Asteroid 1950 set for collision course with Earth!

[Chowlett]

Originally posted by problem_child
Bugs, is the Yellowstone Caldera the one in Oregon? (I'm a little ignorant of North American geography) or is that one an entirely different potential extinction-power volcano?

Anyway, it could be that by 2880 we would have long since been wiped out by ourselves, or bugs, or mega-erruptions, or a Gamma Ray Burst, or a great-big global rescource crash, etc etc etc.

You vicious disembodied eye, you!

[Kassiopeia]

Hahaa! Your evil ploy to strive for world domination has been revealed?
So, Bugs, wanna join the Club? We Finns are already in, as you probably know...

[Sava]

Originally posted by problem_child
The Greenies are always banging on about how we should be saving the planet, and don't get me wrong- I think we should look after the environment we live in, but the planet can take care of itself (hell you'd think a big lump of rock with a heart of liquid-iron could take care of itself!) fact is the earth has soaked up events that could have wiped out humankind and all our nukes, oil-platforms and coca-cola cans a hundred million times over- and will still quite happily continue to churn out new species every few geological-seconds (or every few million years to lifeforms like you an me)

Its quite obviously us who need to be saved from the planet! but somehow I don't think the vast cold radiation-rich vacuum of space is gonna do us any favours just becouse we can build a few metal containers. Maybe if we fling a couple of comets at mars we can get an alternative but >shrugs<

Bugs, is the Yellowstone Caldera the one in Oregon? (I'm a little ignorant of North American geography) or is that one an entirely different potential extinction-power volcano?

Anyway, it could be that by 2880 we would have long since been wiped out by ourselves, or bugs, or mega-erruptions, or a Gamma Ray Burst, or a great-big global rescource crash, etc etc etc.

I think it's the atmosphere that needs saving more than anything else. The solid Earth will keep on its cycle of plate tectonics. You're right about space though. Those "metal containers" as you so eloquently put it, just aren't good enough. Terraforming Mars wouldn't be that difficult in theory. Mars just needs to be warmed up. And we are doing that on Earth already. Humans just need to create a greenhouse effect on Mars to get the temperature to be stable. Then plant blue/green algae on a planetary scale and wait a hundred years. It would be tough, but very possible.

[Lemmy]

I might have to disagree with you on this. Human beings have been around for nearly 20,000 years. Modern civilization as we know it has been around about 5000 years. 800 years is an awfully short time for such a drastic change.

but human progres has't been linear, there has been ups and huge downs, if there aren't any big downs in the next 800 years, i think our progress would be immense.

A few select groups of people with the available technology might be able to live on other planets. But at that point, the environment might change the way humans develop. In zero gravity, a child growing up will not develop the muscle tissue needed to support itself on a planet with gravity.

you could always try the "big spinning station" approach, although that is quite expensive to do now.

And as of yet, the technology for a self-sufficient contained unit isn't there. Humans in any other environment, the moon, mars, etc, would need a level of technology to be able to use the new environment to sustain life. I don't think that the technology can be found in 800 years to handle human habitation due to the rate of growth in the last 100 years. Too many social problems will occur in the next 100 years alone that will require solving. With the current rate of population growth (doubling every 20-25 years) there will be approximately 1.3194139 * 10^23 people.

the technology may be closer than you think, with the self-sufficient biodome projects today. I think the biggest problem would be transport.

[Dr Strangelove]

I'm sure that even a small nuclear warhead would vaporize a one kilometer asteroid. The earth is held together by the gravitational force of it's mass. The earth is about 13,000 kilometers in diameter. The gravitational force holding together this one kilometer asteroid must be fairly small, so I would imagine that having, oh, let's say a one megaton warhead exploding on it's surface would transfer enough heat to cause the asteroid to shatter apart into many small pieces, some of which would be propelled into trajectories which would cause them to miss the earth.

[Sava]

Originally posted by Lemmy


but human progres has't been linear, there has been ups and huge downs, if there aren't any big downs in the next 800 years, i think our progress would be immense.

It has the potential to be. But you have to look at economics. If it becomes profitable for this capitalist society to undertake advancements, then it will happen.

you could always try the "big spinning station" approach, although that is quite expensive to do now.

There are other developmental factors to consider. Can you imagine never having seen the sun? Or breathing fresh air?

the technology may be closer than you think, with the self-sufficient biodome projects today. I think the biggest problem would be transport.

No, the biggest problem would be expanding it fast enough to support the human rate of growth. Also, to support a billion people in space, you're going to need a helluva lot of space stations. And how are you going to move all that material into space for construction? Launching ships into space requires a lot of material and is expensive. How are you going to get a billion people in space? Rockets? Do you know how much fuel that would take?

One idea I've heard about uses magnetic levitation technology (like the trains in Japan). On a frictionless track, a train car is accelerated to the velocity needed to reach orbit on a magnetic lev track and then propelled into space. The technology is sound, but it requires a lot of power. I just don't see it happening in 800 years. Yes, humans have made leaps and bounds in certain areas. But many things are still not all that different.

[Lemmy]

No, the biggest problem would be expanding it fast enough to support the human rate of growth. Also, to support a billion people in space, you're going to need a helluva lot of space stations. And how are you going to move all that material into space for construction? Launching ships into space requires a lot of material and is expensive. How are you going to get a billion people in space? Rockets? Do you know how much fuel that would take?

like i said, transport

but i'm not neccesarily talking about space station, colonies on other planets is a more viable option.

[Shadowlord]

Or, we just launch a rocket today on a collision course with that asteroid. It hits it and explodes (it would be a conventional explosion, not a nuclear one), nudging the asteroid ever-so-slightly.

The force of the impact will change the asteroid's course by a very very tiny amount... But, that small amount is enough to keep the asteroid from hitting the Earth 880 years in the future, because that small impact, resulting in a slight change in the direction the asteroid's going at the time of the impact, will translate, after 880 years, into a very large difference in its final destination. (The asteroid gets farther and farther from its original course due to the impact.)

Of course, the dumb thing to do would be to ignore the asteroid and try to solve the problem 10 years before it hits. We have noticed it now, and due to time's magnifying effect, it requires far less force to stop it now than it will 10 years before it hits. Then, it might really take a nuke or two to throw it off-course.

[Velociryx]

The whole notion of getting mass amounts of material into space cheaply has me thinking....would it be possible to build something like a space elevator?

I mean, we've got some pretty high mountains that are relatively close to civilization. We could use one of them to rig up a...somethingorother, connected to an orbiting station via a tether (really wampum big cables that could handle a large load), the power supply is on the station (nuclear?), and we use cable cars not unlike the ones used in mining operations sometimes.

Dump stuff into the bin, push da button, up goes the cable, into the docking bay of the orbiting station, and gravity does most of the work when the car comes down.

Seems like most of the fuel we use is in getting stuff OFF the earth. If we can get it into space by some other means, we can save the fuel for the actual spaceflight....or something....

I'm just...thinkin' out loud....don't mind me....

-=Vel=-

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Sure is. There is sufficient warheads in the US stockpile that some can be used to blow a hole deep enough to let out some magna and gas. At least weaken part of the crust so that the explosion will go through a controlled area instead.

Do you have any idea of the kind of pressure that caldera is under? Weakening a part of the crust to deal with it would be like attempting to remove a verrucca by stepping on a landmine.

We're talking geological pressure that has been increasing for millions of years. It's causing the crust to bulge from over 100 miles down. That's 100 miles of igneous and metamorphic rock that's actually bulging. We can't even stop little firecrackers like Surtsey from blowing, so what do we do against a monster like that?

[Adalbertus]

would it be possible to build something like a space elevator?

Depends a bit on what you expect to get. There is one problem in the thing: While you can move things on the surface of the earth with "arbitrarily low" energy input (of course there is some energy required to overcome friction), getting things away from earth costs at minimum gravitational energy (it is the energy you gain when rolling downhill on your bike or you have to spend when climbing a mountain). If I did do the calculation right it's about 6.2 megajoule per kilogram. If I again calculated correctly, this is equivalent to running a car with a weight of 1 ton and a power of 100 kW for one week.

So, you can't get away paying this price. Then I see two (hypothetical) possibilities, which probably both need Super Tensile Solids (more so the second). The first would be to install a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit, which means that it stays always over the same spot on earth's surface. The geosynchronous orbits are IIRC about 36 000 km (10% of distance earth-moon) away from earth's surface, so you have a distance which overcomes most, but not all, of the energy you need to invest. When you use this as the base for you elevator with a 36 km belt (or 72 km to have it continuously rotating), you can drag things into space. But you will regularly have to spend energy to move the satellite closer to earth, because the energy to lift the load is not taken from the motor who drives the belt but from dragging the satellite closer to earth. "super tensile" here means that the belt should sustain its own weight and that of the load.

The other model would be to keep the satellite on a rope which is considerably longer than 36 km and fixed on the ground. Then you basically have something like a swinging lasso, or milk can (and that's why the solid has to be much more super tensile): It is centrifugal forces which keep the rope under tension. Then you can simply drag the weight up. The energy for doing so will be taken from the earth's rotation. If we really want to do so, is another question.

Happy speculating.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Bugs ****ing Bunny


Do you have any idea of the kind of pressure that caldera is under? Weakening a part of the crust to deal with it would be like attempting to remove a verrucca by stepping on a landmine.

We're talking geological pressure that has been increasing for millions of years. It's causing the crust to bulge from over 100 miles down. That's 100 miles of igneous and metamorphic rock that's actually bulging. We can't even stop little firecrackers like Surtsey from blowing, so what do we do against a monster like that?

Yeah, I'm sure that the pressures we're talking about here dwarf the entire sum of all the nuclear arsenals of all the nuclear nations on Earth. It would make more sense to suggest trying to bury the thing under a big pile of dirt. Notice I said that it would make more sense to suggest, but not necessarily more sense to attempt to do.

[Sarxis]

Somone get a broom!

I read that article concerning this asteroid.

Its really amazing that Earth is habitable at all, considering how cluttered this star system is. The amount of asteroids floating around probably sets the Sol system above the curve for space debris.


How they manage to get satellites past the belt is beyond me; it must be narrow.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

That's how the solar system forms. Masses hit each other, bond together and get bigger. It's just an ongoing process.

[Velociryx]

Thanks, Adalbertus, for putting some numbers behind my musings.

Hmmm...so the thing is technically doable then (well, pending the discovery of supertensile materials). I'm wondering if we could do it anyway, with the technologies on hand?

Even if the payload of each individual "cart" wasn't all that much, it seems that it'd be right handy to have a means of getting stuff "up there" on a continuous basis that didn't rely on staged rocketry and liquid fuel consumption. I'm thinking...okay, so even if we limited ourselves to a thousand pounds of material per lift, if it's in operation on a near-continuous basis, we could easily out perform the shuttle in terms of total materials transported. And, relying on some kind of nuclear reactor to provide the power we'd need, we could run the thing 24/7, as opposed to the infrequent shuttle launches. No problems with quirky weather causing delays or any of that stuff....we just keep right on shipping.

So....rather than a satellite then, what say we model the thing around a smallish to mid-sized space station (I'm thinking extra storage bays, mostly).

We create a station that's basically a power plant, living space for...say six, and then a whole lotta storage space. Hook up a big cable that runs from the docking area of the station to our mountaintop facility, and put 2 enclosed carts on it (about 2/3rds the size of railroad boxcar). Fill it with...whatever we're shipping up on that load, push da button, the guys at the station end receive it and unload, storing stuff in our cargo bays by category for easy retrieval.

Uses:
With all heavy payload stuff kept off of the shuttle, we could either have more people and/or more scientific experiments.

We could install a lab on the space station and send scientific experiments up in the cart...that way, the scientific community need not wait for the next shuttle launch to get their experimental packages up.

We could even transport people up in the cart, probably more cheaply than a traditional space flight. Rotating staff from the station would be a snap, in that case.

Construction materials could be hauled up the elevator, the shuttle could launch, pick them up, and take them to the next construction site for assembly.

We could even design little mini shuttles (no cargo, 1-2 man things) for running about the immediate vicinity of the station.

Seems to me the only technical hurdles would be:
1) determining how strong those cables would need to be
2) determining the power output needed to haul the stuff up

Dunno...but it's kinna cool...

-=Vel=-