Phew, looks like Apophis won't hit us for at least the next 100 years. We're safe lads!

However, as you know, I often create miraculous inventions for the benefit of mankind in my shed, so will continue to develop my asteroid deflector ray. Can't tell you how it works, it's physics and stuff and you wouldn't understand.

If there's anything else you'd like me to invent in my shed, please let me know.

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/space/apophis-asteroid-god-of-chaos-risk-b1823053.html

The most dangerous objects are the ones that we have not discovered yet......and that includes long period comets that could be significantly larger than any undiscovered asteroids.

Edited March 29, 20215 yr by Christopher Low

This is no kind of threat at all. I personally remember having destroyed many thousands of asteroids - and some invading flying saucers - with nothing more than a 24-point capital letter A and a few well-aimed punctuation marks:

Edited March 29, 20215 yr by Chock

Didn't SG-1 defeat Apophis years ago?

Dave

3 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

Didn't SG-1 defeat Apophis years ago?

Dave

 

Yes, but he survived and was transformed into a giant 26.99 kg chunk of rock by a little guy called Thor, of the Asgard. 

The power of the Ancients was used to complete the task, thanks to a few zero point modules they found.

Edited March 29, 20215 yr by martin-w

Antigrav shoes for trimming trees and changing ceiling light bulbs.

10 hours ago, Fielder said:

Antigrav shoes for trimming trees and changing ceiling light bulbs.

 

Hmm... I actually was working on that, based on Podkletnov's anti-grav superconductor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Podkletnov

Trouble is it proved unstable and propelled my test subject into the stratosphere. It wasn't a pretty sight. 

 

Makes you wonder how many low-albedo earth-orbit-intersecting rocks are out there that we don't know about.    Wouldn't one the size of a bus cause quite a lot of damage?

Assteroids......  had them once.  Hurt like hell!  Thank you Prep H.  😵

52 minutes ago, Mace said:

Makes you wonder how many low-albedo earth-orbit-intersecting rocks are out there that we don't know about.    Wouldn't one the size of a bus cause quite a lot of damage?

Asteroids the size of a bus would break apart and explode high in the atmosphere (like the Tunguska event in 1908) if they are made of stony material. However, chunks of solid iron-nickel (similar to the object that made Meteor Crater) are a lot more robust, so they are much more dangerous at that kind of size. Of course, once you start getting up to the size of an object like Apophis (around three hundred metres in diameter), this becomes somewhat irrelevant, as most of the mass gets through to the ground long before total disintegration occurs.

There will be a lot of undiscovered objects out there. That is why we need to find as many of them as we can. Some people seem to think that the number of these objects is increasing year after year, but that is not true. It is our ability to detect them that is getting better. Let's just pray that all of the really big objects (I am talking a kilometre or more in diameter) are found before one of them hits.

Unfortunately, that is not the end of the story. Those long period comets are a distant, but not insignificant threat. Whilst they are few and far between compared to the tens of thousands of asteroids flying around the inner Solar System, they are also moving much faster, and some of them are monsters. Remember Comet Hale-Bopp? What a spectacular sight that was back in 1997. However, it's a sobering thought to think that an object which provided such a great display in the night sky over twenty years ago actually never came closer to Earth than 1.3 times the distance to the Sun. That's nearly 200 million kilometres.....and yet it looked magnificent in our skies. One reason for that was it's size. The estimated diameter of the nucleus was a whopping 50 kilometres! If an object like that hit Earth, you could kiss goodbye to four billion years of evolution in a single day.

1 hour ago, Christopher Low said:

If an object like that hit Earth, you could kiss goodbye to four billion years of evolution in a single day.

 

Why we need to be a multiplanetary species. That and mega sized CME's, unmitigated climate change, super volcanoes, etc.

Re impact from space, thank god for Jupiter. The solar systems vaccuum cleaner.

3 hours ago, martin-w said:

 

Why we need to be a multiplanetary species. That and mega sized CME's, unmitigated climate change, super volcanoes, etc.

Re impact from space, thank god for Jupiter. The solar systems vaccuum cleaner.

Jupiter has probably saved our bacon more times in the past 4+ billion years than we know.

1 hour ago, Mace said:

Jupiter has probably saved our bacon more times in the past 4+ billion years than we know.

But I like Bacon. Why should Jupiter get it all?! Give us back our bacon, you Jovian muthas!! 🚀

44 minutes ago, Chock said:

But I like Bacon. Why should Jupiter get it all?! Give us back our bacon, you Jovian muthas!! 🚀

heh.  Do you Britishe-types have the expression "save your bacon"?   Or is that a purely American-ism.

Just now, Mace said:

heh.  Do you Britishe-types have the expression "save your bacon"?   Or is that a purely American-ism.

Yeah, it's a very old saying dating back to medieval times.