This is the expected path the probability is going to take. Scott Manley made a great video on that.
Basically the area in which the asteroid is going to be includes the earth. When you shrink this area earth is going to take up more space, unless it left the cone. I.e. measurements increase the likelihood until they don’t.
Scott Manley… Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time
Fly safe!
As if fascists and climate change wheren’t enough. Here, have an asteroid!
What if it lands an the fascists and dust in the atmosphere cancels climate change for a couple of decades. Could that work?
I don’t subscribe to your death cult.
I just hope it’s bigger then they think.
3.1% odds are nothing to sneeze at. Ever played D&D?
XCom vets know what’s about to happen
It’ll climb to 95% and then phase through the earth to somehow miss entirely?
Either that or devastating critical strike. No in between
roll for save vs. asteroid on a D30…
Balls.
D&D odds aren’t cumulative, though
Good.
Up those numbers.
We’re awful.
is this the aliens going “welp they elected Trump again time to press the reset button”
Where do I donate to help the asteroid?
Hit Washington DC please.
Mar-a-Lago would be a great choice.
It will be in 2032, so near the end of Trump’s third term.
first hit moscow and take an insane bounce and hit washington DC please. that’s all I’m asking.
Bruh the DC metro area is statistically one of the most anti Trump places in the US. Let’s root for it to hit Maralago instead.
I don’t think trump is the only reason someone might want an asteroid to fall on DC
Is it because they want around 6M politically progressive inhabitants to die?
It might be because it is the center of US imperialism but I’m just guessing
Is there any way we can speed it up?
Let’s point all our magnets towards the sky!
🧲🌠
Probably a carbonic asteroid rather than ferrous
No worries! We’re working on that, too!
Melting the ice caps shifts mass, and therefore, gravity, away from the largely unpopulated poles and nearer to where the people live.But this problem will not solve itself with any one solution. We must also petition our government to act now to stage a mission to nudge the asteroid into earth’s orbit! With modern science, we can do this.
I believe in humanity’s power to defeat humanity!Gonna take a bit more than a nudge. Even if we put it on a collision course, it would only be travelling ≈ 17,000 kph, on impact. Barely even moving in intrastellar space. That’s only 0.0000157024 times C. We’d need to get it moving to at least 0.0001 C to get it to be a world killer, maybe even 0.001 C. So somehow we need to figure out how to get the thing moving at ≈ 170,000 kph to ≈ 1,700,000 kph for it to have enough energy to be a world killer. Right now it’s a measly little one megaton explosion.
A large enough impulse could knock it onto an impact trajectory in 2028. “Large enough” would be absolutely gigantic though, and we have to catch up with it, making it quite impractical. It would be cheaper to just build some more multi-megaton nukes for the same effect.
Having seen Scott Manley’s video on the topic, it seems well within the realm of possible.
That’s for changing the trajectory of the 2032 encounter by a few thousand km, not changing the 2028 encounter by 8 million km. And if we’re changing the 2032 encounter we can smack it as it goes by in 2028 instead of playing catch-up before then.
The one mentioned above is 2024 YR and is slated to pay a visit in 2032. The 2028 one is 1997 XF11, and poses no risk.
(But I was confused, too - I only looked up because of the 2028/2032 discrepancy. I made a joke to my wife about emailing a state senator and suggesting they fund a mission to knock the asteroid into earth, so that they can help their constituents by ensuring that they no longer have a state to be a senator over. 2028 is during their term, and god willing, 2032 won’t be.)2024 YR4 has a close(ish) encounter with the Earth every 4 years; it will pass within 8 million km in 2028 before the very close pass/potential impact in 2032. You can see info for close encounters here.
Well, huh. TIL.
Serves me right for half remembering something and assuming the first search result explains it.
What’s up with the school shooter mentality? You know that if you want to die you can just kill yourself and don’t need to take bunch on innocent people with you?
A massive reduction of human life in earth would have insanely positive benefits for the future of human kind and life on earth.
Just quantifiable proveable net benefits.
Those facts are uncomfortable, but it would dead end a lot of much worse outcomes
This is a city killer, not a continent killer. Wishing for few hundred thousand innocent people to die is just pure evil - it has no effect on overpopulation.
Overpopulation is eugenicist propaganda anyway
Owls and rabbits aren’t the ones burning fossil fuels. Since I was born, 74% of the animals have gone.
Yeah, overpopulation is long past, we’re at apocalyptic now.
Sounds like a
capitalismoverconsumption problem more than populationJFC you’re a child. Who do you think is doing all the consuming? Hint: It ain’t rabbits.
Well, it’s a problem that will solve itself. Most estimates say that the world’s popularion will peak around 2080 and start to decline after that.
I hadn’t seen those numbers, is it a result of anthropogenic climate change?
More a result of countries managing to get over the industrial revolution population spike, and getting into the modern age. Once you have access to modern medicine, and the birth mortality and child mortality rates plummet, people stop having so many kids.
Depends on how fast its going when it hits
It’s currently moving at about 12,000 kph and will be slightly sped up to 17,000 kph if it actually hits us. That is not a significant enough portion of C to be anything but a city killer. This thing isn’t even a Tsar Bomba in terms of energy output. More like a Mark 17.
https://lemmy.world/comment/15180729
Regrub just said can we make it go faster, so i guess it would need to be increased much much more than 17,000 kph, which seems slow for galactic/cosmic speeds.
Wonder how much more energy it would need.
Someone get Randal Monroe on this stat!
Lol
I think you’d need to nearly double the velocity for it to be remotely close. I think I saw something like 30-40k km/h before it’s at that level
Y’all don’t have loved ones? Just kill like 2700 billionaires and the world is a better place already. Fun fact, all dear leaders are on the same list.
Can we strap a bunch of spacex rockets to it to achieve the needed speed? Probably not but the irony would be great
Bro, Thanos quotes are so 2020
This has been a good test of our planetary defense procedures, and will be an even better test on the off chance the probability resolves to 100%. I’m rooting for an impact trajectory, since we’d either get to see humanity’s first real asteroid deflection or witness the largest asteroid impact in over a century. (Hopefully in the ocean or a sparsely populated area!)
Unfortunately, I half expect that if we get a 100% chance, governments are going to see where it’s going to land (sea/Africa) and decide it’s not worth the spend/let’s see what happens if we let it hit.
Really hope I’m wrong, but I don’t have a lot of faith in humanity anymore.
Why would we mitigate the asteroid if its cheaper to clean up after a non-consequential impact?
To test our ability to stop it. If one was going to hit a major city, that’s not the best situation to be trying something out for the first time.
Seems like a cost benefit analysis that nobody here is going to be an authority on.
If the cost of a recall for a defective car is higher than the cost to settle wrongful death lawsuits, they don’t do a recall.
A recall costs money for a corporation to perform. A project like astroid deflection is an opportunity to funnel more government spending into the pockets of defense and space contractors. These are not the same.
Who is they? What situation are you talking about? Are you sure they would do that? Are you making up a scenario to prove a point?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls
The General Motors ignition switch recalls refers to February 6, 2014 when General Motors recalled about 800,000 of its small cars due to faulty ignition switches, which could shut off the engine while the vehicle was in motion and thereby prevent the airbags from inflating.[1] The company continued to recall more of its cars over the next several months, resulting in nearly 30 million cars recalled worldwide[2] and paid compensation for 124 deaths.[3] The fault had been known to GM for at least a decade prior to the recall being declared.[4] As part of a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, GM agreed to forfeit $900 million to the United States.[5]
Isn’t this also a ford thing, where they expected the recall of the explody pinto to cost more than the lawsuits for the wrongful deaths?
It’s a paraphrase of a quote from Fight Club but yeah it’s a real thing. Cost benefit analysis is a bitch
Chances are greater that it lands in the ocean somewhere.
And hopefully it can be highly rich in rare minerals, so that when the ashes of WW3 finally settle down, at least the future generations of humans or not-human sapient entities will at least get something good out of the whole ridiculous mess we’re currently in lol
Unfortunately, at the speed they travel, an asteroid will be vaporised in the impact. Whatever rare earths there are will be scatter as a fine powder over a large area.
The problem is that countries east of the projected impact will say that a deflection attempt will be viewed as a nuclear attack. Shit will get messy real quick.
I hope it’s cataclysmic
It’s only a city-killer, but last I saw there were a few cities in the estimated impact area. Fortunately we’ll get a better idea of whether it’s going to hit in 2028. Plenty of time to launch a redirection mission or evacuate the danger zone.
Not 2028, but 2032. It is guaranteed to miss in 2028, but could potentially impact us in 2032
Yeah, but it comes close enough in 2028 to get a good fix on its trajectory and to launch a mission to it.
I see what you’re saying now, sorry. Yeah as it passes by we should be able to say with certainty when it actually will hit whether that is 2032 or 2432
Bring it
A direct hit would be about the size of a fission nuclear bomb. Devastating for a city, but no regional or country-wide impacts, let alone globally
Not even a little global cooling?
As a treat?
If anything, it might get a tiny bit warmer
How long before impact would we learn where the hit is going to be? A real lotto scenario, but my money is on the ocean. What happens if it hits the ocean?
Here’s the possible impact sites. Ocean is a pretty good chance, and that would mean even less impact. If it’s close to shore, then there’s a chance for waves, but that’s about it. Locations are based on the timing of when the asteroid will arrive in 2032, not the shape of the orbit which we have fairly good accuracy on (that’s why the “beam” of possibilities is so narrow)
Currently, we’re unable to directly observe the asteroid due to the distance, but we do have a good idea on what its orbit looks like, so any updates on the odds is coming from past, unintentional observations on the asteroid (we took a photo of something else in the sky, but know that the asteroid should be in that photo).
When the asteroid passes by again in 4 years is when we’ll likely get the most info on location/impact before the potential impact in 2032.
All this info comes from this Scott Manley video. He’s an excellent space science educator (and KSP player)
Wow what a great response, thank you so much! I had no idea we had such a Small beam. I guess the downside of that is the rest of the world won’t be as concerned with figuring out how to stop it as they would if it were more random.
It’s already been broughten :(
How many people need to die before someone hits the Earth with a rock ?
From the article
In a new update, the space agency has increased the chances of asteroid 2024 YR4 colliding with Earth, with the probability of impact rising to 3.1 per cent or one-in-32 odds of impact — the highest probability of a collision yet.
IE - 3%.
3% events happen all of the time!
The article stresses that this probability has been going up over the past year or so, which is likely neither here nor there, but I can totally understand how it’s alarming in a post-COVID world.
Statistics isn’t my strong suit. What’s the probability of the probability increasing given that it has been increasing over time? Should we project the future probability to include this growth?
Scott Manley said in his video that it would almost certainly increase right up to a point where it would (probably) drop to 0.
Imagine the asteroid position is going to be in a range 1 to 100. Earth will be at position 31 when passes. That’s a 1% chance.
Now I tell you that it’s actually a 10 to 90 range ( like they predict the asteroid a bit more precisely).
The chance is now 1 in 80 or 1.25% It went up!
Now I say I’ve got more info, the number is 30 to 70. The chance is 1/40, 2.5% time to panic, it’s getting worse!
Next it’s 40 to 70. That doesn’t include 31. The chance just dropped to 0.
So the increase is showing a more accurate prediction still includes hitting earth, but at some point that prediction might show that it will miss.
Really no idea personally. My hunch would be that it’s technically a fuzzy problem (what’s the system being measured here exactly?) but also one around which we have some experience and wisdom established by now. Otherwise, the probability has changed like twice or three times, so any statistical inference would likely be close to meaningless with that little data.
Slightly more likely than rolling two sixes.
But mar el lago is not in the impact corridor
