Scary news: Asteroid may pass Earth by just 6,880km in October NASA's preparing another round asteroid defence tests, thanks to the October fly-by of a rock that may come within a cosmic whisker of the Earth. Update: The figures below were later revised by scientists. See our followup story, here. The original article continues below. Asteroid 2012 TC4 is said rock, and is between ten …
I don't get it...
I thought Hudson Hawk was a funny over the top theatrical comedy (It has Richard E. Grant ffs), and was most surprised when I watched an interview with Bruce Willis, and he was asked what one film did he wish he had never made, and surprise surprise, he named Hudson Hawk.
I lost all respect for Bruce Willis in that moment....
Ahhh.. Starship Troopers.
A fine example of a book showing the futility of war then co-opted to make a film gloryfying war..
(And not even a very good one. About 20 minutes was all I could bear to watch. It joins a select few films that even my regularly-suspended disbelief could cope with..)
I wouldn't call the book anti-war by any stretch of the imagination. Basically the book not-so-intimated that humanity was going to have to wipe out the Arachnids, rather than try to find any basis to communicate and reach a peace. Hence the 5 gallon drum of Raid.
The book was much superior to the movie, but I appreciated the movie as both a satire of war movie cliches and a satire of the media state. Whoever ran the TV network in the Starship Troopers future is basically using the Fox News/MSNBC/RTV playbook from today's cable news industry.
I thought the book somewhat glorified the war and the idea you weren't a citizen unless you fought, where as the film was a satire.
I concur. I've heard arguments that Heinlein wrote starship troopers to show us a dystopia and that he wished to show us what a bad idea a society that really venerated the military to that degree was. Maybe I'm just not literary enough, but I just didn't get that feeling from him. He wanted snappy uniforms and synchronised marching and he wanted it now.
The film, conversely, dropped in a couple of little bits of subtle satire (the recruiting adds for example) in-between and otherwise fun action film, which is most fun if not entirely sober.
Maybe it just me, but I really enjoyed both. Plus, I felt that the over-the-top jingoism was satire. Same goes for the sequel, where the recruiter coos at the baby and says "we need fresh meat for the grinder".
Slightly related - I once described the film as "Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers with gratuitous violence and nudity". I was corrected by somebody saying "the gratuitous violence and nudity description is redundant".
Would you like to know more?
"About 20 minutes was all I could bear to watch."
It's a pity you didn't. It's deliberately set in a future where the Nazis won(*) and in the style of Triumph of the Will. Once you get into the meat of the piece it's clear that it's an antiwar film.
(*) Didn't you notice everyone was blonde and aryan? Including the troopers from Buenos Ares?
Not only that, but when the article says "test how ready we are for a potential impact" - well I can answer that : we're not.
Any major asteroid strike in a populated area will just be mayhem, pure and simple. If we have advanced warning, there might be a way to evacuate, but given that this particular rock can pass 6,800km close or more than 200,000km away, if it did hit somewhere I don't think we would have the slightest idea of where before it was way too late to do anything about it.
As of now, our only chance for surviving an asteroid impact is that the asteroid itself is too small to do too much damage (with all due respect to the thousands who could potentially be killed even by a small one).
"Any major asteroid strike in a populated area will just be mayhem, pure and simple"
Airbursting fragments are worse, believe it or not.
Check out the simulations at https://craterhunter.wordpress.com/the-planetary-scaring-of-the-younger-dryas-impact-event/a-thermal-airburst-impact-structure/
"Er, what defences? "The one where we collectively shake our fists at it, yelling "we know you're there!"
A lot of these rocks, as reported in the Daily Minor Planet newsletter, aren't spotted until they are a few days out from doing their (hopefully) flyby. So, unless someone has something ready to go, we're still basically screwed.
Now if someone has the technology that's fairly good to go, it might be nice to practice nudging/obliterating a few of those rocks. As this really is rocket science, time to bone up on it. For practice.
SMoD {Sweet Meteor of Death} still hasn't shown up in the neighborhood, dammit! Look at what got into the Whitehouse.
We should only try a "nudge" if it's definitely going to hit, because "trying it out" on one that is going to safely miss might result in it's next pass being "on target".
Though of course then we'll be able to give it another nudge, and since we've had practice we'll be more confident that it will work.
I don't know which scenario is for the best...
"A lot of these rocks, as reported in the Daily Minor Planet newsletter, aren't spotted until they are a few days out from doing their (hopefully) flyby"
At lot more aren't spotted until a few days AFTER their flyby. They're dark and we're blindsided by the sun as they come from that direction. They show up as they go past and are intensely backlit for a few days.
I'll go for it won't, space is big, mind-bogglingly big. The chance of a 10m asteroid hitting a sub 10m lump of metal in a corridor of mind-bogglingly big (can't be arsed to look it up) is very, very small.
But then again those 1 in a million chances do happen 9 times out of 10.
"Reactors in space exist."
Only 1 that the USA or Russians admit to (and it's been dead since the 1960s).
Radiothermal decay generators aren't reactors and in any case if any of them (or the reactor) burned up in the atmosphere the additional radioactivity would be barely noticeable.
The Soviet Union launched a good number of reactors on their US-A ocean surveillance radar satellites (RORSATs). Their radar technology meant the satellite had to be in a very low orbit which precluded draggy solar panels, so they put a nuclear reactor onboard.
At the end of the mission, the spent core was meant to be fired into a disposal orbit, that didn't always happen. At least two cores returned to Earth, one in the South Atlantic, the other redecorated about 120,000km2 of North Canada with intensely radioactive debris of which only about 1% has been recovered.
Of the remainder, several spilled their liquid metal coolant which now contributes to orbital debris, at least one appears to be disintegrating in its graveyard orbit, and when they were working they were nightmares for gamma ray astronomers.
Fortunately, none have been launched since the late 1980s.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
