It's coming right for us!

Hehe, okay, it might be coming right for us.

Near-Earth Asteroid 2004 MN4 Reaches Highest Score To Date On Hazard Scale.

Apparently this is the first space object, ever, to have its risk rating on the Torino Scale actually increase as its orbit became better understood.

And the projected date of closest approach happens to be... a Friday the 13th. Uh-oh.

I can see my house from up... oh. Aw, crap.

Don't panic.
The odds were up to 1 in 45 last I heard - the article you linked still mentions 1 in 300.
What this means is that there's a 2.2% probability that the asteroid will impact Earth. But there's also a 97.8% probability that it will not, and if so, you will hear about it soon enough
If it hits us, it will miss America completely. It's headed for the eastern hemisphere. Think Russia, China, Iraq, etc... The most likely point of impact is in the GMT+3 timezone, and the error margin is +/- 6 hours so at worse it will hit somewhere between Greenland and Japan.

Yeah Eggy. It's only a 400 meter rock traveling very fast, so if it hits over there it can't possibly effect us all the way over here.

I'd imagine that if we can survive the current crap going on in the world this decade, we will have the technology to deflect or destroy this thing by 2029. Like Devlin said, its only 400 meters.

Aw, heck, we could deflect this thing right now, it's not that terribly hard. We could send a little ion drive shippy over to stick to it and nudge it along, or we could blow up a nuke near it and nudge it along, or if we're feeling cheap we could just fill a rocket with white paint and paint the thing white, and let the Sun nudge it along.

What baffles me is why not toss the damn nukes at it? I don't understand, since theres got to be a reason why we have nukes in the first place, and if the world is threatened, then an asteroid would be the most likely target to use it against.

Armageddon (the movie) if you went by what they said, makes aboslutely no sense. Yes, the asteroid would be broken up into a million peices, however, those smaller peices would increase the chances of it burning up in the earths atmosphere. So not using nukes against an asteroid is illlogical since at least we'd have a chance to survive it. But I do agree, that there's a potential risk of using nukes as with all WMDs, but hey, there's got to be some reason we have them.

The current technology is pretty iffy. They tend to miss more often than they hit their targets. I guess that in 25 years, it will be more accurate.

This whole thing also provides an incredible opportunity for us. If we can figure it out, we ought to try to grab the thing and put it into Earth orbit. It'd give us our own pet asteroid to study, and it'd also be a handy source of building materials that we wouldn't have to carry all the way up there.

I dunno about that, they seem pretty remarkable for accuracy, considering the scale of the solar system, and that they're basically using Newtonian physics for most of their calculations.

As far as NASA goes, I think their bigger problem is making stuff that works, as opposed to getting it to where its supposed to be. Then again, that's just as big a problem, now isn't it.

Devlin, if it hits, odds are that you wont even notice it.
If it hits on water, then the worse that can happen is a repeat of the current SE asia tsunami disaster. If it hits on land, well, most land is empty. It will make a big dent (3 miles wide) that will draw a lot of tourists. The odds of it hitting an actual city are scarce, but we have so much advance notice - 25 years - that we would be able to prepare ourselves for it.
Actually, the current SE asia quake had a magnitude of 8.9 on the Richter scale, while the asteroid would "only" cause a quake of magnitude 6.7. The Richter scale is exponential, so a quake of magnitude 6 is 10 times weaker than a quake of magnitude 7 and so on and so forth. Stop watching so many sensationalist hollywood movies - impacts like these have happened once every 30000 years and we're all still here

Did she fry your eggs?

Huh?
BTW Cross... good luck getting any propulsion technology to move a 400m-wide chunk of rock in a predictable manner...

They are saying now it's gonna hit Lisbon.

LOL you liar

Sorry - cross posted from the 'AV Sex is Evil' thread... not sure how that happened.

Shit! Nasa raised the probability from 2.2% to 2.7%!
The odds of it hitting went from 1 in 45 to 1 in 37... but still, there's a 97.3% chance the asteroid will miss the Earth entirely.

That'd be cool, it would be my birthday.
Dying during the apocalypse on the day of your birthday on a friday the 13th. It doesn't get any cooler than that.
(well, actually it could. I'd be 53... and 53 is nothing particular as a number.... can't have everything I guess).

Pfft...

llPushObject() should take care of the problem.

- Ace

Hey, 53 is a Prime number, that's something, isn't it?

Hmmm? What, an ion drive would work perfectly, assuming that it's a solid object and not some flying pile of gravel (which it might be). Though a solar sail, or the white paint, would probably be more cost-effective solutions.

So Eggy, can you think of what happened 30,000 years ago? I believe it was about that time that humans began their spread across the globe and and began the shift from nomadic to agrarian societies. What will the next major event(s) bring?

Champie

Hopefully, donuts that taste like beer.

This is like that movie where everything went wrong... can't remember the name right now... oh yeah, Armageddon!

There's a theory going around, bolstered by the discovery of what looks like a large impact crater in southern Iraq, that an asteroid impact might be responsible for the sudden decline of several major cultures in the area at that time (around 2350 BC). The Egyptian Old Kingdom, Akkad, all sorts of good stuff blew up around then.

So, why didnt they leave anything in writing about a great big mother of a fireball and the ensuing chaos?