Risk of large asteroid striking Earth falls to 1.5%
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Well we'd lose the tides, which would devastate ocean life. We'd lose moonlight, which would devastate nocturnal animals. The axial tilt would change, so seasons would become more even, devastating plants that rely on seasonal cycles, or become more extreme, devastating everything.
The book Seveneves explores this scenario, but is mostly about how humanity moves to space to survive.
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Why wait? The best time would have been the dawn of civilization. The second best time is now.
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Just give us the confidence interval and stop updating. We will know better in January 2029 once it has passed by and been tugged by our gravity and the moons.
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There's always a chance that we can hit by a gamma-ray burst.
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Relevant username
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Yeah, but mummies can be friendly.. asteroids are a sure thing. Just ask the dinosaurs.
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Dontgivemehope.meme
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Unfortunately, Washington is outside of the possible impact zone. (Well, Washington in Brazil is inside, but it's not about that one.)
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Could it even completely obliterate the moon? Just not being tidally locked would be awful, but completely changing its trajectory/orbit and probably fuck up our atmosphere with debris seems more likely
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It's probably not big enough to shatter the moon, but enough to at least alter its orbit. I'm not enough of an astrophysicist to say how much. I haven't looked up the forces involved, so I can't even give a ballpark estimate.
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Boourns!
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As someone who's played MMOs, 1.5% chance is actually pretty high.
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Here's the upside: new species will evolve that can take better advantage of the new environment.
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I'm a Powerball man...
Those are great odds!
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Much much much much larger objects have hit the moon in the past
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Can we please not post daily updates? This is still 7 years away
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As someone who's played XCom, a 1.5% chance of a bad thing (questionable) means it's gonna critically hit
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It technically would alter the moons orbit, but not by a lot. This asteroid would impact with roughly the energy of a nuclear bomb, which sounds like a lot, but on the scale of our moon it's negligible.
A rough estimation given my limited understanding of physics is that to change the moon's orbit by 1 m/s, you would need to impart something like 10²² joules of energy into it. Wikipedia says that if this asteroid hits the moon, the impact energy will be around 10¹⁶ joules. I don't know how much you know about exponents, but 10¹⁶ is approximately 0% of the way to 10²², and that's just change of 1 m/s
Of course, someone who actually understands physics is free to correct me if I'm wrong
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Is this the new seven minutes to midnight? We're 1.5% to asteroid.
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As someone who played Ragnarok Online extensively, 1.5% for a single monster kill means I will never find that item.
Not to mention cards’ .01% drop rate ugh
