5 hours ago, Chock said:

You know that NASA and POCKOCMOC have actually done feasibility studies on that for real? Even more amazingly, the Russian space agency were actually considering doing it, in order to deflect the asteroid Apophis away from Earth (this was about ten years ago), but since Apophis only had a one in a quarter of a million chance of hitting our planet, they didn't go ahead with the plan.

The problem is however, it would apparently only take an asteroid approximately 400 meters wide to wipe out the planet (anything coming at us bigger than that would be classed as an extinction-level threat). This is where one has to be just a little bit concerned with the feasibility since the biggest known asteroid is Ceres (sometimes referred to as a dwarf planet), which is getting on for 2,000 times the size of that extinction-level size classification (Ceres is about 933 kilometers wide), so its a bit less than one twelfth the size of Earth, or more or less the size of France if you prefer that in more easily recognisable geographic terms. If something the size of France ever decides to say Bonjour to us whilst travelling at 25 kilometers per second, which is how fast those things are typically travelling, it's gonna take more than a few nukes to persuade it otherwise lol, however, it does make for some fun movies.

How devastating.  ;)

 

Well this thread tooka sharp left turn.