Asteroid as Powerful as 50 Megaton Nuke May Slam Into Earth in 2023 –

[DunkingDan]

A large asteroid that could someday be headed directly for Earth would pack a tremendous impact force 1,500 times that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs combined, the newspaperExpress warned. The British daily cites NASA sources as claiming that the space rock, measuring nearly 700 feet across, could have a staggering 62 different potential impact trajectories with Earth with each of them potentially able to set the asteroid on a collision course with us over the next 100 years.

More at link

[Cincydawg]

When I see an article that includes the qualifier "may" I immediately wonder about the odds of its happening.  Then I see the report is from some British daily and I figure they hyped this to the nth degree to sell newspaper, what is extreme catches the eye.  So, then I check around the web for a more, um, sentient and dispassionate analysis:

https://bgr.com/2018/11/26/asteroid-2018-lf16-earth-impact-odds/

"NASA’s models show that the actual odds of the rock affecting Earth are 1 in 30,000,000. That’s 30 million. In fact, the odds are so low that the folks who track asteroid threats have given 2018 LF16 a threat rating of 0/10. The “zero” rating is defined as “The likelihood of a collision is zero, or is so low as to be effectively zero.” A rating of 5/10 is where astronomers consider an object to be “threatening” and “certain collisions” begin at ratings of 8/10."

I'm sure to be excoriated hereabouts for bringing a bit of actual sanity to a thread, again, but so be it.  Maybe a few folks can relax now.

[DunkingDan]

Hip hip Hip I am Deputy Dip of the internet posting police. Either post like I demand or get ready to pay the price.


As you have said in the past science theory is always changing depending on the flavor of the day or what you do not admit money. Likewise unknown objects and unknown events cause  paths to change

But you at least not threatening to delete my post like you have in the past



and just remenber to

You also ignored this

A recently rediscovered 400-meter Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) is predicted to pass near the Earth on 13 April 2029. The flyby distance is uncertain and an Earth impact cannot yet be ruled out. The odds of impact, presently around 1 in 300, are unusual enough to merit special monitoring by astronomers, but should not be of public concern. These odds are likely to change on a day-to-day basis as new data are received. In all likelihood, the possibility of impact will eventually be eliminated as the asteroid continues to be tracked by astronomers around the world.

From that awful American source
-------------------------------------------------

Most bodies in the solar system with a visible solid surface exhibit craters. On Earth we see very few because geological processes such as weathering and erosion soon destroy the obvious evidence. On bodies with no atmosphere, such as Mercury or the Moon, craters are everywhere. Without going into detail, there is strong evidence of a period of intense cratering in the solar system that ended about 3.9 billion years ago. Since that time cratering appears to have continued at a much slower and fairly uniform rate. The cause of the craters is impacts by comets and asteroids. Most asteroids follow simple circular orbits between the planets Mars and Jupiter, but all of these asteroids are perturbed, occasionally by each other and more regularly and dramatically by Jupiter. As a result some find themselves in orbits that cross that of Mars or even Earth. Comets on the other hand follow highly elongated orbits that often come close to Earth or other major bodies to begin with. These orbits are greatly affected if they come anywhere near Jupiter. Over the eons every moon and planet finds itself in the wrong place in its orbit at the wrong time and suffers the insult of a major impact.
The Earth's atmosphere protects us from the multitude of small debris, the size of grains of sand or pebbles, thousands of which pelt our planet every day. The meteors in our night sky are visible evidence of this small debris burning up high in the atmosphere. In fact, up to a diameter of about 10-meters (33 feet), most stony meteoroids are destroyed in the atmosphere in thermal explosions. Obviously some fragments do reach the ground, because we have stony meteorites in our museums. Such falls are known to cause property damage from time to time. On October 9, 1992, a fire ball was seen streaking across the sky all the way from Kentucky to New York. A 27-pound stony meteorite (chondrite) from the fireball fell in Peekskill, New York, punching a hole in the rear end of an automobile parked in a driveway and coming to rest in a shallow depression beneath it. Falls into a Connecticut dining room and an Alabama bedroom are well documented incursions in this century. A 10-meter body typically has the kinetic energy of about five nuclear warheads of the size dropped on Hiroshima, however, and the shock wave it creates can do considerable damage even if nothing but comparatively small fragments survive to reach the ground. Many fragments of a 10-meter iron meteoroid will reach the ground. The only well-studied example of such a fall in recent times took place in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains of eastern Siberia on February 12, 1947. About 150 US tons of fragments reached the ground, the largest intact fragment weighing 3,839 pounds. The fragments covered an area of about 1 x 2 kilometers (0.6 x 1.2 miles), within which there were 102 craters greater than 1 meter in diameter, the largest of them 26.5 meters (87 feet), and about 100 more smaller craters. If this small iron meteoroid had landed in a city, it obviously would have created quite a stir. The effect of the larger pieces would be comparable to having a car suddenly drop in at supersonic speeds! Such an event occurs about once per decade somewhere on Earth, but most of them are never recorded, occurring at sea or in some remote region such as Antarctica. It is a fact that there is no record in modern times of any person being killed by a meteorite. It is the falls larger than 10 meters that start to become really worrisome. The 1908 Tunguska event was a stony meteorite in the 100-meter class. The famous meteor crater in northern Arizona, some 1219 meters (4,000 feet) in diameter and 183 meters (600 feet) deep, was created 50,000 years ago by a nickel-iron meteorite perhaps 60 meters in diameter. It probably survived nearly intact until impact, at which time it was pulverized and largely vaporized as its 6-7 x 1016 joules* of kinetic energy were rapidly dissipated in an explosion equivalent to some 15 million tons of TNT! Falls of this class occur once or twice every 1000 years.
There are now over 100 ring-like structures on Earth recognized as definite impact craters. Most of them are not obviously craters, their identity masked by heavy erosion over the centuries, but the minerals and shocked rocks present make it clear that impact was their cause. The Ries Crater in Bavaria is a lush green basin some 25 kilometers (15 miles) in diameter with the city of Nordlingen in the middle. Fifteen million years ago a 1500-meter (5000 feet) asteroid or comet hit there, excavating more than a trillion tons of material and scattering it all over Europe. This sort of thing happens about once every million years or so. Another step upward in size take us to Chicxulub, an event that occurs once in 50-100 million years. Chicxulub is the largest crater known which seems definitely to have an impact origin, but there are a few ring-like structures that are 2-3 times larger yet about which geologists are uncertain. There are now more than 150 asteroids known that come nearer to the Sun than the outermost point of Earth's orbit. These range in diameter from a few meters up to about 8 kilometers. A working group chaired by Dr. David Morrison, NASA Ames Research Center, estimates that there are some 2,100 such asteroids larger than 1 kilometer and perhaps 320,000 larger than 100 meters, the size that caused the Tunguska event and the Arizona Meteor Crater. An impact by one of these larger meteors in the wrong place would be a catastrophe, but it would not threaten civilization. However, the working group concluded that an impact by an asteroid larger than 1-2 kilometers could degrade the global climate, leading to widespread crop failure and loss of life. Such global environmental catastrophes, which place the entire population of the Earth at risk, are estimated to take place several times per million years on average. A still larger impact by an object larger than about 5 kilometers is damaging enough to cause mass extinctions. In addition there are many comets in the 1-10 kilometer class, 15 of them in short-period orbits that pass inside the Earth's orbit, and an unknown number of long-period comets. Virtually any short-period comet among the 100 or so not currently coming near the Earth could become dangerous after a close passage by Jupiter.
This all sounds pretty scary. However, as noted earlier, no human in the past 1000 years is known to have been killed by a meteorite or by the effects of one impacting. (There are ancient Chinese records of such deaths.) An individual's chance of being killed by a meteorite is small, but the risk increases with the size of the impacting comet or asteroid, with the greatest risk associated with global catastrophes resulting from impacts of objects larger than 1 kilometer. NASA knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small. In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years. To be able to better calculate the statistics, astronomers need to detect as many of the near-Earth objects as possible. It's likely that we could identify a threatening near-Earth object large enough to potentially cause catastrophic changes in the Earth's environment, and most astronomers believe that a systematic approach to studying asteroids and comets that pass close to the Earth makes good sense. It's too late for the dinosaurs, but today astonomers are conducting ever-increasing searches to identify all of the larger objects which pose an impact danger to Earth.
* joule: a unit of measurement, the amount of energy corresponding to one watt acting for one second.

[Cincydawg]

British "dailies" in general are not a great source of reliable information.  If they feature something that sounds sensational, it very likely is exaggerated to sell papers.

This is one classic example of that, something highly exaggerated that misrepresents the actual threat.  I posted a more credible and logical and sensible version of the story to correct the misinformation purveyed in the OP.

Given this is a discussion site, I view that as entirely reasonable.  I realize folks don't like being corrected, but perhaps over time they might invest one minute to check something they cite as authoritative especially when it does not even sound right.  Look for that word "may" in some story.

[gymvol]

When I see an article that includes the qualifier "may" I immediately wonder about the odds of its happening.  Then I see the report is from some British daily and I figure they hyped this to the nth degree to sell newspaper, what is extreme catches the eye.  So, then I check around the web for a more, um, sentient and dispassionate analysis:

https://bgr.com/2018/11/26/asteroid-2018-lf16-earth-impact-odds/

"NASA’s models show that the actual odds of the rock affecting Earth are 1 in 30,000,000. That’s 30 million. In fact, the odds are so low that the folks who track asteroid threats have given 2018 LF16 a threat rating of 0/10. The “zero” rating is defined as “The likelihood of a collision is zero, or is so low as to be effectively zero.” A rating of 5/10 is where astronomers consider an object to be “threatening” and “certain collisions” begin at ratings of 8/10."

I'm sure to be excoriated hereabouts for bringing a bit of actual sanity to a thread, again, but so be it.  Maybe a few folks can relax now.

The odds of winning the lottery is approximately 300 million to one give or take depending on which one you play.

So the odds of the asteroid is ten time more likely to hit the earth than anyone has to win the lottery and people do win the lottery so what's your point?

If you've read Edgar Cayce he predicted Califorina would fall into the Pacific and the Great Lakes would flow into the Gulf of Mexico.  He was very accurate in his readings or predictions.

[highVOLtage]

I'm sure the wacky New Green Deal has an answer for it.

[Cincydawg]

I note a complete misunderstanding of probability theory around here pretty often.

If s single ticket has a 300 million to 1 chance of winning the lottery, it is clear that if hundreds of millions of tickets are purchased with unique numbers, the odds that SOMEONE will win increase dramatically (and yet the lottery often is not won for weeks).

This is an entirely different situation obviously, and this 30 million to 1 shot is not what I would consider concerning, nor worth noting, though it MAY happen.

A LOT of things MAY happen, and this is rather far down the list of such things.

[gymvol]

I note a complete misunderstanding of probability theory around here pretty often.

If s single ticket has a 300 million to 1 chance of winning the lottery, it is clear that if hundreds of millions of tickets are purchased with unique numbers, the odds that SOMEONE will win increase dramatically (and yet the lottery often is not won for weeks).

This is an entirely different situation obviously, and this 30 million to 1 shot is not what I would consider concerning, nor worth noting, though it MAY happen.

A LOT of things MAY happen, and this is rather far down the list of such things.

There is more than one asteroid in outer space too.

There are millions of asteroids in the solar system there is even an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter so the odds are greater as time passes that one hits the earth.

[Cincydawg]

Indeed that is true, and needs no sensationalistic silly article to be discussed.

We have a decent handle on how often such events happen over time, particularly for asteroids that are sizable enough to be a serious problem.  And, obviously such events are very very rare.  I'm not going to worry about something that might happen in a million years, or more, especially since we have no current means to prevent it.

Scientists of course do run calculations and simulations on such probabilities and I'd trust their calculations over some Brit tabloid any day.

This is tripe.

[Cincydawg]

https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/back2.html

This is a JPL discussion of the probability of such events.  Of course, it's by scientists, so some here may consider their calculations and perspective to be dismissed because of money or they are all Leftists or folks can't understand it and don't want to try.

"NASA knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small. In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years. To be able to better calculate the statistics, astronomers need to detect as many of the near-Earth objects as possible. It's likely that we could identify a threatening near-Earth object large enough to potentially cause catastrophic changes in the Earth's environment, and most astronomers believe that a systematic approach to studying asteroids and comets that pass close to the Earth makes good sense."

Interesting list from JPL:

https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/

Yeah, sciencey stuff, again.

[gymvol]

[Cincydawg]

Heaven forbid anyone would read anything written by scientists on a scientific technical topic.

Folks are welcome to depend on British Dailies if they so choose.  I'm just providing some perspective from people who ostensibly know a lot more about it.

People criticize the media unless it says what they want it to say.

[gymvol]

WORD

[Cincydawg]

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/tsar-bomba-russias-insane-50-megaton-monster-nuke-could-have-20801

[DunkingDan]

I ignore the NASA article stated '' These odds are likely to change on a day-to-day basis as new data are received'' thus giving reasonable cause to differences in the two articles as well as other scientists probably sued to background information.

I do this because I want to continue my quest of denigrating DD and running him off the board
 

Well at least you are not threatening to delete my post again  their Deputy Dip er OCDDawg.

But you are doing an outstanding job of  trying to denigrate 

[fuzzynavol]

[Cincydawg]

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/22/5636960/a-rough-guide-to-spotting-bad-science

5) Speculative language: You can say anything with the word "could" and it could be true. Jelly beans could be the reason that the average global temperature is increasing. Unicorns might cause cancer. And pygmy marmosets may be living in the middle of black holes.

[gymvol]

[Cincydawg]

There is a rather obvious difference between attacking a POST and attacking the POSTER.  

The responses to my posts attack me, not my posts.  There is an obvious reasons for that.  When you can't rebut what is posted, you attack the poster instead, with lame memes and photos that are puerile.

[gymvol]

Heaven forbid anyone would read anything written by scientists on a scientific technical topic.

Folks are welcome to depend on British Dailies if they so choose.  I'm just providing some perspective from people who ostensibly know a lot more about it.

People criticize the media unless it says what they want it to say.

So now you think you're a scientist?  

[Cincydawg]

I think a lot of people find science interesting and attempt to appreciate and understand it as much as they can.

Some people find it to be a threat of course and seek to minimize and distort it as much as they can.

[gymvol]

I think a lot of people find science interesting and attempt to appreciate and understand it as much as they can.

Some people find it to be a threat of course and seek to minimize and distort it as much as they can.

What I find interesting is I can make fun of people who think they know it all especially when they don't know when to quit.    


 

[Cincydawg]

Yes, if it makes you feel some sense of enjoyment, you can indeed make fun of people, here or elsewhere in your life.

It does appear to be something you like to try to do, rather than, for example, discussing the actual topic at hand.

[ATexasVol]

How long is this pissing match going to keep going?   Asking for a friend.   

[Cincydawg]

I'm guessing until an asteroid hits the planet and kills us all.

[gymvol]

How long is this pissing match going to keep going?   Asking for a friend.  

It isn't a pissing match Cincy as always has to have the last word.  I enjoy messing with his head and making fun of him for being a know it all.

If you noriced I just posted WORD and he had to respond he couldn't let it go.

 

[TREX]

I hope i'm out fishing when it happens.

[847badgerfan]

So now you think you're a scientist?  

Well... he actually is.

[Cincydawg]

Don't blow my cover.

[Drew4UTk]

Well... he actually is.

heheheheheeee- yup.  and that's no shit. heheheheheeeee!!!