03 Mar 2009, 3:20 pm
Ragtime wrote:
DeaconBlues wrote:
"The Earth is too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."
- Robert Heinlein
- Robert Heinlein
Kind of makes himself feel big and powerful to say something like that, doesn't it?
Gigantic, male, reverberating bass voice from a hundred feet overhead: "The Earth is TINY, the Earth is WE-HEE-HEE-HEEAK!"
(I have a dramatist's imagination.)
The Earth is actually not fragile. It's been very adaptive to everything that has come along. It's still here, isn't it?
If the dinosaurs could have talked they might have said something like that.
Everything was fine for the dinosaurs until one fine day about 65 million years ago.
ruveyn
03 Mar 2009, 3:56 pm
ruveyn wrote:
Ragtime wrote:
DeaconBlues wrote:
"The Earth is too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."
- Robert Heinlein
- Robert Heinlein
Kind of makes himself feel big and powerful to say something like that, doesn't it?
Gigantic, male, reverberating bass voice from a hundred feet overhead: "The Earth is TINY, the Earth is WE-HEE-HEE-HEEAK!"
(I have a dramatist's imagination.)
The Earth is actually not fragile. It's been very adaptive to everything that has come along. It's still here, isn't it?
If the dinosaurs could have talked they might have said something like that.
Everything was fine for the dinosaurs until one fine day about 65 million years ago.
ruveyn
The dinosaurs... big deal! We don't want them around anyway. God obviously did us a favor by eliminating them.
03 Mar 2009, 6:32 pm
gina-ghettoprincess
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03 Mar 2009, 6:37 pm
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04 Mar 2009, 2:17 pm
12 Mar 2009, 3:16 pm
Ragtime wrote:
Nan wrote:
Not meaning to feed the paranoia of those afraid of cosmic cataclysms, but these things happen all the time - check spaceweather.com and at the bottom of the page there is a list of known neos and how close they came/will come to the earth. (Note "LD" is the distance from the earth to the moon.) I think the closest one I noticed was a year or two ago one passed at 0.1 LD (which is pretty darned close!), but I could be remembering it wrong.
The article says this was 1/7th LD, so it was one of the closest. How big was that other one (the 0.1 LD)?
Don't remember.... actually, lemme check.... hmmm I think it was this one. A lot more recent... (memory goes once you pass 18, you know).
Object (2009 EJ1)
Close-Approach Date Ascending (TDB) YYYY-mmm-DD HH:MM ± D_HH:MM 2009-Feb-27 19:44 ± 02:32
Miss Distance Nominal (LD/AU) 0.2/0.0004
Miss Distance Minimum (LD/AU) 0.1/0.0004
mag 26.9
Lovely websites:
old comet misses are here http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/historic_comets.html
color-coded potential impact risk here http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
here's the "by distance" table for recent
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca? ... ble&show=1
Now, for the really paranoid, who plan to be alive in 700 years, there's this...
"1950 DA is an asteroid for which there is some possibility of impact in March of the year 2880. The case is extraordinary because the current orbit of 1950 DA is very precisely known, which allows us to explore centuries into the future, much farther than is usually possible. The Sentry automatic monitoring system is tailored for objects with poorly determined orbits and it searches for potential impacts only over the next 100 years. More information on 1950 DA."
