Uh...we kinda almost got hit by a meteor
 

Yeah, uh, we were almost kinda hit by a meteor in January. It was small, but still, we had a 1 in 4 chance of it hitting! Just look how close the shit was from hitting the fan.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3517319.stm

yeah, that was on slashdot yesterday.

kidna spooky.. but what can i do about it?


if they ever actualyl DO see an asteroid that WILL hit earth, they should call ti "anvil", just so that all those cartoons are jsutified,

Don't worry, the life on Earth won't end quite yet . . . that is what I believe anyhow

well, that kind of awnsers the question my science teacher proposed to us. "If an asteroid was going to hit the Earth and possibly destroy civilization as we know it, would the authorities tell us?" Apparently not.

in one way, i guess thats a good thing, I'd rather it be a sudden, unexpected death. although the day or two of looting and rioting in the streets would be fun...

It's a good thing it didn't hit, considering...

Preliminary size: 30m wide
Actual size: 500m wide

30m is really nothing. If it hit land, it probably wouldn't leave much of a crater, but would level an area the size of a small city. If it hit water, it might make ocean levels rise just slightly, and wouldn't really cause any damage.

500m is some serious business. According to a table I found here, if it hit land, an object that size would leave a crater somewhere around 16km wide and level an area somewhere around the size of Ohio. If it hit water, it would produce large tsunamis, such that would innundate coastal regions.

Was this a close call? Yes. Would it have been bad? Yes. Would we survive? Yes, but it would certainly screw up political systems worldwide.

I'm a little confused. Are they saying that the 30mm object could have caused more damage than 9-11 or the 500mm object that it turned out to be? I might be able to see 500mm doing that, but I can't possibly see 30mm being a life or death situation unless it hit some building in Chicago with enough force to topple it into an adjacent building, and I don't even know if the object's terminal velocity would allow it to build up enough force.

Let's break this down science like. Suppose the 30mm metiorite were to hit the earth. 2/3 of the earth is water and we only use up (a guestimate) about 3/4 of the land on earth. Of the land in the northern hemisphere, maybe 1/50 is heavily populated. So the metiorite had a 1/100 chance of hitting somewhere where it could harm more than 20 people. And most of the unpopulated land is for farming or is unwell for farming (desert or tundra) so there is a high chance that no one would be right in that spot. And by "in that spot" I'm assuming that a 30mm object could make a 10m wide parabaloid in the earth.

Still, looting woulda been fun.

uh, dragonglove? thats one 'm', as in Meter. so 30 meters across is roughly 15 full grown people standing on each others shoulders.

and you have to concider that these things are traveling at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. anything traveling at that speed would fuck things up. especialy when its like iron or rock that's become super-heated from entering our atmosphere.

Also, when they say "Potentially, the loss of life could have been much worse than September 11th", that's only if it hit a large populated area. Of course, that was the estimate when they thought it was only 30m wide. It was really 500m wide. Hence, the death toll would have been several hundered times the loss of 9-11.

This has happened before... also the goverment probably has a plan for this that we have no clue about, an most of these arent just normal rocks some of it is space metal alloys... which would double up rhe problems in some ways now wouldn't it.

i was gonna say, 30m is like 90 feet. that's not big at all. sure it might do some damage but probably not. 500m is different.

oh man space is proving to be a terrorist too.

maybe we should go pre-emptive strike the moon before it starts giving us dirty looks.