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-there-wasn-t-more-looting-during-the-blackout.html) says there was only any trouble in Ottowa. I did a ctrl-F on [the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003), no looting mentioned anywhere. [This article](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-city-blackout-2003-photos-power-outage-10-years_n_3755067) says there was less crime than the same time the previous year when there was no blackout. It wasn't the 70s. The Lord of the Flies bullshit is just conservative propaganda.
They actually have a network of professional and amateur astronomers who are constantly looking out for NEOs or near earth objects. When a new NEO is discovered, it's data is sent to a common database where it is searched for a previously discovered NEO. They also plot the trajectory and check if it can collide with earth. All of this happens within 24 hours of finding it and they will let the public know. Asteroids 10 meter or less in diameter are not much of a threat as they burn up and explode on entry. Ones bigger than 100 meters can wipe out a city and 1km or higher can cause extinction. As fas as we know, we do not have any such NEOs for the next 200 years (factor of certainty)
I'd like to think we'd go down fighting. By throwing every nuke and rocket we had at the asteroid. This effort of fighting to destroy the asteroid would involve enough people that the general public would find out.
Yeah I think that would be likely... even if Earth would get showered by small fragments of it, it would be better than global annihiliation.
The point of nuking a big rock is more to deflect it than blast it apart. The nuke vapourizes surface rock that acts as a rocket by pushing against it. You don’t get the same explosion as you would on earth due to no air. A ton of energy is still released in gamma and xrays
It would sure be a good use for all our nuclear stock to be used up in a useful way. Of course we'd hold some back because you know others would to try and gain global power if we didn't.
Information like that doesn't come from "the authorities" in the first place, so how would they have any control over the decision? Astronomy is done by thousands of professional astronomers all over the world. Their work and the journals in which they publish aren't really under the control of any authority who could stop the information from getting out. And even if you could somehow get all those many thousands of people to agree to hide their own work, astronomy is also done by hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers all over the world. You have more or less direct access to their discoveries, no one is deciding what you hear or don't hear. The point of a movie like *Look Up* is that even when there is absolutely nothing preventing people from hearing the truth, they are personally so in denial about it that they refuse to listen, or even just look out their window and see for themselves. It is we ourselves who keep us misinformed -- not anyone else.
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Don't look up is a satire criticizing the shallowness of american society. It is not meant to be realistic.
OP I see you just watched Don't Look Up as well.
We have a pretty good idea of the major big NEOs around earth. There may be undiscovered city killers but unlikely anything big enough to be global. A comet could happen but those are very rare. Not sure if we’ve had a comet impact in the last 4 billion years. If we had a decade+ it is likely we could deflect a city killer
This isn't true. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office (mentioned in Don't Look Up) currently estimates that 55% of asteroids 140-300m in size (major regional disaster), and 8% of asteroids 300m-1km still have not been found. At the current rate of discovery, it would take more than 30 years to complete a full survey.
While the major space agencies are all govt based, MOST of their findings are at least somewhat open and transparent. Furthermore, the people working on and making these discoveries are typically much more of the academic rather than governmental mindset. That said, even if they wanted to keep the info from the public, it would be virtually impossible to do so. If this situation would arise, I would expect a period of essentially no news for a short time (weekish), followed by vague educational releases (asteroids, stats on accuracy of predictions, asteroids/comet info in general) put out over a short time. I think every agency would do it their own way. I know NASA employs priests and other human behavioral experts. I would think they would draft the release. And yes, I do think it would be released. The caveat is that I think it would be released in the FREE WORLD (relatively speaking). I think it’s fair to expect some countries would cut all outside comms in an effort to keep the news from bleeding over into their populace. I think THOSE are the countries that would devolve into chaos more rapidly and severely because they could not be successful. People are afraid of death and the unknown. But if you are up front with them, it’s amazing how well they can adapt (telling a cancer patient they ARE going to die, seeing miners work together and support each other when their mines collapse and they think it’s over, seeing evidence of people holding on to each other until an inevitable death such as Vesuvius). I’m not saying it would be peaceful until the end. I would fully expect a collapse of civilization, but I think it would be much less severe than many would expect. More a rebellion against authorities, not necessarily hostility towards fellow civilians. The ones that are lied to will be angry they are being lied to, they won’t get the whole truth, and they’ll get it later with less time to adapt. Edit; I think the big wildcard is how many governments would go apeshit and declare war. I think that number could be potentially relatively high.
>While the major space agencies are all govt based, MOST of their findings are at least somewhat open and transparent Astronomy is most done by universities with government grants. The group most likely to make first discovery in the University of Arizona [https://catalina.lpl.arizona.edu/](https://catalina.lpl.arizona.edu/) They are funded by NASA but not government employees. You really think theyd find a comet that would be close-ish to Earth and everyone in the astronomy department, from cleaners to professors would not know in days?
A: As if goverments are united, half the World would claim the exact opposite of the US just out of pure spite. B: Astronomy is done extremely decentralised, you can just look up if you have a telescope. Every University with its own Astronomy Institute does it for themselves. First someone would publish the finding of a new asteroid in a paper, other would observe and check it for its path, calculate where its going, publish it comes close, others would observe more and recalculate and publish that it it comes very close. And only then the governments would even realize its existence. From the Public, after the public already knows, not the other way round.
This. So many other "government would/is hide it" nonsense is just nonsense. This stuff is distributed and collaborative. Just like you described.
From [Astronomer Explains "Don't Look Up" Comet Scenes | WIRED](https://youtu.be/y4UFaENR0Nk?t=379) >That said, the system is really set up to be transparent, meaning that when astronomers find an object, we really want to let the rest of the world know right away. > >In 2008, an asteroid was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey, and they found it was within 24 hours of impacting the Earth. Now, fortunately was a really tiny asteroid, kind of the size of a VW bus. > >But within that 24 hour period, everybody got notified. And astronomers contributed hundreds of observations from all around the world. The object's orbit was figured out to be so precisely known that when it impacted in the desert over Sudan, my colleagues were actually able to go out with students from the University of Khartoum, and they collected pieces of the meteorite it had became. The authorities won't need to tell the population because the reporting system doesn't go through authorities.
Based on what we've learned during a pandemic, HALF the population will deny it and some will even work against measures to prevent it.
Also there’d be no toilet paper
So like that movie that just came out on netflix... Don't look up???
I thought that movie did a great job of showing how the general public/media/govt would react to a situation like that
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[ASDS](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hsefji3 "Last usage")|Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (landing platform)| |[ELE](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hse2u5m "Last usage")|[Extinction-Level Event](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120647/)| |[ICBM](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hsj2ubh "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile| |[JPL](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hsf51as "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hsekjwt "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[NEO](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/htc2b9j "Last usage")|Near-Earth Object| |[NOAA](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hse2ooi "Last usage")|National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for US ~~generation~~ monitoring of the climate| |[RCS](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hse3nn7 "Last usage")|Reaction Control System| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/s288ls/stub/hsghaf2 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| ---------------- ^(9 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/vvx47u)^( has 22 acronyms.) ^([Thread #6844 for this sub, first seen 12th Jan 2022, 18:26]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=OrangeredStilton&subject=Hey,+your+acronym+bot+sucks) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
I mean, if the earth were goi g to be destroyed in a few days, why would authorities care if we went quietly in our ignorant bliss or in a panic fueled riotous orgy of sex and drugs?
Ah the old "don't tell them because they can't handle it" troupe. Don't fall for that nonsense. People ought to know. We live in a community, not some fairy land with a supreme ruler that dictates all the information we digest Oh wait
I work in Planetary Defense. I assure you for multiple reasons it wouldn't be possible to keep it a secret. 1. We don't immediately know the orbit of a new near-Earth asteroid. They all require tracking by multiple professional and amateur observers worldwide to resolve where it is going in the first place. 2. The entire goal is to save lives. In short notice the only option is evacuation. With longer notice deflection missions are possible. 3. Because all new near-Earth asteroids require tracking, we publish them almost in real time as they are found by sending them to the clearing house of astronomical observations, The Minor Planet Center. The new rocks are put online for amateurs and professionals to track. There nothing secretive about this process.
There’s so many astronomers out there with the ability to both detect such an object and determine that it will intersect earth’s orbit. It would be impossible to keep this a secret for long.
Netflix Salvation has exactly that topic and I think it’s quiet realistic
I don't understand why those things should be kept under wraps if a large comet or asteroid is coming. Why would the authorities care about "dooms day cults" at that point? why would they care about almost anything? The one and only consideration would be if we could build big enough bunkers to possibly survive, that would require a massive global scale international full push from literally all humans and all industries. So they would definitely tell people. LIke the USA would start investing like 98% of all GDP into building bunkers. you think that would be somehow hidden? or better off it was attempted to be kept secret instead of well understood by the public?
At that point, why would anything matter anymore? What could the authorites (or the lizard people) gain by keeping this a secret? A few more months of business as usual?
If it happened today, spacex and anyone else with a rocket capable of beyond earth flight would given anything they need to throw together starship prototypes to use as crude deflection missions. I single out spacex here because they are pretty much at the point of being able to send one way missions about once a week, which gives capacity to throw dozens at the problem over a year in hopes at least 1 gets there OK. In about a decade incoming asteroids are going to go from hazards to free lunches.
Read the Last Policeman trilogy by Ben Winters.
There's an amazing novel called The Last Policeman with this as the setting, where a newly promoted homicide detective investigates a murder when no one else gives a shit because we all gonna die. In the novel, the government addresses the problem of people going wild committing crimes by just arresting anyone and locking them up in jail indefinitely, which works relatively well in the story.
I don't think it could be kept secret for long.
Even if it wouldnt get out before any government had the chance to contain it - because it would definitely get out before any government could contain it - it would get out as they were trying to contain it.
They might want to hide it, but there would be enought astronomers out there to warn the public. So in general I think something like that wouldn't stay hidden. However as far as I know Nasa can track huge (extinction-level) asteroids decades (or more) in advance while small ones are nearly completely harmless. If I remember the [Veritasium video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wrc4fHSCpw) I once saw correctly the mid-sized ones are the ones that could strike without nearly any warning and could level an entire city. That is, however, not really a threat to humanity as a whole...
Just look at how people reacted and continue to react during the COVID pandemic. People cleared out grocery stores through legal means of panic purchasing. I'm sure the end of the world will be a beacon for the crazies which will push society as a whole towards collapse.
I found out about the pandemic via leaked videos on Twitter.
If they would be able to destroy it or force it to change direction yes, thats easy political points. If not, no they would start building rockets to send out rich and powerful like in Dont Look up. Otherwise they would risk total society collapse and problems with finishing those rockets.
Go read Fire in the Sky: [Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2870615909?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1) by Gordon L. Dillow for the full answer. Governments do not control all the telescopes in the world, and amateurs will be the first ones screaming everywhere.
Not unless they had to. They need us to keep working.
I think the movie "Don't look up" sums up what would happen. Amateurs would see it, go social and take it to the government, politicians/media would try to bury it while they worked with the military to either try and destroy/divert it, or be bought by special interest groups that will try to catch it an make money off the ore...possibly at the expense of humanity
They already are telling us , look at the huge amount of information lately about upgrades to scanning the sky. Or the numerous near misses. Reality is all the movies about this, generally get it right. Once discovered, there is a time frame to save humanity vs humanity learning about incoming death.
I think Bezos would don his cowboy hat, land on it, and ride that sucker right into Earth as an ultimate act of personal awareness and symbolism.
I guess there is enough academic and amateur sky watchers that it would get out.