• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Meteor Over the Atlantic

eohrnberger said:
Actually, this is far from a laughing matter.

A rocky asteroid what? About a 1/2 mile in diameter, would in fact be a ELE.

Rather surprised that the astronomers who are looking for such things didn't see it first and coming, and give warning.
Click to expand...

I don't think you understand how incredibly difficult it is for an astronomer to see such a small object from a long distance. Something like this fireball would be invisible to our biggest scopes on earth. This was a very tiny object, and tiny objects tend to be incredibly dim, think in the >25 magnitude range.

Hell, one of the most amazing things I've ever seen was an asteroid about the size of a city block that came damned close to earth, and that was about magnitude 10.5 and I was just barely able to see it on a moonlight night from my not too dark front yard with a 10 inch mirror telescope. Only way I saw it was to type in its RA and DEC a minute ahead, have the computer slew the scope to that spot and once my scope started following the stars, I searched for any dim spot of light moving across the field of vision. It was tough but I saw it, growing and dimming in light, due to its tumbling. An object like the one in the OP would be hundreds of times dimmer.

And, you can only build a telescope so large on earth....making a huge mirror is very difficult, time consuming, and must be flat to within a few microns in order to be usable.
 
beefheart said:
I don't think you understand how incredibly difficult it is for an astronomer to see such a small object from a long distance. Something like this fireball would be invisible to our biggest scopes on earth. This was a very tiny object, and tiny objects tend to be incredibly dim, think in the >25 magnitude range.

Hell, one of the most amazing things I've ever seen was an asteroid about the size of a city block that came damned close to earth, and that was about magnitude 10.5 and I was just barely able to see it on a moonlight night from my not too dark front yard with a 10 inch mirror telescope. Only way I saw it was to type in its RA and DEC a minute ahead, have the computer slew the scope to that spot and once my scope started following the stars, I searched for any dim spot of light moving across the field of vision. It was tough but I saw it, growing and dimming in light, due to its tumbling. An object like the one in the OP would be hundreds of times dimmer.

And, you can only build a telescope so large on earth....making a huge mirror is very difficult, time consuming, and must be flat to within a few microns in order to be usable.
Click to expand...

No, I understand how difficult it is to spot these things. They are dark, as opposed to stars, and sometimes the only clue that there's something between the telescope and the start it's looking at is a slight percentage drop in the star's light that is being observed.

I was more thinking that a sizable asteroid made it all the way to the lower atmosphere before anyone knew about it. It just seems that one that large, that close, would have been spotted earlier by some means.
 
eohrnberger said:
Of the recent asteroid strikes, we've been lucky, in that they've all been air bursts high enough in the atmosphere that the strength of the shock wave that high ground level was sufficiently reduced such that only minor damage was done.

One day, our luck is going to run out.

A number of scientists have stated that you don't want to blow up / break up a single large asteroid into smaller pieces that would still hold to the same trajectory and hit the Earth, but I have to ask, which is better / worse? A single very large impact, and a number of dispersed smaller ones?

I keep coming up with a number of dispersed smaller ones would be better.

Spread out the energy of impact for one thing, and a number of smaller asteroids have a greater chance of burning up in the atmosphere and / or air bursts higher in the atmosphere imparting less energy on impact and causing less damage.

Some may say that if you set off a nuke to break up that large asteroid, now you've got radioactive smaller asteroid coming down, but as Chernobyl has shown, life is far more resistant to the effects of radioactivity than we first may have thought. Sure, the incidents of cancer and other medical problems will take some lives, some very soon after the fallout and some in future generations, but I have to believe it would be less than had the single large asteroid come down and caused an ELE.
Click to expand...

Spreading out the damage isn't beneficial, it's harmful.

eohrnberger said:
No, I understand how difficult it is to spot these things. They are dark, as opposed to stars, and sometimes the only clue that there's something between the telescope and the start it's looking at is a slight percentage drop in the star's light that is being observed.

I was more thinking that a sizable asteroid made it all the way to the lower atmosphere before anyone knew about it. It just seems that one that large, that close, would have been spotted earlier by some means.
Click to expand...

 
Deuce said:
Spreading out the damage isn't beneficial, it's harmful.



Click to expand...


I would have thought that spreading out the energy of the impacts far and wide and smaller ones would cause far less severe damage than a single very large impact. A single large impact, such as Chicxulub, which did extinct the dominant species on the planet, would be far worse than many smaller ones spread out over a larger area. It just seems common sense. Where does that conclusion go wrong?
 
eohrnberger said:
I would have thought that spreading out the energy of the impacts far and wide and smaller ones would cause far less severe damage than a single very large impact. A single large impact, such as Chicxulub, which did extinct the dominant species on the planet, would be far worse than many smaller ones spread out over a larger area. It just seems common sense. Where does that conclusion go wrong?
Click to expand...

Beyond a certain point, additional energy becomes meaningless because anything caught in the blast radius will be obliterated. Additional energy just increases that blast radius, but not in a linear fashion. You'll actually destroy more total area by spreading out the impacts. Now, it's possible to break up an asteroid into small enough pieces that they'd individually burn up, but if the asteroid were small enough for our piddly little weapons to accomplish that, it wasn't exactly a major problem in the first place. Extinction-level rocks are just going to get a new crater and keep on coming.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom