back to article Giant FLYING SPACE ROCKS could KILL US ALL, warns Brian May

Scientists are trying to raise awareness about planet-killing chunks of flying space rock with today's Asteroid Day. Among them are ex-Queen guitar man and astrophysicist Brian May and meedja celeb Brian Cox. Asteroid Day accompanies a call for a 100-fold increase in the detection and monitoring of asteroids, called the 100x …

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  1. Alister

    I'm Brian, and so's my wife colleague!

  2. RobHib

    So.

    So, the risk doesn't seem much different to yesterday. We're all aware of the risk and we've nowhere else to go, and we don't need stress-creating reminders.

    1. AbelSoul
      Facepalm

      Re: So.

      Best not to bother even contemplating potential contingencies then, eh?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: So.

        Such as?

      2. RobHib

        @ AbelSoul - Re: So.

        'Best not to bother even contemplating potential contingencies'

        Strange, I didn't say that, read what's written. Now, would I still be misinterpreted if I formatted comments more formally like thus: ∃x(D(x) → ∀yD(y))? Perhaps so.

        I did refer to people being stressed by the continued repetition of such dire warnings; I also hinted that for the past two million years we humans have been on the planet we've not been hit by large flying rocks, thus we've survived. (Reckon the odds of a lottery win are probably better. If not, then it'll be amen—and quick.)

        Now, what exactly didn't I say?

        1. Filippo Silver badge

          Re: @ AbelSoul - So.

          Well, they're warnings. The whole point of warnings is to stress people. If you give warnings and people still feel pretty relaxed about whatever it is you're warning about, then the warning is not really going to be effective. If the theater is on fire, you don't whisper "fire" once; you shout it and you keep shouting it until everyone is out.

          Of course, it's debatable whether asteroid strikes are worth getting stressed about. It's true that humanity has been around for a while and haven't gone extinct due to asteroids; most asteroids are not an existential risk.

          However, I'd argue that there's a wide, wide gap between "extinction" and "not a problem". If the Tunguska asteroid had hit a densely populated area, humanity as a species would have been fine, but the damage and loss of life would have been staggering. That kind of event could be effectively mitigated with proper asteroid tracking. You don't even need to be able to get rid of the rock; having a few years' warning to evacuate would already be a huge benefit.

          1. This post has been deleted by its author

          2. RobHib

            @Filippo - Re: @ AbelSoul - So.

            "If the theater is on fire, you don't whisper "fire" once; you shout it and you keep shouting it until everyone is out."

            Absolutely correct.

            But that's not the current situation with asteroids, if it were so then shouting "fire" would be precisely the correct thing to do—unless perhaps a 20-50km whopper was on a collision course, then it may be best to say nothing for all the obvious reasons.

            The current state-of-the-art for detecting and monitoring asteroids is rudimentary. Seemingly, most big asteroids can be detected and monitored but many smaller ones–those somewhere in size between Tunguska and the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs–are hard to detect; alternatively, their whereabouts is unknown or they're known to lurk in hidden blind spots.

            The all-too-subtle-for-some point in my above facetious/acerbic comments is that we're continually being bombarded with alarming words from scientific doomsayers who've no definite/concrete evidence of any potentially disastrous asteroid strike. Without definitive evidence, their ongoing strident warnings do little other than to cause worry and alarm. Eventually, this evolves progressively into a state similar to one created by the boy who cried "fire" once too often, the population evolves into a state of ambivalence.

            There's no doubt there's a real threat of a catastrophic asteroid strike, and inevitably one will occur at some future time. However, what precise details do we now actually have for any such future event happening? Let's begin by asking the doomsayers for actual evidence. For starters, to date the whole of human history has passed without incident, so historically the odds are low. Further examination shows that the doomsayers have no definitive evidence of real 'suspects' who are actually dangerous–ones who've signs pinned on them showing date, time and bulls-eye location. Simply, the fact is there are no precise facts about any imminent or impending catastrophic impact(s), there are only noisy dire warnings. The evidence, in totality, is accurately described by the phrase:

            "There's a chance of a possible maybe."

            Logicians will recognize this statement as it's often analyzed formally. But as you'll have easily figured out, that's unnecessary as it's clear that this existential statement contains no concrete evidence or information that can be usefully used in any practical sense to plan for a specific future disaster. Again, the nett effect of such vague but dire warnings has a negative effect on the population. Eventually, the ongoing and non-specific nature of such warnings end up having the opposite effect, emotions are numbed and become cathartic and they do so in ways similar to the way that climate-change fatigue has taken hold of the population. An 'immune' population develops a response that's equivalent to the boy who cried "fire".

            Brian May's warnings are no doubt made with the sincerest intentions, they would however be best targeted specifically at asteroid researches and those who fund scientific research rather than frightening the general population, as its citizens know damn well they're essentially powerless to prevent any such potential catastrophe.

            Scientific research into making the planet a safer place from asteroid impacts is another matter altogether. It may be surprising for some to know its research of which I'm strongly in favour.

            1. strum

              Re: @Filippo - @ AbelSoul - So.

              >historically the odds are low

              The odds are the same as they've always been. It's the stakes that are higher.

              Asteroid strikes that would have been inconsequential for most of human history would now be catastrophic.

              >There's a chance of a possible maybe

              Nope. It's a dead certainty. We just don't know when.

          3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: @ AbelSoul - So.

            "If the theater is on fire, you don't whisper "fire" once; you shout it and you keep shouting it until everyone is out."

            That's true. But if your village is near a forest and someone once saw a wolf there, you don't go around shouting "WOLF! WOLF!" just because there might be more wolves that you've not seen yet.

            Signed

            Peter (Yes, that one.)

          4. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: @ AbelSoul - So.

            "That kind of event could be effectively mitigated with proper asteroid tracking."

            For something in the kiloton or megaton range, that's a bloody huge region to evacuate. Even with fully tracked and known orbits, we still can't be very precise about where a de-orbited satellite is going to come down or how much might make it ground level because we don't fully understand what will melt or drop off in the atmospheric entry and change it's trajectory. Now try that with a big rock of unknown shape, composition and spin. Yeah, it's moving fast so can't change course much but will it blow up at 30 miles altitude? 20 miles? 10 miles? 0 miles?

            That recent one over Russia travelled a loooong way inside the atmosphere before it blew. A slight difference in size or composition would have affected where it exploded along that path.

          5. This post has been deleted by its author

        2. AbelSoul
          Pint

          Re: @ AbelSoul - So.

          Now, what exactly didn't I say?

          My apologies, I took your post as implying that this is not something we should be concerning ourselves with.

          Have a virtu-ale. ---------------------------------------------------------------------->

    2. Bloodbeastterror

      Re: So.

      I sort of agree. So what happens when we discover an object which will hit us in 5 years? Or 100? What do we do with that knowledge? The atomic bomb method has been discounted because it will shower us with many missiles. Next idea...?

      1. Tom Womack

        Re: So.

        If you've got thirty years to work with, gravity tractors (stick a heavy spacecraft with an ion drive hovering near the asteroid) will probably work, as would chroming one side of the asteroid; and you can measure if it's worked.

        Five years is cutting it a bit close, but an object that would hit us in five years and that we haven't discovered already is probably small enough that it turns into an evacuation exercise. Which would be somewhat expensive, and would cause quite a lot of stress-related illness, but nothing an even fairly incompetent government couldn't handle.

        Coping with a well-predicted medium-sized tsunami, which is the expected result from a hundred-metre impactor, is a harder but not an impossible coordination problem

        1. Wzrd1 Silver badge

          Re: So.

          Gravity tractor, laser ablation, nuclear warhead near the asteroid and no contact causing ablation of the facing surface, ion thruster pushing it off course and a few other notions are being considered.

          One need only move it a degree or so and it'd miss the Earth. Or speed it up slightly or slow it down slightly. If one wants to get fancy, one adjusts the course enough to slingshot around the planet and into an entirely different and distant orbit.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: So.

        "So what happens when we discover an object which will hit us in 5 years?"

        My prediction would be that my brain would hurt a lot. Perhaps a girl my age would go off her head and hit some tiny children, maybe a cop might kiss the feet of a priest. Others would probably drink milkshakes. Cold, long milkshakes.

        1. Nigel 11

          Re: So.

          If you can't divert it enough to miss the planet completely, divert it into an area with low population density and evacuate that area, or onto an island and evacuate that island. Make sure it misses cities and oceans (the latter because it'll cause a Tsunami all around that ocean's coasts).

      3. AbelSoul
        Trollface

        Re: So.

        So what happens when we discover an object which will hit us in 5 years?

        Well, I imagine this little number would storm back into the hit parade or whatever the cool kids are calling it these days.

        Smiling and waving and looking so fine...........

        -EDIT-

        Ninja'd by Hadvar.

      4. This post has been deleted by its author

      5. WalterAlter

        Re: So.

        >>I sort of agree. So what happens when we discover an object which will hit us in 5 years? Or 100? What do we do with that knowledge? The atomic bomb method has been discounted because it will shower us with many missiles. Next idea...?

        The atomic bomb method has been discounted because it justifies the Cold War nuclear arsenal buildup, a taboo of shrieking fit proportions for lefties. What size meteor, what composition, what speed, what angle are all variables that may have a cutoff point beyond a certain quantity. But up to that quantity, an ICBM hit with an armored nose cone for penetration could either blast a catastrophically destructive meteor into something more manageable or blast it out of its Earth intersecting path. Think surface area vs. heat ablation. The more surface area, i.e., the more blasted bits, the more of the mass of the original meteor will burn in the atmosphere. Also, a largely ignored variable is whether or not the meteor has a charge differential from Earth. If large enough, the meteor might be blasted before impact by an electrical discharge like the Tunguska meteor. So, yah, given certain parameters, an ICBM could save our bacon. And, yah, the most efficient deployment of ICBMs would be to base them in space, at which point they could intersect the meteor or its blasted chunks multiply at much safer distances from Earth. There is a forehead slapping degree of infantile rigorless thinking on this issue.

    3. Bunbury

      Re: So.

      There's a few benefits to spotting, say five years out, that a rock is coming:

      1. You can zap the fella. Yeah, sure, all sorts of options have been discounted. But in times of war things get done and developed really quickly.

      2. The further out you spot them, the less deflection you need to make them miss.

      3. If you can spot the big ones 5 years out you can spot the littler close ones too. Even if you can't stop them, you can advise local governments/people they are coming - like the one that hit Sudan a couple of years back - so they don't think it's enemy action.

      1. Wzrd1 Silver badge

        Re: So.

        "...like the one that hit Sudan a couple of years back..."

        I remember that. India and Pakistan had mobilized their nuclear forces when that detonated over the Med and chunks landed in Sudan.

        Everyone's baro-sensors tripped at nuke levels, but no radiation for those with satellites looking for such things. Both sides had an "Oh, shit!" moment and put their stupid toys away and started talking. For the truth is, Sudan isn't all that far from the India-Pakistan border, as the meteor flies. Had that popped off in that region, the nukes would've flown before anyone realized it was a fireball of meteoric origin.

  3. Don Dumb
    Facepalm

    Welcome to the 19th century

    "800 square miles", "120 ft across.", "travelled at 33,500mph", "heated the air to 44,500°F", "28,000 feet above the ground"

    Oh FFS Reg. You're writing about astrophysics on a tech website and yet you give all the measurements in imperial. I should expect better but El Reg seems more and more like a Top Gear spin-off every day.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Kubla Cant

      Re: Welcome to the 19th century

      If the Siberian object, at 120 feet across, was equivalent to to 185 * Hiroshima (185 * 20 kilotonnes = 3700 kilitonnes), why was the Chelyabinsk object, at slightly over half the size (65 feet), only equivalent to 500 kilotonnes?

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Christoph

        Re: Welcome to the 19th century

        Kinetic Energy = 1/2 mass * velocity squared.

        Mass scales approximately as volume.

        Volume scales as radius cubed.

        So the mass difference alone accounts for it, let alone any difference in velocity due to different approach angle.

      3. thx1138v2

        Re: Welcome to the 19th century

        Mass times speed SQUARED. Speed has a much larger effect on energy delivered that mass.

      4. Wzrd1 Silver badge

        Re: Welcome to the 19th century

        "If the Siberian object, at 120 feet across, was equivalent to to 185 * Hiroshima (185 * 20 kilotonnes = 3700 kilitonnes), why was the Chelyabinsk object, at slightly over half the size (65 feet), only equivalent to 500 kilotonnes?"

        Shape, density, composition, velocity, irregularities in the composition of the meteor, density of the atmosphere at the point of disruption of the mass, amount disrupted and size of the resulting debris all come to mind, along with a full dozen other factors that would include time of year (atmospheric density of the lower atmosphere based upon the temperature), amount of water in the are (density and cooling factors if it passed through stratospheric clouds), altitude of disruption also figures in.

        If it popped upon contact with the boundary of the stratosphere, the effects on the ground would be lesser than if it popped midway through the stratosphere, due to the inverse square law and atmospheric density. If it disrupted into 5cm units and less vs 5M rocks and assorted sized debris, etc.

      5. Nigel 11

        Re: Welcome to the 19th century

        Kinetic energy = mass times velocity squared. Mass is proportional to diameter cubed. So there's a factor of about eight from the relative sizes. Double the velocity could easily account for another factor of four. Finally, there's the extent to which it dissipates its energy in the atmosphere before impacting the ground. It'll be far worse if it's coming straight down compared to a very oblique impact with the atmosphere. A large one will shed relatively little energy in the atmosphere. Small enough, and it's just a shooting star. That Chelyabinsk meteorite shed all but a small amount of energy in the lower atmosphere, which broke a lot of windows over a wide area rather than subjecting a smaller area to the equivalent of a small ground-burst nuke.

    3. Phil55494
      Paris Hilton

      Re: Welcome to the 19th century

      Indeed how do these relate to the standardised El Reg units such as the Olympic Swimming pools, Bulgarian Airbags or Jubs?

    4. Old Tom

      Re: Welcome to the 19th century

      If astrophysicists are using SI properly, why were Rosetta and Comet 67P quoted by ESA as being 303 million km from Earth last week, and not 303 Gm?

      1. Wzrd1 Silver badge

        Re: Welcome to the 19th century

        "If astrophysicists are using SI properly, why were Rosetta and Comet 67P quoted by ESA as being 303 million km from Earth last week, and not 303 Gm?"

        Because, the people of the land that still uses inches, feet, yards and miles are metric challenged.

        You know, 'Murica.

        Yeah, I'm thrashing my own nation and its idios. Yes, I used the ancient Greek for a reason, I'm quite certain that the ancient Athenians had the right of it, in terms of democracy.

      2. Eddy Ito

        Re: Welcome to the 19th century

        ... as being 303 million km from Earth last week, and not 303 Gm?

        Because the public would say one of two things, either "what's a Gm?" or "which model GM, a Suburban?" You have to put on the dumb it down cap that the PR person wears.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Welcome to the 19th century

      "Oh FFS Reg. You're writing about astrophysics on a tech website and yet you give all the measurements in imperial. I should expect better but El Reg seems more and more like a Top Gear spin-off every day."

      +1

      I think the old dart has yet to fully give up on the imperial system. It harkens back to the good old days, empire, colonialism, a car industry and such...

    6. Wzrd1 Silver badge

      Re: Welcome to the 19th century

      Well, El Reg realizes that it has an audience in the US, which still soundly remains in the 19th century.

      Hell, the health care system is purely 19th century in nature, with payment for treatment and no universal health care, unlike modern, civilized nations.

      Most of my peers don't have a clue what a meter is, save for those peers I served in the military with. That said, I'm one of the few of those peers fluent in English, rather than American. ;)

      1. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: Welcome to the 19th century

        Hell, the health care system is purely 19th century in nature, with payment for treatment and no universal health care, unlike modern, civilized nations.

        On the other hand, their health care system is where we send people when our health care system has decided it can't offer any more treatment.

      2. Don Dumb
        Thumb Up

        Re: Welcome to the 19th century

        @Wzrd1 - "El Reg realizes that it has an audience in the US"

        I get that El Reg has a US audience to cater for but surely that still is largely a tech and scientific audience, which even in the US, I would expect to understand and use metric. Considering this is about space and even NASA uses metric, you would have thought that El Reg wouldn't have seemingly gone out of its way to use Imperial (which I have just realised the US calls 'English').

  4. steward
    Boffin

    So what's the chance...

    that an asteroid will do us in before global warming causes the sea rise to swallow up most of Britain?

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: So what's the chance...

      Sang by the asteroid chorus during entry into the Earth atmosphere:

      We will we will rock you

      We will we will rock you

      Anyway. Who wants to live forever...

    2. Grikath

      Re: So what's the chance...

      about 1, I guesstimate, given that "most of Britain" lies well above sea level, and even the EcoHippies' worst case scenarios don't have the sea level rising that much.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Don't worry, Bruce Willis will save the day.

    1. TheTrouser

      Step aside Willis - Chuck Norris will save the day.

      Or Brian's hair - because "its a kind of magic"

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Only Doctor Hans Zarkhov, formerly at NASA, has provided any explanation ...

        2. Sir Gaz of Laz

          If this does to an asteroid what it does to my ears...

          https://youtu.be/q4L5Bbm5BNw

          We're safe.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @ the trouser

        Lol the hair, it will just bounce off. +1

    2. caffeine addict

      Willis? Nah, the day will be saved by badgers with dreamy voices...

  6. S2S

    where has he been, under a rock?

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