Another DEVASTATING Chelyabinsk METEOR STRIKE: '7x as likely' as thought NASA has revealed fresh research on the Chelyabinsk meteorite that exploded over Russia in February, and the findings aren't good: not only does it look like the astronomic models about the number of similar-sized things reaching Earth are wrong, but also the damage they can do is much greater than expected. Chelyabinsk …
Whether governments are willing to put up the relatively small amounts of money needed to take things further is another matter however.
I will say. There is always enough money for someone to get his arse gilded in the most penetrating way (if need be by "quick" military compaigns) but the important stuff falls by the wayside, even in these days of unbridled Keynesianism.
Examples?
Currently in immediate need of funding:
Chemweapon destruction in Syria
The mind boggles.
The Arachnids only found out we were here in 1997, and it takes awhile for those rocks to get here from the quarantine zone!!
P.S.--The use of a spacecraft to subtley pull an asteroid out of it's current orbit is called a "gravity TRACTOR".
P.P.S.--We're all going to die!!! (Statement of fact that may or may not have anything to do with meteorite bombardment, but I'm buying a heavy-duty umbrella just in case.)
Nowadays, it doesn't matter what it is, experts have concluded that it's umpteen percent more frightening than they thought.
A fearful population is more easily controlled and placated. Yes, yes, the infrastructure is degrading, taxes are going up, your job is gone because some capitalist gave it to someone in India but look on the bright side. You didn't get hit by a meteorite today, even though you were 7 times more likely to.
My thoughts exactly - people only started getting scared of this when they made a few films about it! The dinosaurs may have had an issue with something large hitting earth, but we've been here thousands and thousands of years and we're still here by the looks of it. So probability tells us that the chances of it happening anytime soon are remote, right?
People have been scared of comets and meteors since Babylon and earlier. Their appearance traditionally caused consternation, human sacrifice and periods of intense supplication to the sky gods. Even Haley's comet was met with portents of doom into the latter 19th century. The recent concern you mention was triggered by comet Shoemaker-Levy that slammed dramatically into Jupiter in 1994 at which point them bits of rock have been studied a good deal more intensely, to the point that their profusion _should_ be perceived as scary by any sane human who has visited the site of the 1907 Tunguska impact virtually or otherwise. The think tank engineers of social destiny should begin to consider making the real danger potential of meteor impact a replacement for the idiot fear mongering bugaboo of our age, global warming/climate change. Only fools and mimes avoid confronting the historic reality of massive cometary destruction: http://cosmictusk.com/clovis-population-decline-at-younger-dryas.
>>No, they have been scared of what they portend as omens of the future.
Fear of a hucking fuge rock smacking into the earth is a relatively recent phenomenon.
D%D, get some rigor into your chops. Why the ham sell do you think that there was an association between comets and portents of doom to begin with? Check the link in my post.
Yes, the probability is remote, especially for an Extinction Level Event (ELE). However that doesn't mean it won't happen anytime soon. The probability of an ELE in any one dinosaur's lifetime was also remote, but that didn't help those dinosaurs who were around when it happened.
Whilst it's not worth beggaring ourselves to protect against a possible meteor strike, we have the technology and the collective wealth to drastically reduce the risk at very little individual cost. As we do not yet have the capability to guarantee that Humankind, let alone so-called civilization, would survive such an event, it makes sense to spend some money on precautions. Besides, even if Humankind did survive such an event I probably wouldn't, so I think precautions are definitely justified.
Well..
I'm waiting for the blame to be apportioned to climate change.
Maybe the cash-cow of global climate change/warming/cooling is not attracting the cash anymore: quick switch to splatting meteors?
It ties in quite well to military spending as well, never forgetting that space spending is not increasing as much.
Well, since Mother Nature won't cooperate with the "Earth's gonna fry" scare, NASA has to find a new way to generate research funding (i.e., a way to fund their paychecks). So they just returned to the tried and true Chicken Little scare - the sky is falling.
Man's had a good run. Something's going to take us out. At least a huge meteor or astroid would be quick and painless. Life is short, anyway. Have another drink.
Although I think the meteor problem is real, the same thought crossed my mind: to what extent are they PRing the number more because they are looking for money from scare tactics than because of the actual measurable threat? Maybe my prejudices do make me more likely to believe the meteor threat and they are trying to play me.
I'm with him, tongue in cheek or not. We're a selfish, destructive, self important and pointless race that deserved to have been wiped out a long time ago - the planet would be in a vastly better state if we had been. Bring on a massive asteroid - just as soon as I've finished consuming and ruining and shuffled off this mortal coil.
That defeatist enough for you?
[4 fixit_f ] "We're a selfish, destructive, self important and pointless race ..."
Oi! Speak for yourself! Personally, I am a generous, creative, self-confessed genius and boudoir athlete of god-like prowess. When I am gone the world will be a smaller, sadder place, as it will have fulfilled its purpose and will have nothing left to do but to slowly spin down and get swallowed by the Sun grown large.
Unless a bloody great rock hits it first, of course.
For those not in the blast zone, there would be waiting for the fallout to drop, waiting for the sky to darken, waiting for the crops to die, waiting for the food riots to start while donning a 4th blanket to try to keep warm, and, after all that, dying of hunger/thirst.
So no, quick and painless it would certainly not be.
'At least it will be quick and painless' - only if you are standing under it when it hits...
The rest of mankind will either starve to death - due to the lack of light kicked up by the million tons of debris kickied up by the impact, no crops growing, no animals breeding or fish reproducing - or die in the resource wars that follow.
Geological evidence shows that a giant meteorite about six miles wide smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula close to the current Mexican town of Chicxulub 65 million years ago. According to the standard theory, the impact set off volcanic eruptions, massive earthquakes and tsunamis that sent dust flying high into the atmosphere, where it lingered and blocked the sun's light for decades or centuries.
Deprived of the sun's life-giving rays, plants and animals began to die. The dark skies also caused temperatures to plummet and white-hot debris falling back to Earth ignited wildfires all over the globe, the smoke of which mixed with rain clouds to create a scalding acid downpour.
Many scientists believe the combined calamities killed off most of the life on Earth, including dinosaurs, in the so-called K-T extinction event .
One ever bigger event according to Wikipedia:
The prevailing hypothesis today is that the Earth–Moon system formed as a result of a giant impact, where a Mars-sized body (named Theia) collided with the newly formed proto-Earth, blasting material into orbit around it, which accreted to form the Moon.
The cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction is not widely believed to have been an impact event. It was coincident with the erruption of the Siberian traps. This was the most colossal volcanic erruption probably since life evolved. It could hardly have caused less than a global ecological catastrophe due to the gases released into the atmosphere.
Of course it's possible that an impact event provided the final straw for a seriously damaged ecosystem. This is the probable fate of the dinosaurs in the more recent mass extinction. The Chixulub impact occurred at the same time as the eruption of the Deccan traps, another massive volcanic outpouring though considerably smaller than the Siberian traps.
Finally, at least one sort of catastrophic event exists that would leave no direct geological trace at a remove of hundreds of My: exposure of the Earth to a gamma-ray burst in a "nearby" galaxy. This would ionise some fraction of the N2 and O2 molecules over half the planet's atmosphere, followed by recombination into Nitrogen Oxides. The Ozone layer would be almost instantly gone, and decades of nitric acid-laden rain would follow. Land-based life would suffer worst, as almost all plant life would be destroyed. You can of course posit any quantity of NOx creation depending on the gamma-ray flux.
It is possible as you have mentioned that an impact triggered large scale eruptions. It could have even been very unusual solar activity.
There are plenty of interesting hypothesis that all have the same scary and deadly conclusion with the prospect of whatever the cause, it will more than likely happen again at some point in the future.Now lets see if I can hitch a lift on a passing Vogon constructor fleet before then.
@ Nigel 11
"The cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction is not widely believed to have been an impact event. It was coincident with the erruption of the Siberian traps. This was the most colossal volcanic erruption probably since life evolved."
Yes but the planet had just suffered a major impact, possibly more, and the crust of our planet, in geological terms is really no more than the skin on great molten custard ball, in would cause crust to move around, "bell rings" to be transmitted through crust, possibly causing Siberian Traps event ...
Gama rays, Meteors, asteriods, Mutant star goats, the universe is strange place, lots of little problems, my suggestion is get on with it, we need to spread out, all our eggs are in 1 basket, I watched scifi from 50's, we should have been off this rock by now, but somebody decided to sell us mobilephone/fridges/cars/pc etc instead or do any upkeep on the place .....
"Is it possible that the Chixulub impact triggered the eruption of the Deccan traps?"
Maybe it is, I need to look at that time frame of those events for me to comment but, I think we dont look at full effects of hits sometimes, when I say "bell rings" I mean like throwing a rock into a pool, all those concentric rings, same thing happens to crust, with a large enough impact, I can easy see it, tearing a hole in crust & via "bell ring" doing greater damage, but, I am no scientist, just a observer ....
I remember sitting in a seminar as a student hearing a talk about how maybe a meteorite impact could have wiped out the dinosaurs. At the end of the talk, there was embarrassed silence, followed eventually by sceptical and even slightly hostile questioning. The disbelief was palpable. This was from a room full of physicists and astronomers.
Little did they know that one day that idea might be the source of their salaries.
Geologists have something of a track record of being right!
Back in Victorian days, they became quite certain that the earth was billions of years old, by measuring sedimentary rock strata thicknesses and present-day deposition rates. Physicists, however, were equally certain that the Sun could not be more than tens of millions of years old, because no chemical reaction could fuel it for any longer. The Geologists insisted that if chemistry couldn't, something else must....
...and in due course, nuclear fusion was discovered.
Time to "dust off" Wilhelm Reich's machine, maybe? You've probably heard about it: Kate Bush wrote a rather excellent song about it
"Over the past few decades we've seen an impact rate about seven times greater than the current state of the telescopic surveys would indicate."
Not mentioned is by how much that falls within the predicted statistical variation. Maybe an occasional 7 times rate increase is not that unlikely. Maybe it is.
But should the knowledge that a meteorite strike like Chelyabinsk is now 7 times higher than before make a difference to me? If I was now 7 times more likely to win the lottery would I buy a ticket? Humans are not good at visualising very large or small numbers. It very quickly gets to a point where orders of magnitude have no real perceived absolute value.
So, by how much more worried should I be with a 7 times increase in meteorite hit? A bit? A lot? Some? 7 times more than I was? Just asking.
"So, by how much more worried should I be with a 7 times increase in meteorite hit? A bit? A lot? Some? 7 times more than I was? Just asking."
I wouldn't worry about it at all, to be quite honest...
The probability of being hit was previously a very, very small number... and a very, very small number multiplied by 7 is still a very, very small number!
The predictable human death rate from meteor impact is at least 60 people per annum.
Surprised? Doubtful? That's because I'm using a conservative average, but running it back over hundreds of millions of years.
Let's assume just one Chixulub-scale impact every 100 million years. It would kill most of not all of the human race if it happened today. 6 billion deaths / 100 Million years = 60 per annum.
Aren't statistics wonderful?
"The predictable human death rate from meteor impact is at least 60 people per annum."
But you're only considering meteor impacts on Earth. If we expand this and take account of the average population of all the planets in the universe*, then it follows that nobody is going to die and we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief and go about our business as usual...
You're right... abusing mathematical assumptions is fun!
[*] Taken from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
It was a stony meteorite rather than a nickel-iron one. Stone is brittle and usually has internal weaknesses. So when it was subjected to thousands of G, and when its exterior was abruptly made very hot, it broke up and then (with a massively increased surface area) "exploded" (meaning lots of pieces in close proximity deposited most of their kinetic energy into the same smallish volume of air).
An Iron meteor of the same mass would probably have held together and made a crater on the surface if it were big enough for it to not be completely burned up in transit. (Iron burns, most stone doesn't because it's already as oxidized as it can get).
I think the original article did a pretty good job of that. Would you also like me to explain how to read?
"From an analysis of the remains scientists have concluded that fractures in the meteorite (formed from an impact with another space rock) left veins of silicates running throughout its body, making it much more likely to break up in the friction with our atmosphere."
Interesting!
How did the silicates form in the fractures in the vacuum of space? And why only in the fractures - on earth the explanation might be exposure to the atmosphere, but that doesn't hold up in space.
Maybe it was the fractures themselves than made "much more likely to break up in the friction with our atmosphere", and the silicates formed after the break-up. Or did the heat and pressure cause the silicates to form rapidly as the meteorite entered earth's atmosphere?
I'm okay, I have Bruce Willis on speed dial. :) Seriously while I am concerned about this there are just so many ways we are humans are doing our utmost to kill ourselves already. It sure would be nice if we could address all of those as well as something as potentially catastrophic as an impact event.
If you try to use a spaceship as a gravity tractor it will fall towards the asteroid at a much greater rate than the asteroid falls towards it, so it will have to fire rockets to maintain it's relative position. Those rockets will have to be pointing in the direction of the gravitational pull - i.e. towards the asteroid, and unless they're mounted on long beams so they can fire past either side of the asteroid the rocket blast will hit the asteroid and pretty much balance out the gravity tractor effect.
The one case where a gravity tractor makes sense is where a solar sail is used to keep the spaceship in position. The ideal candidate asteroid would be one that was spinning too fast to attach a propulsion system directly to it.
Re: "making the real danger potential of meteor impact a replacement for the idiot fear mongering bugaboo of our age, global warming/climate change."
The danger presented by meteor impacts has been known for many years. It is real and it is important, but it is hardly news. It may not be *likely* at any given time, but it is *inevitable* eventually. Funding for this has been woefully inadequate.
Re-purposing our 'climate change' budget to this would be money well spent. Early warning systems and mitigation strategies might save us all from annihilation. If we are headed for an extinction level strike, we might be able to save ourselves with a decade or two of lead time. We are evolved to deal with wide temperature variations. We have no such adaptation to save us from a meteor strike.
Another useless comparison without scope.
If the odds are 1 in a billion of something happening, then 7 in 1 billion isn't statistically important to me. If the odds are 3 in 100, then 21 in 100 would be statistically important as that would be slightly more than 20%. Since they don't mention the base odds in the article, i suspect that it falls into the category of the former rather than the latter.
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