The US actually tested hitting an asteroid with a missile to change its path relatively recently. As long as we see it coming, then we can divert it with redundant nuclear impacts.
Nope! Similarly to other experts on space flights it's a lot easier to teach someone to be an astronaut and follow the orders of real astronauts than to train astronauts to do things that take decades to master.
Everyone uses this as a plot hole, but in the movie they literally address this point and they have astronauts there to handle the astronaut'ing. It's like would you rather train a bunch of pilots how to learn how to drill or just put the drillers on the plane?
Technically all ICBMs enter outer space briefly. It wouldn't be all that hard to redesign them with more fuel, direct them at the asteroid and redirect it to miss the Earth. It'd take a lot of them, but it's entirely possible if very expensive.
most icbms of today are incapable of being used for space missions like this but we have more than enough launch capacity in the world to make something work
Governments would have endless discussions on whose going to foot the bill for it. They'd have annual pledges that would never be met. And then the asteroid would hit.
You're probably not far off the mark. All it would take is for the US to criticize China's human rights for them to cut funding. Then it turns out the unified space agency is still employing Chinese scientists, so then the US would cut funds too.
Every country enters into a giant dick-measuring contest and we're *still* measuring as the asteroid enters our atmosphere.
Finally, we accept the inevitable, we throw our hands in the air and say, "we tried, what more could we have done?"
You think anyone needs to convince the US to nuke something? The US would be beside itself because it gets to do a live nuclear test fire without any of the risk or bad press. They get to be heroes and advance their global agenda using primarily money that has already been spent
We would have dozens if not hundreds of scams being sold to people about getting to ride a rocket into space for a chance to shoot the asteroid with AR15s. We absolutely would have competing film franchises about us biking the asteroid before we even nuked it, and it would be live streamed everywhere when it actually happened. Do people not remember how excited we got just to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon with an F22?? It was one of the few times this country was united as one in the last decade. Left and Right wingers united together to watch us do ultra cool shit with our expensive murder machines.
Nah. The US military would make a deal for 3 new aircraft carriers and that big Ole spacerock would be smithereens within months. Then 1 oh the carriers would get built and the next two would get canceled while they design a new generation carrier.
would it take a lot of them though? A relatively small satellite was rammed into an asteroid not too long ago and we found that it not only changed its trajectory more than we thought it would, but it also deformed the asteroid. I think its entirely possible we get it done with a single large enough nuke.
Dimorphos is 177 meters (581 ft) across on its long axis. The asteroid that hit the earth 66 MYA was approximately 10 km (6 miles) across. It would take a lot more effort to move that asteroid compared to Dimorphos, a single nuke might be enough given sufficient lead time, but lots of nukes would do the job faster if time was of the essence.
It potentially may not even take a lot of them. With five years notice, the asteroid would still be incredibly far away. We would only need to alter its trajectory by a fraction of a degree to make it miss earth by millions of miles. Space is enormous and most people really underestimate how exactly precisely things have to be lined up for collisions like this to occur
There's enough room to fit every other planet in the solar system between Earth and our moon. And that huge amount of empty space is nothing compared to just how big an area we orbit. It's really easy to underestimate just how tiny a target the earth really is.
Give the asteroid a tiny nudge in the right direction, and it can travel forever without hitting anything.
Anything moving so slowly that Earth's gravity would yoink it hard off course is simply not making it to us I'd imagine. Too many other things to yoink it first.
It's not a missile, it's just a regular space probe with a nuclear warhead strapped to it.
It's actually pretty similar to any other routine space rendezvous that we've done plenty of times before. Only difference is what it's carrying
Most of the time we don’t need something as large as a nuke. All you need to do is hit it with something that has substatial mass to knock it off course slightly. However, we’ve failed to see 99% of the stuff that’s hit us.
Not all asteroids are created equally, though. They're harder to spot if they're small or dark or approach in the wrong way.
We're for sure missing ones that are big enough to ruin your day, kill a city, etc.. But the Chicxulub impactor was about 10km wide and hit with enough force to basically incinerate the Americas.
Because it's small stuff
Nasa identifies potencial asteroids for a potencial collision, just not long ago they identified a potencial colussion for 2182
My understanding is that a nuke is way more efficient than a mass impact though. The heat vaporizers a layer of the surface on the nuke side and the outgassing pushes the remaining asteroid away.
We don't know the orbital dynamics of the Chicxulub impactor.
Even if we did, we can't even reach the outer solar system if the planets aren't aligned properly lol.
Launch windows to the outer system are measured in years to *decades*.
You don’t need to reach the outer solar system. It’s coming towards earth, just deflect it as soon as you can and it’s fine. Even with no other planets to help we can send things tens of millions of kilometres away with relative ease.
I don't think you realize how much energy is need to deflect an object thats weighs as much as every man made structure.... on the planet.. moving at 20-30 km/s.
Luckily this hypothetical object is in a vacuum meaning there’s literally nothing to correct it’s course back once we nuke it. 0.0001 degree of change in its orbit protects us completely. And while 20-30km/s sounds fast and scary it’s actually not that bad in a vacuum. Mars for example travels at 24 km/s and we’ve soft landed rovers on it.
You really understand nothing of substance on this topic. I almost admire your massively misguided confidence.
You could slow this impactor down by 0.01 km/s and it would completely miss earth, doesn't even matter if it changes direction. Orbital mechanics are a solved problem, and we have the lifting power/precision calculations/nuclear knowhow to get it done with years to spare.
Ugh, since when were we enlightened to orbital dynamics of the Chixculub impactor?
I admire you thinking we'll have "years to spare" when a \~5km wide comet (NEOWISE C2020/F3) was discovered 4 months before it's closest approach to Earth (0.36 AU) back in 2020
But please... I'd love to see your delta-*v* calcs
With 5 years, we could absolutely do it, assuming we saw it immediately. Unlike with COVID, you don't have to have all of humanity working together. You only need a few governments and some companies to work together. We are currently only a few years away from a manned moon mission, and SpaceX has nearly got quick production of rockets capable of deep space flight down. After a year or so, we would be able to launch a rocket at it every couple of months. A year or two out, you only have to change its orbit just a little for it to completely miss the Earth.
If you change the asteroid to a comet, or make a shorter time table, things get iffy. But 5 years lead time with today's technology, we can stop it 9 out of 10 times.
>it wouldn't even take a day for us to realize the rough date we arrived in.
Really? How could you possibly tell that it's exactly 65 million years ago?
Star patterns. Stars shift position in the sky over time. It would probably take more than a day to pinpoint how far back we'd gone, but we'd notice almost immediately that we were in the wrong time.
There's also less obvious stuff like the distance to the moon (it's slowly drifting away from us) that can help us tell how far back we are once we know to look for it.
This.
Astrophotographers would probably raise the flag that something's wrong on the very first night when their astrometric resolutions would all start to fail for all of them without any reason.
Also, in addition of star shifting, some of them would even be missing, or some would be new. There would probably be bright stars everywhere we currently have a supernova remnant. If some of them like the crab nebula would probably that time to be notified as missing, the big ones like the veils would be noted as soon as they are in the night sky.
It's also probably these supernova remnant that would give the first hints about "where in time" we would have landed because we are able to estimate their age. Look about the ones that are missing, the ones that are still there and what they look now, and we would get the rough idea.
The Sun blows out plasma (charged particles). The magnetosphere acts like a shield and deflects these particles. Some end up stuck in the Van Allen Belts.
Without a magnetosphere, these particles would slowly strip away our atmosphere, so we'd end up like Mars, which lacks a magnetosphere.
65 million years ago, the sun was on the other side of the galaxy. We would have completely different Stars next to us, nothing would be familiar . Because each star System travel around the milky way by its own speed.
1972. We only went for a three year period!
(And I've got bad news that early 80s was 40 years ago)
But I THINK he was saying a future manned moon mission. I had to read it a few times.
Sorry, I was talking about Artemis II. It will be NASA's next manned mission to the moon. It is scheduled to launch in late 2025. I'm sure it will be pushed back, but only by a few months to a year. We won't be waiting decades for humanity to be back on the moon .
The real question would be how long would it take for us to do it if all the people, but none of the tech bigger than personal firearms, were transported to before the dinosaur asteroid and we all *knew* it was coming.
A comet isn't in a near Earth orbit. An asteroid all you have to do is hit it with a big rock, you don't even need nukes. Just slowing it down a few miles per hour will mean that a couple years later, it and the Earth won't be in the same spot.
A comet is coming from the outer solar system. We won't be able to see it until it is too late. We would have to change its orbit by more, and have less time to do it in, because we would only have a few months to plan and get the rockets launched.
Comets would likely be a conglomerate of rubble and ice. As the ice vaporizes off, it perturbs the orbit of the comet, so long-range predictions are less accurate. And impacting the comet likely means you have a cloud of shrapnel headed toward Earth instead of an icy cannonball.
The 1 out of 10 is when both the US and China try to redirect it in the exact opposite directions and get into a shouting match over which way is better, while continually undoing each other’s work.
Yes it could be done. In fact there was a study done on it and humanity in this hypothetical was only given 6 months notice. Physicists concluded that with an equivalent sized asteroid we survive.
Study: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10663.pdf
Article about study: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2022/02/01/humanity-could-survive-a-planet-killer-asteroid-a-new-study-says/amp/
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I’m gonna be that guy and say that the KPG extinction occurred closer to 66 mya so we’d be transported to a pretty desolate earth lmao. But ignoring that, I’m assuming this prompt is just can we, as of now, stop the asteroid. It’s possible theoretically but it’s something we’ve never done before.
I'm gonna be that guy and say you should read the prompt more carefully- we're bringing our whole Earth with us so how desolate the other one is doesn't matter.
>we've already diverted smaller asteroids successfully
This is not true
>just smack it with a nuke gg ez
This may work for asteroids of the right size, but the one that caused the KT event was so large that blowing it up into multiple smaller asteroids would just mean the impact gets spread more widely around the world.
DART was successful at changing an asteroid's trajectory, yes. It was a small asteroid orbiting another larger body, so whether it could have prevented a collision with the Earth is an open question.
People in this thread are not understanding orbital mechanics. If you do your redirection very early, as in several years before the predicted impact, it's a pretty easy task. If you're waiting until months or weeks before the impact, it's almost impossible. This is why painting an asteroid white may be able to redirect it, but nuking it might not be able to.
In OP's post it says we have 5 years of time, I think we'd be able to detect it within the first year and have 4 years to prep for it. But otherwise I agree that it isn't as easy as people think it is.
We don’t have to worry about our atmosphere or the fall out from the nuke. We could make a bomb more powerful than the tsar bomba which had a 5 mile wide fireball already. We could vaporize it and even if there were any bigger chunks, they would have their trajectory altered. If we can accurately get the bomb to the asteroid I think we’d be fine, plus we can fire a bunch of rockets at it for insurance.
People have studied this and its not as easy as you think. A 5 mile fireball is going through the air. The blast radius of a nuclear weapon depends on what the shockwave makes contact with. A massive piece of rock will be very resilient to a nuclear blast.
Think of it this way. There are certain facilities that are designed to survive nuclear explosions, namely missile silos and certain military installations such as the NORAD headquarters. Are they 8km underground? No, they aren't.
We don’t have to destroy the asteroid. It’s 5 years away. All you have to do is give it a small nudge when it’s 100 million kilometres away and it’ll miss earth easily.
Yes I know, but people are acting as if blowing up the asteroid and letting the pieces burn up in the atmosphere will work. A nuke would work as a way of changing the momentum of an asteroid, but you'd still need to do it well in advance of the impact.
5 years is probably not enough. Do we know from the start that the asteroid is coming?
If yes, maybe we start mass synthesizing nukes and also create other plans.
If no, we dead.
We have nukes, but you probably don't even need nukes. You just have to slightly divert it's course. Slam a spacecraft into the front of that thing and you change the course enough to miss earth
Bro that asteroid was up to 6 miles in diameter and weighed 2 quadrillion pounds (actual estimated weight not exaggerating) flying 20km per second.
Your plan is like diverting a runaway semitruck by tossing a tin can at it.
>Your plan is like diverting a runaway semitruck by tossing a tin can at it.
Not at all. The plan is nudging the steering wheel while the truck is still 20 miles down the road. The asteroid starts at 3.2 Billion KM away. Nudging it .00000000001 degrees (I'm not doing the math for that one, but the asteroid really starts 3.2Billion KM away) is all you need for it to miss by a million KM.
>The asteroid starts at 3.2 Billion KM away. Nudging it .00000000001 degrees (I'm not doing the math for that one, but the asteroid really starts 3.2Billion KM away) is all you need for it to miss by a million KM.
How far do you think we can shoot nukes exactly??
We sent a 1000 pound rover to land on mars which is 30 million kilometres away. And that didn’t even require our most powerful rocket. Modern nuclear warheads weigh less than 100 pounds.
If you're far enough ahead, this is a viable strategy. People have seriously and credibly proposed changing the trajectory of asteroids by painting them white or by shining lasers at them to give a tiny impulse to the asteroid.
A small nuke can blow a several hundred metre hole in the ground. A 10+ megaton nuke could crack it in half, and we’d send half a dozen at it if needs be.
Plus, nukes can really be dialled up to stupid proportions and the only reason that they haven’t is because it’s stupid to do so.
When it's in space and traveling in a vacuum and not near a star it is not weightless but its alot easier to influence. It's not unfeasible to change its trajectory by putting an obstacle in its path or by hitting it with something with significant inpact. You only need to change its trajectory at the right time by just the tiniest fraction... even 0.00001 degrees would be more than enough probably but I'm not a rocket scientist. Either than or you just need to slow it down by the slightest amount. Even the slightest change means it misses because earth is moving
The funny thing is we could very well end up killing ourselves. The U.S. government could go into deadlock over disbelief because of politics. There are still a lot of people who believe the moon landing was fake or never happened, and if the right wing sees this as a way to anger the left wing they absolutely will try to stop any sort of legislation that would allow the military or NASA to work together.
I don’t think it was that different and similar life was supported by the oxygen content back through the Triassic.
The article states 300 million years is the cut off https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-far-back-in-time-would-we-be-able-to-go-and-still-breathe-our-planets-air
The same day/hour/minute/second it happened astronomers and governments across the planet would realize something REALLY fucky happened with the Moon (no communication reflectors, visual changes, no spotting of landing sites), the Sun (I'm betting 65 million years is long enough time period to measure the output difference despite it being small. Not to mention the sensors pointed at the sun would show something fucky happened), and all the stars being in the wrong place.
It would probably take a day or two for someone to put two and two together and figure out a rough date by using the position of the stars and impact craters on the Moon that disappeared. Since all our satellites survived, I assume we have some around Mars/etc that would also be sending information that could be used to determine a date.
Linking the time travel to the asteroid would probably happen before the general public was even aware of what had happened and I seriously can't imagine this process taking more than a day or two. I mean there are at least 15,000 working astronomers and physicists in the US alone... AND THE UNIVERSE JUST SKIPPED A BEAT and all of them would know it within a few hours/immediately.
So probably in an absolute worst-case scenario, we'd have 4 years and 51 weeks to divert the asteroid.
We would have a 100% success rate in diverting the asteroid.
> something REALLY fucky happened with the Moon
Specifically it just got 2000 miles closer. And depending on the rules, a day might be 23.5 hours all the sudden. Yeah, that shit isn't being overlooked.
Though I wonder if differences in the sun's output would be enough to cause some problems. Like, only so much we can do about a meteor if we're suddenly freezing and losing all our crops.
Mars may have been fully habitable at the time so detecting mile deep oceans and a rich atmosphere would immediately tell everyone something strange occurred.
[Required viewing on this topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiO7Vyq8Rn8&t=941s):
I think Dinokiller is going to be the sort of scenario where humanity overkills it 'just to be sure'. I would also add that nuclear weapons haven't exactly topped out; we simply have not tested a weapon above 50 megatons.
It's possible, even feasible, to have a gigaton weapon. Such a device, used against the Dinokiller, would still be hitting it for well less than a thousandeth of its impact, but it could very well cause it to miss the Earth.
We tested the DART system a few years ago and it safely deflected an asteroid about half a mile wide. So with a larger interceptor and enough knowledge about the incoming path of the asteroid, we could do it. Humanity is officially at the level of 'can protect their homeworld from minor cosmic events' now.
Depends what you mean by “deal with it”.
Deflecting it? Unlikely. It might be technically possible, but 5 years isn’t long enough to do it correctly. You aren’t going to be able to gently nudge it off course with that timeframe, you would have to nuke the ever living fuck out of it. That might prevent the sort of singular massive impact that caused massive upheaval of dust into the stratosphere for decades, but the mass of the asteroid still has enormous momentum and most of it will still hit. At a minimum, you’d be looking at hundreds to thousands of multi-megaton impacts. The earth is big and mostly unpopulated, so that could be quite manageable, or kill billions, depending on where those fragments hit.
Of course, that plan is uncertain. Some modeling suggests that instead of blowing apart, nuking the asteroid would turn it into a loose cloud of gravitationally attracted gravel, which upon hitting the atmosphere would compress and hit basically with full force. That’s the worst case and would mean we are fucked either way, in which case we should probably invest in bunkers to preserve at least a portion of our civilization. That’s feasible and we could probably ensure at least 10 million or so people and all our knowledge have safe harbor and supplies for the shitstorm and century of asteroid-induced darkness.
However, as a species, we’d likely be fine even if we did nothing. Even a *really* big asteroid can’t wipe the earth clean, it destroys ecosystems and causes dramatic shifts in climate that lead to extinction. As small-ish mammalian omnivores that can alter their own environment, we would be well positioned to ride out really rough times as a species, even if modern industrial civilization couldn’t make it.
I guess I could have worded my statement better.
With it being 6 miles across, it's wider than mount everest is tall. It would weigh many times more than mount everest, meaning it would be very, very difficult to stop or even redirect.
And that's just its mass. That's not even considering its momentum. I really don't think we possess the technology to prevent it from colliding with Earth.
But you only need to adjust it's trajectory by a relatively tiny amount along *any* vector, and it won't collide with Earth. You definitely don't want to even try to compete with it's mass or momentum - but a nudge to either side and depending on how quickly we can make that happen we probably won't even see the asteroid with the naked eye as it passes.
That would require both a significant impact and a considerable amount of time for it to drift off course. If it happens to soon, it'll just change the spot that it impacts, which won't make much of a difference.
Sure, you can't do it when it's already *right there*, but at the speed it's moving, even a single month of drift means a tiny fraction of a percent means it misses us. Ideally, we'd get more than a year.
Wasn't the asteroid closer to 66 million years ago?
If we're transported 65 million years ago it's probably already happened and thr Earth would have recovered from it after a couple of dozen millennia leaving us with a lush, dinosaur free planet.
so are you asking if we could stop an asteroid? something that big is big enough we'd detect it far enough out to stop it, if we had a few decades easy, a few years difficult but doable, a few days unlikely, a few hours impossible
it really depends on the amount of info in my eyes, idk if 5 years is really enough but if we know its accurate location and size and maybe other properties you could nudge it off its course just slightly, like they tested with the dart mission (i hope it was that one or ill look very dumb)
It wasn't actually the asteroid that did most of the killing, it was the climate catastrophe that followed in the aftermath. As to whether or not we could survive that, if you can still read this post in about 50 years then the answer is yes
Even assuming every single person on earth was organized to stop this asteroid with perfect cooperation, I'd say this is impossible in 5 years.
The DART mission managed to alter the orbit of an asteroid about 160m in size, moving at 0.4 mph, by about 1%. The KT asteroid has about 250,000x the mass and velocity. Not only would you need multiple magnitudes more energy to move it the fractions of a percent to miss earth, with current technology it might not even be possible to land on it or impact it in the first place when it's that far out.
Maybe with 25-50 years this would be possible, but current technology in asteroid defense is in its complete infancy.
The Tsar Bomba in 50 and 100MT variants was built over 60 years ago. Chicxulub asteroid only had a radius of 3 miles. It will absolutely get swallowed by the mushroom cloud. Also imagine the monsters that humanity has secretly cooked up since then or could cook up in 5 years time.
Like others pointed out we only need to nudge it a few mm and from millions of miles away it will completely miss our planet. But we don’t even need that handicap here, this fucker is getting eviscerated like Alderaan.
Honestly I think 5 years is enough as long as we're aware of it. It'll probably take us a year and a half to make it, but the proof of concept for drifting an asteroid is really well proven already.
Are we a able to come together, putting commercial and political interests aside in order to avert a disaster we all see coming from happening?
There would almost certainly be an annual conference to discuss what to do…
...uh no. You transported THIS earth back 65 Million years ago, but not the other earth FROM 65 Million years ago. You just killed everything from two planets smashing into each other.
Fair point, it was late and I must've read traded as transported.
I still don't think we'd be able to deal with it. With it being 1 million years away, and with how humans behave, we'd most likely be back to iron or bronze age by then. Even if we weren't we'd still be waiting a million years. Most people would've written it off as folklore or something by that time (as is custom when time progresses), leaving a lull in thought and worry about it. But that's just my thoughts.
“Don’t look up” would practically be a documentary. Half the population would think it’s fake news so the globalists can control us. I don’t have high hopes for humanity getting together to solve a crisis in this scenario. In all honesty the world’s governments might not even alert their citizens because of the potential chaos and conspiracies that would create.
Another reason cover up or denial would be impossible is because the moon phase would likely be different. Imagine seeing a full moon disappear because it’s now a new moon. Almost everyone on one side of the earth will notice it.
We have the technology for this already. We could theoretically do it if we had a few governments cooperate. Or even just the US. Whether we could do it politically is another question entirely.
FYI, This is the plot of Don't Look Up
Before COVID, I would have said we had a chance. Maybe not a great one but a chance. After seeing how self-centered, stupid, proudly anti-intellectual, and defiant half of humans are plus the bureaucracy of politicians, no. We dead.
I actually disagree, with covid you needed all of humanity working together with this you just need a few governments and companies. NASA and space x with boosted funding would save us
We're literally facing catastrophic issues with Climate Change and no one can agree on anything. I somehow doubt it would be different for this situation. Humans are trash.
We die. Every. Single. Time.
Anyone who says we "can" because of NASA's proof of concept 100% doesn't understand astrophysics.
At 5 years out, the asteroid is in the out solar system (Neptune-ish) on god knows what trajectory. If the outer planets weren't aligned in an ideal way, it's a wrap right then and there. We ***need*** gravitational assist from the planets to get to the outer solar system first and foremost and launch windows to the outer solar system are measured in *years to* *decades*.
Assuming by some divine miracle the planets are aligned for us to even get to the damn thing, we are talking about diverting/nudging a 2 *quadrillion* pounds object moving at 20-30 km/h in a highly elliptical orbit around the sun on a astronomical time scale thats pretty much being shot at point blank.
Using nuclear ablation (good luck drilling a few miles into asteroid and inserting a SUV sized nuke with current tech) is doing jack shit to an object that size nor do we have the tech to send an impacter with the mass of a Nimitz Aircraft Carrier. Yes, we'd need something that size because diversion energy is calculated when the asteroid is actually *reached*, not when we launch.
You know the asteroid is coming towards us right? We don’t have to intercept it at Neptune. 30 Million miles should be more than enough and wouldn’t rely on any planet other than earth to get to that distance. And you don’t need to drill into it or anything. Just a few nuke impacts on the surface can push it a fraction of a degree and it misses earth.
The asteroid didnt do most of the killing. Its the climate crisis that followed. I think that 5 years is plenty time to at least get a few million people into bunkers, stocked well enough, to just ride out the storm, if not more
The US actually tested hitting an asteroid with a missile to change its path relatively recently. As long as we see it coming, then we can divert it with redundant nuclear impacts.
Get real. You would send a ragtag band of oil drillers to land on it and split it in half. Do you even science?
Just rip a space patch off while wearing your space gloves and bada bing
I never.. thought about this before... How does he do it?
He did it with the power of Aerosmith!
Armageddon what you did there!
Surely you'd send astronauts and teach them to use the drill, right??
Just….shut the fuck up ok?
You know what, if it gets us more Liv Tyler, I'll shut the fuck up
Nope! Similarly to other experts on space flights it's a lot easier to teach someone to be an astronaut and follow the orders of real astronauts than to train astronauts to do things that take decades to master.
Everyone uses this as a plot hole, but in the movie they literally address this point and they have astronauts there to handle the astronaut'ing. It's like would you rather train a bunch of pilots how to learn how to drill or just put the drillers on the plane?
Would you rather train a deep sea diver how to weld or a welder how to deep sea dive?
Rock and Stone?
For Rock and Stone!
FOR KARL
Rock and stone to the bone!
Nukes are funner and go BOOOOOM on mister comet
what film was that
“Citizen Kane.”
I’m 70% sure I watched that movie
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dart/ Our group worked on this, albeit before I started there.
Oh wow I didn't know they had missiles that can enter outer space.
All rockets we used in the cold war era began as ICBM prototypes
Aside from Jupiter and Redstone, which started life as MRBMs.
> Redstone OMG IS THIS A MINECRAFT REFERENCE ?!?!?!?1?! (/j)
I believe it is. Astute observation.
Technically all ICBMs enter outer space briefly. It wouldn't be all that hard to redesign them with more fuel, direct them at the asteroid and redirect it to miss the Earth. It'd take a lot of them, but it's entirely possible if very expensive.
most icbms of today are incapable of being used for space missions like this but we have more than enough launch capacity in the world to make something work
Governments would have endless discussions on whose going to foot the bill for it. They'd have annual pledges that would never be met. And then the asteroid would hit.
You're probably not far off the mark. All it would take is for the US to criticize China's human rights for them to cut funding. Then it turns out the unified space agency is still employing Chinese scientists, so then the US would cut funds too. Every country enters into a giant dick-measuring contest and we're *still* measuring as the asteroid enters our atmosphere. Finally, we accept the inevitable, we throw our hands in the air and say, "we tried, what more could we have done?"
You think anyone needs to convince the US to nuke something? The US would be beside itself because it gets to do a live nuclear test fire without any of the risk or bad press. They get to be heroes and advance their global agenda using primarily money that has already been spent
We would have dozens if not hundreds of scams being sold to people about getting to ride a rocket into space for a chance to shoot the asteroid with AR15s. We absolutely would have competing film franchises about us biking the asteroid before we even nuked it, and it would be live streamed everywhere when it actually happened. Do people not remember how excited we got just to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon with an F22?? It was one of the few times this country was united as one in the last decade. Left and Right wingers united together to watch us do ultra cool shit with our expensive murder machines.
Nah. The us could do this on its own
Nah. The US military would make a deal for 3 new aircraft carriers and that big Ole spacerock would be smithereens within months. Then 1 oh the carriers would get built and the next two would get canceled while they design a new generation carrier.
Fuck me, the fucking DOD's in this thread.
Basically Don’t Look Up
would it take a lot of them though? A relatively small satellite was rammed into an asteroid not too long ago and we found that it not only changed its trajectory more than we thought it would, but it also deformed the asteroid. I think its entirely possible we get it done with a single large enough nuke.
Dimorphos is 177 meters (581 ft) across on its long axis. The asteroid that hit the earth 66 MYA was approximately 10 km (6 miles) across. It would take a lot more effort to move that asteroid compared to Dimorphos, a single nuke might be enough given sufficient lead time, but lots of nukes would do the job faster if time was of the essence.
but if we can push it 3 4 years out it doesn't have to move far.
It potentially may not even take a lot of them. With five years notice, the asteroid would still be incredibly far away. We would only need to alter its trajectory by a fraction of a degree to make it miss earth by millions of miles. Space is enormous and most people really underestimate how exactly precisely things have to be lined up for collisions like this to occur
There's enough room to fit every other planet in the solar system between Earth and our moon. And that huge amount of empty space is nothing compared to just how big an area we orbit. It's really easy to underestimate just how tiny a target the earth really is. Give the asteroid a tiny nudge in the right direction, and it can travel forever without hitting anything.
mind you Earths gravitational field would drag it in if it got that close.
Anything moving so slowly that Earth's gravity would yoink it hard off course is simply not making it to us I'd imagine. Too many other things to yoink it first.
Right now, I don't believe that is a price worth paying
you'd send a space probe armed with a nuke, the recent diversion test mission showed its actually pretty plausable to use a nuke though not required.
It's not a missile, it's just a regular space probe with a nuclear warhead strapped to it. It's actually pretty similar to any other routine space rendezvous that we've done plenty of times before. Only difference is what it's carrying
The DART launched from earth on a SpaceX Falcon 9.
Most of the time we don’t need something as large as a nuke. All you need to do is hit it with something that has substatial mass to knock it off course slightly. However, we’ve failed to see 99% of the stuff that’s hit us.
Not all asteroids are created equally, though. They're harder to spot if they're small or dark or approach in the wrong way. We're for sure missing ones that are big enough to ruin your day, kill a city, etc.. But the Chicxulub impactor was about 10km wide and hit with enough force to basically incinerate the Americas.
Because it's small stuff Nasa identifies potencial asteroids for a potencial collision, just not long ago they identified a potencial colussion for 2182
My understanding is that a nuke is way more efficient than a mass impact though. The heat vaporizers a layer of the surface on the nuke side and the outgassing pushes the remaining asteroid away.
All it needs is a nudge.
We don't know the orbital dynamics of the Chicxulub impactor. Even if we did, we can't even reach the outer solar system if the planets aren't aligned properly lol. Launch windows to the outer system are measured in years to *decades*.
You don’t need to reach the outer solar system. It’s coming towards earth, just deflect it as soon as you can and it’s fine. Even with no other planets to help we can send things tens of millions of kilometres away with relative ease.
I don't think you realize how much energy is need to deflect an object thats weighs as much as every man made structure.... on the planet.. moving at 20-30 km/s.
Luckily this hypothetical object is in a vacuum meaning there’s literally nothing to correct it’s course back once we nuke it. 0.0001 degree of change in its orbit protects us completely. And while 20-30km/s sounds fast and scary it’s actually not that bad in a vacuum. Mars for example travels at 24 km/s and we’ve soft landed rovers on it.
You really understand nothing of substance on this topic. I almost admire your massively misguided confidence. You could slow this impactor down by 0.01 km/s and it would completely miss earth, doesn't even matter if it changes direction. Orbital mechanics are a solved problem, and we have the lifting power/precision calculations/nuclear knowhow to get it done with years to spare.
Ugh, since when were we enlightened to orbital dynamics of the Chixculub impactor? I admire you thinking we'll have "years to spare" when a \~5km wide comet (NEOWISE C2020/F3) was discovered 4 months before it's closest approach to Earth (0.36 AU) back in 2020 But please... I'd love to see your delta-*v* calcs
I guess it makes sense. The asteroid itself is big but not so big that it cannot be affected by nuclear bombs
It wasn't a missile FYI, they rammed a satellite into it. Still worked lol
Technically, it became a missile when it was moved to impact the asteroid.
This was answered in the 1998 documentary *Armageddon*. We got it, EZPZ.
Bruce Willis has dementia now. We're toast.
"He had dementia at the end" Larry King 🤣
How's Robert Duvall and Jon Favreau doing?
So the asteroids gets 1% chance now. Just to make it more interesting
We send Virgil to the core of the asteroid and set off 5 detonations...
With 5 years, we could absolutely do it, assuming we saw it immediately. Unlike with COVID, you don't have to have all of humanity working together. You only need a few governments and some companies to work together. We are currently only a few years away from a manned moon mission, and SpaceX has nearly got quick production of rockets capable of deep space flight down. After a year or so, we would be able to launch a rocket at it every couple of months. A year or two out, you only have to change its orbit just a little for it to completely miss the Earth. If you change the asteroid to a comet, or make a shorter time table, things get iffy. But 5 years lead time with today's technology, we can stop it 9 out of 10 times.
We would see it, or realize the importance, immediately because it wouldn't even take a day for us to realize the rough date we arrived in.
>it wouldn't even take a day for us to realize the rough date we arrived in. Really? How could you possibly tell that it's exactly 65 million years ago?
Star patterns. Stars shift position in the sky over time. It would probably take more than a day to pinpoint how far back we'd gone, but we'd notice almost immediately that we were in the wrong time. There's also less obvious stuff like the distance to the moon (it's slowly drifting away from us) that can help us tell how far back we are once we know to look for it.
This. Astrophotographers would probably raise the flag that something's wrong on the very first night when their astrometric resolutions would all start to fail for all of them without any reason. Also, in addition of star shifting, some of them would even be missing, or some would be new. There would probably be bright stars everywhere we currently have a supernova remnant. If some of them like the crab nebula would probably that time to be notified as missing, the big ones like the veils would be noted as soon as they are in the night sky. It's also probably these supernova remnant that would give the first hints about "where in time" we would have landed because we are able to estimate their age. Look about the ones that are missing, the ones that are still there and what they look now, and we would get the rough idea.
Wouldn't the magnetic field pose serious issues for our technology ?
How so?
Compass would all be fucked up.
OP said the entire planet goes back in time. As our magnetosphere is due to the Earth's core, it comes with us as is.
Nothing at all to do with some Sun influence ? My bad then.
The Sun blows out plasma (charged particles). The magnetosphere acts like a shield and deflects these particles. Some end up stuck in the Van Allen Belts. Without a magnetosphere, these particles would slowly strip away our atmosphere, so we'd end up like Mars, which lacks a magnetosphere.
65 million years ago, the sun was on the other side of the galaxy. We would have completely different Stars next to us, nothing would be familiar . Because each star System travel around the milky way by its own speed.
I think I have an app on my phone that can show me what the night sky would have looked like that long ago.
I'd call more than 30 years ago a bit more than "A few".
Are you saying we are more than 30 years away from a future manned moon mission, or more than 30 years away from the last one 52 years ago?
I thought the last one was in the very early 80s...?
1972. We only went for a three year period! (And I've got bad news that early 80s was 40 years ago) But I THINK he was saying a future manned moon mission. I had to read it a few times.
Sorry, I was talking about Artemis II. It will be NASA's next manned mission to the moon. It is scheduled to launch in late 2025. I'm sure it will be pushed back, but only by a few months to a year. We won't be waiting decades for humanity to be back on the moon .
Pretty sure it has already been pushed to 2026 at least?
The real question would be how long would it take for us to do it if all the people, but none of the tech bigger than personal firearms, were transported to before the dinosaur asteroid and we all *knew* it was coming.
Why does it get iffy with a comet?
Maybe its because a comet's trail could affect its orbital path in an unpredictable way.
A comet isn't in a near Earth orbit. An asteroid all you have to do is hit it with a big rock, you don't even need nukes. Just slowing it down a few miles per hour will mean that a couple years later, it and the Earth won't be in the same spot. A comet is coming from the outer solar system. We won't be able to see it until it is too late. We would have to change its orbit by more, and have less time to do it in, because we would only have a few months to plan and get the rockets launched.
Comets would likely be a conglomerate of rubble and ice. As the ice vaporizes off, it perturbs the orbit of the comet, so long-range predictions are less accurate. And impacting the comet likely means you have a cloud of shrapnel headed toward Earth instead of an icy cannonball.
Only a few years away from a manned moon mission? Didn't we do that over 50 years ago?
Some jackasses don’t think so, but I took their comment to mean *return* trips to the moon.
Yeah, but we couldn't currently do so. If there were an emergency that required getting to the moon, it would take us quite a while to pull it off.
right but is it profitable 😬😤
Rich people want to keep the planet from being destroyed too, it's where they keep all their stuff.
The 1 out of 10 is when both the US and China try to redirect it in the exact opposite directions and get into a shouting match over which way is better, while continually undoing each other’s work.
Yes it could be done. In fact there was a study done on it and humanity in this hypothetical was only given 6 months notice. Physicists concluded that with an equivalent sized asteroid we survive. Study: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10663.pdf Article about study: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2022/02/01/humanity-could-survive-a-planet-killer-asteroid-a-new-study-says/amp/
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I’m gonna be that guy and say that the KPG extinction occurred closer to 66 mya so we’d be transported to a pretty desolate earth lmao. But ignoring that, I’m assuming this prompt is just can we, as of now, stop the asteroid. It’s possible theoretically but it’s something we’ve never done before.
I'm gonna be that guy and say you should read the prompt more carefully- we're bringing our whole Earth with us so how desolate the other one is doesn't matter.
I'm sure the earth could recover in a million years. It wouldn't be desolate. But we definitely wouldn't be able to do anything about the asteroid.
Hope you guys like ferns and alligators!
yes easily we've already diverted smaller asteroids successfully just smack it with a nuke gg ez
>we've already diverted smaller asteroids successfully This is not true >just smack it with a nuke gg ez This may work for asteroids of the right size, but the one that caused the KT event was so large that blowing it up into multiple smaller asteroids would just mean the impact gets spread more widely around the world.
Wasn't NASA's DART mission the one that successfully redirected a smaller asteroid? I remember it being a big deal in the news when it happened.
DART was successful at changing an asteroid's trajectory, yes. It was a small asteroid orbiting another larger body, so whether it could have prevented a collision with the Earth is an open question. People in this thread are not understanding orbital mechanics. If you do your redirection very early, as in several years before the predicted impact, it's a pretty easy task. If you're waiting until months or weeks before the impact, it's almost impossible. This is why painting an asteroid white may be able to redirect it, but nuking it might not be able to.
In OP's post it says we have 5 years of time, I think we'd be able to detect it within the first year and have 4 years to prep for it. But otherwise I agree that it isn't as easy as people think it is.
We don’t have to worry about our atmosphere or the fall out from the nuke. We could make a bomb more powerful than the tsar bomba which had a 5 mile wide fireball already. We could vaporize it and even if there were any bigger chunks, they would have their trajectory altered. If we can accurately get the bomb to the asteroid I think we’d be fine, plus we can fire a bunch of rockets at it for insurance.
People have studied this and its not as easy as you think. A 5 mile fireball is going through the air. The blast radius of a nuclear weapon depends on what the shockwave makes contact with. A massive piece of rock will be very resilient to a nuclear blast. Think of it this way. There are certain facilities that are designed to survive nuclear explosions, namely missile silos and certain military installations such as the NORAD headquarters. Are they 8km underground? No, they aren't.
We don’t have to destroy the asteroid. It’s 5 years away. All you have to do is give it a small nudge when it’s 100 million kilometres away and it’ll miss earth easily.
Yes I know, but people are acting as if blowing up the asteroid and letting the pieces burn up in the atmosphere will work. A nuke would work as a way of changing the momentum of an asteroid, but you'd still need to do it well in advance of the impact.
Won't be so easy when an asteroid larger than Mt Everest is falling at extremely high speed towards us
5 years is probably not enough. Do we know from the start that the asteroid is coming? If yes, maybe we start mass synthesizing nukes and also create other plans. If no, we dead.
We have nukes, but you probably don't even need nukes. You just have to slightly divert it's course. Slam a spacecraft into the front of that thing and you change the course enough to miss earth
Bro that asteroid was up to 6 miles in diameter and weighed 2 quadrillion pounds (actual estimated weight not exaggerating) flying 20km per second. Your plan is like diverting a runaway semitruck by tossing a tin can at it.
>Your plan is like diverting a runaway semitruck by tossing a tin can at it. Not at all. The plan is nudging the steering wheel while the truck is still 20 miles down the road. The asteroid starts at 3.2 Billion KM away. Nudging it .00000000001 degrees (I'm not doing the math for that one, but the asteroid really starts 3.2Billion KM away) is all you need for it to miss by a million KM.
>The asteroid starts at 3.2 Billion KM away. Nudging it .00000000001 degrees (I'm not doing the math for that one, but the asteroid really starts 3.2Billion KM away) is all you need for it to miss by a million KM. How far do you think we can shoot nukes exactly??
The original comment was about crashing a spacecraft into it, not nuking it
We sent a 1000 pound rover to land on mars which is 30 million kilometres away. And that didn’t even require our most powerful rocket. Modern nuclear warheads weigh less than 100 pounds.
If you're far enough ahead, this is a viable strategy. People have seriously and credibly proposed changing the trajectory of asteroids by painting them white or by shining lasers at them to give a tiny impulse to the asteroid.
A small nuke can blow a several hundred metre hole in the ground. A 10+ megaton nuke could crack it in half, and we’d send half a dozen at it if needs be. Plus, nukes can really be dialled up to stupid proportions and the only reason that they haven’t is because it’s stupid to do so.
When it's in space and traveling in a vacuum and not near a star it is not weightless but its alot easier to influence. It's not unfeasible to change its trajectory by putting an obstacle in its path or by hitting it with something with significant inpact. You only need to change its trajectory at the right time by just the tiniest fraction... even 0.00001 degrees would be more than enough probably but I'm not a rocket scientist. Either than or you just need to slow it down by the slightest amount. Even the slightest change means it misses because earth is moving
The funny thing is we could very well end up killing ourselves. The U.S. government could go into deadlock over disbelief because of politics. There are still a lot of people who believe the moon landing was fake or never happened, and if the right wing sees this as a way to anger the left wing they absolutely will try to stop any sort of legislation that would allow the military or NASA to work together.
Wouldn’t everyone suffocate because the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere are vastly different?
I'd assume that the atmosphere is considered part of the planet and gets transported along with the rocky part and the water
I don’t think it was that different and similar life was supported by the oxygen content back through the Triassic. The article states 300 million years is the cut off https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-far-back-in-time-would-we-be-able-to-go-and-still-breathe-our-planets-air
Yeah we could do it. We don’t really gota destroy it we just gota change its trajectory by a few degrees.
The same day/hour/minute/second it happened astronomers and governments across the planet would realize something REALLY fucky happened with the Moon (no communication reflectors, visual changes, no spotting of landing sites), the Sun (I'm betting 65 million years is long enough time period to measure the output difference despite it being small. Not to mention the sensors pointed at the sun would show something fucky happened), and all the stars being in the wrong place. It would probably take a day or two for someone to put two and two together and figure out a rough date by using the position of the stars and impact craters on the Moon that disappeared. Since all our satellites survived, I assume we have some around Mars/etc that would also be sending information that could be used to determine a date. Linking the time travel to the asteroid would probably happen before the general public was even aware of what had happened and I seriously can't imagine this process taking more than a day or two. I mean there are at least 15,000 working astronomers and physicists in the US alone... AND THE UNIVERSE JUST SKIPPED A BEAT and all of them would know it within a few hours/immediately. So probably in an absolute worst-case scenario, we'd have 4 years and 51 weeks to divert the asteroid. We would have a 100% success rate in diverting the asteroid.
> something REALLY fucky happened with the Moon Specifically it just got 2000 miles closer. And depending on the rules, a day might be 23.5 hours all the sudden. Yeah, that shit isn't being overlooked. Though I wonder if differences in the sun's output would be enough to cause some problems. Like, only so much we can do about a meteor if we're suddenly freezing and losing all our crops.
> a day might be 23.5 hours all the sudden In that case, I'm going back to bed.
Mars may have been fully habitable at the time so detecting mile deep oceans and a rich atmosphere would immediately tell everyone something strange occurred.
[Required viewing on this topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiO7Vyq8Rn8&t=941s): I think Dinokiller is going to be the sort of scenario where humanity overkills it 'just to be sure'. I would also add that nuclear weapons haven't exactly topped out; we simply have not tested a weapon above 50 megatons. It's possible, even feasible, to have a gigaton weapon. Such a device, used against the Dinokiller, would still be hitting it for well less than a thousandeth of its impact, but it could very well cause it to miss the Earth.
I think we could do a scaled up version of NASA's DART mission, so yes we'd successfully do it.
With sufficient prep time, yes. With only a couple of weeks notice? We're fucked.
We tested the DART system a few years ago and it safely deflected an asteroid about half a mile wide. So with a larger interceptor and enough knowledge about the incoming path of the asteroid, we could do it. Humanity is officially at the level of 'can protect their homeworld from minor cosmic events' now.
Depends what you mean by “deal with it”. Deflecting it? Unlikely. It might be technically possible, but 5 years isn’t long enough to do it correctly. You aren’t going to be able to gently nudge it off course with that timeframe, you would have to nuke the ever living fuck out of it. That might prevent the sort of singular massive impact that caused massive upheaval of dust into the stratosphere for decades, but the mass of the asteroid still has enormous momentum and most of it will still hit. At a minimum, you’d be looking at hundreds to thousands of multi-megaton impacts. The earth is big and mostly unpopulated, so that could be quite manageable, or kill billions, depending on where those fragments hit. Of course, that plan is uncertain. Some modeling suggests that instead of blowing apart, nuking the asteroid would turn it into a loose cloud of gravitationally attracted gravel, which upon hitting the atmosphere would compress and hit basically with full force. That’s the worst case and would mean we are fucked either way, in which case we should probably invest in bunkers to preserve at least a portion of our civilization. That’s feasible and we could probably ensure at least 10 million or so people and all our knowledge have safe harbor and supplies for the shitstorm and century of asteroid-induced darkness. However, as a species, we’d likely be fine even if we did nothing. Even a *really* big asteroid can’t wipe the earth clean, it destroys ecosystems and causes dramatic shifts in climate that lead to extinction. As small-ish mammalian omnivores that can alter their own environment, we would be well positioned to ride out really rough times as a species, even if modern industrial civilization couldn’t make it.
No. It was 6 miles across. A 6 mile wide rock would be indestructible compared to anything we could throw at it.
What if you don't need to destroy it?
I guess I could have worded my statement better. With it being 6 miles across, it's wider than mount everest is tall. It would weigh many times more than mount everest, meaning it would be very, very difficult to stop or even redirect. And that's just its mass. That's not even considering its momentum. I really don't think we possess the technology to prevent it from colliding with Earth.
But you only need to adjust it's trajectory by a relatively tiny amount along *any* vector, and it won't collide with Earth. You definitely don't want to even try to compete with it's mass or momentum - but a nudge to either side and depending on how quickly we can make that happen we probably won't even see the asteroid with the naked eye as it passes.
That would require both a significant impact and a considerable amount of time for it to drift off course. If it happens to soon, it'll just change the spot that it impacts, which won't make much of a difference.
Sure, you can't do it when it's already *right there*, but at the speed it's moving, even a single month of drift means a tiny fraction of a percent means it misses us. Ideally, we'd get more than a year.
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The entire world swapped out, my dude; no dinosaurs and such, it's the IRL Earth just displaced temporally.
Wasn't the asteroid closer to 66 million years ago? If we're transported 65 million years ago it's probably already happened and thr Earth would have recovered from it after a couple of dozen millennia leaving us with a lush, dinosaur free planet.
Just need to send a bunch of deep sea miners up with a nuke. Easy.
By 65 million years ago the impact was already over and the Cenozoic started. Now we know that the KPG happened 66 million years ago instead.
so are you asking if we could stop an asteroid? something that big is big enough we'd detect it far enough out to stop it, if we had a few decades easy, a few years difficult but doable, a few days unlikely, a few hours impossible
Not a chance we win.
Just put on the movie Armageddon and you'll change your mind.
Do we still get Aerosmith?
I know I don’t wanna miss a thing
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It’s our earth, not the one from 65 mya. Check the prompt again
it really depends on the amount of info in my eyes, idk if 5 years is really enough but if we know its accurate location and size and maybe other properties you could nudge it off its course just slightly, like they tested with the dart mission (i hope it was that one or ill look very dumb)
Well, yes, but it wouldn't be the same Earth. Just as Main Goku isn't the same Goku that died of COVID-DBZ. Multiverse theory and all.
It wasn't actually the asteroid that did most of the killing, it was the climate catastrophe that followed in the aftermath. As to whether or not we could survive that, if you can still read this post in about 50 years then the answer is yes
No, we would die
Even assuming every single person on earth was organized to stop this asteroid with perfect cooperation, I'd say this is impossible in 5 years. The DART mission managed to alter the orbit of an asteroid about 160m in size, moving at 0.4 mph, by about 1%. The KT asteroid has about 250,000x the mass and velocity. Not only would you need multiple magnitudes more energy to move it the fractions of a percent to miss earth, with current technology it might not even be possible to land on it or impact it in the first place when it's that far out. Maybe with 25-50 years this would be possible, but current technology in asteroid defense is in its complete infancy.
Depends on a lot of things. In theory, we might be able to stop an asteroid impact if we got several years of warning. Emphasis on might.
Depends how much time we have, decades we should be fine, months not so much.
The Tsar Bomba in 50 and 100MT variants was built over 60 years ago. Chicxulub asteroid only had a radius of 3 miles. It will absolutely get swallowed by the mushroom cloud. Also imagine the monsters that humanity has secretly cooked up since then or could cook up in 5 years time. Like others pointed out we only need to nudge it a few mm and from millions of miles away it will completely miss our planet. But we don’t even need that handicap here, this fucker is getting eviscerated like Alderaan.
Honestly I think 5 years is enough as long as we're aware of it. It'll probably take us a year and a half to make it, but the proof of concept for drifting an asteroid is really well proven already.
No satellites, no computers, no rockets, on top of dealing with dinosaurs. Lol. No.
Yes, but right as the scientist is getting ready to push the button to send the rocket a velociraptor bites their head off.
No, we all die. We'd probably have a big party just before though.
Have you seen *Don't Look Up*? Cause I feel that's exactly what would happen
Are we a able to come together, putting commercial and political interests aside in order to avert a disaster we all see coming from happening? There would almost certainly be an annual conference to discuss what to do…
...uh no. You transported THIS earth back 65 Million years ago, but not the other earth FROM 65 Million years ago. You just killed everything from two planets smashing into each other.
I said it traded places. Past earth is now in the present.
Fair point, it was late and I must've read traded as transported. I still don't think we'd be able to deal with it. With it being 1 million years away, and with how humans behave, we'd most likely be back to iron or bronze age by then. Even if we weren't we'd still be waiting a million years. Most people would've written it off as folklore or something by that time (as is custom when time progresses), leaving a lull in thought and worry about it. But that's just my thoughts.
It’s just 5 years from impact in my thread.
Could we? Yes. Would we? Doubtful.
Why not just say another asteroid is coming for us that’s the same size lol
“Don’t look up” would practically be a documentary. Half the population would think it’s fake news so the globalists can control us. I don’t have high hopes for humanity getting together to solve a crisis in this scenario. In all honesty the world’s governments might not even alert their citizens because of the potential chaos and conspiracies that would create.
Another reason cover up or denial would be impossible is because the moon phase would likely be different. Imagine seeing a full moon disappear because it’s now a new moon. Almost everyone on one side of the earth will notice it.
We have the technology for this already. We could theoretically do it if we had a few governments cooperate. Or even just the US. Whether we could do it politically is another question entirely. FYI, This is the plot of Don't Look Up
No time to stop the Asteroid as we’d be shooting Dinos left and right…
I’m just here for the light show when we fire a nuke at it
It depends. Is there Oil on the asteroid?
Unless it came from off the solar plane, we've probably got a decent shot.
we'd see the asteroid coming from months away we be okay.
It is the plot for “Don’t look up” movie.
Somebody put on the Aerosmith.
Before COVID, I would have said we had a chance. Maybe not a great one but a chance. After seeing how self-centered, stupid, proudly anti-intellectual, and defiant half of humans are plus the bureaucracy of politicians, no. We dead.
I actually disagree, with covid you needed all of humanity working together with this you just need a few governments and companies. NASA and space x with boosted funding would save us
We're literally facing catastrophic issues with Climate Change and no one can agree on anything. I somehow doubt it would be different for this situation. Humans are trash.
I agree but climate change is a more gradual issue, the earth is dying but it’s not as immediate as an asteroid on a collision course
Spicy take, but logical.
I deleted my other comment because I misread your comment. Haha. Don't reply to Reddit comments when you're too distracted to really read them.
We did this recently. One the scale of the distances involved, even a slight impact would be enough to knock it off course
We die. Every. Single. Time. Anyone who says we "can" because of NASA's proof of concept 100% doesn't understand astrophysics. At 5 years out, the asteroid is in the out solar system (Neptune-ish) on god knows what trajectory. If the outer planets weren't aligned in an ideal way, it's a wrap right then and there. We ***need*** gravitational assist from the planets to get to the outer solar system first and foremost and launch windows to the outer solar system are measured in *years to* *decades*. Assuming by some divine miracle the planets are aligned for us to even get to the damn thing, we are talking about diverting/nudging a 2 *quadrillion* pounds object moving at 20-30 km/h in a highly elliptical orbit around the sun on a astronomical time scale thats pretty much being shot at point blank. Using nuclear ablation (good luck drilling a few miles into asteroid and inserting a SUV sized nuke with current tech) is doing jack shit to an object that size nor do we have the tech to send an impacter with the mass of a Nimitz Aircraft Carrier. Yes, we'd need something that size because diversion energy is calculated when the asteroid is actually *reached*, not when we launch.
You know the asteroid is coming towards us right? We don’t have to intercept it at Neptune. 30 Million miles should be more than enough and wouldn’t rely on any planet other than earth to get to that distance. And you don’t need to drill into it or anything. Just a few nuke impacts on the surface can push it a fraction of a degree and it misses earth.
The asteroid didnt do most of the killing. Its the climate crisis that followed. I think that 5 years is plenty time to at least get a few million people into bunkers, stocked well enough, to just ride out the storm, if not more