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Comment by robotomir | Hacker News Reader

We don't have the technology to deflect a planet-killer.

The odds of a planet-killer hitting our planet in the lifetime of you, your children, your children's children, and the subsequent thousand generations is so low it may as well be zero.

Worrying about it is like stressing out over what you are going to name your super-yacht, when you're broke, unemployed, homeless, and are dying of lung cancer. It's the most absurdly pointless form of bikeshedding. There are plenty of immediate and catastrophic disasters that we should be preparing for, first.

Even so its still fun to think about!

If we detect it with enough time ahead (which is very likely we will), it’s not that hard to deflect. We have already landed on asteroids and we certainly have the technology to give it a light, but constant, push in the course of an year or so. We don’t have the technology in case it’s found only days before hitting the earth. But that is very unlikely.

I'm quite sure we do, assuming that US military would be willing to share their experiences from the B61 Mod 11 project.

A planet killer won't hit the Earth without 3-5 near misses first. Plenty of opportunity to paint it.

Paint it? I think I vaguely know what you're getting at, but please explain.

You only need a few thousand km of orbital change to move a direct impact to well clear of Earth. You can use the momentum of photons to get this orbital change. The effect of paint is a very small delta-V, but it works out that it's enough if done a few decades before the expected impact. This works out since it is extremely unlikely that a large asteroid would impact Earth without first having a series of near passes.

https://spaceguardcentre.com/asteroids-deflected-with-paint/

If something is going to hit Earth and wipe us out, we won’t have a few decades notice.

Yes we will. Planet killer sized asteroids are the easiest to detect and track and are also the least common. City killers are harder: there is a chance we won't one of those coming and there are many more of them out there.

Asteroids that hit Earth are in near-Earth orbits. For a first intercept event the odds of an asteroid just happening to hit an Earth sized target as opposed to, say, a 1000x Earth sized "near miss" target is incredibly unlikely. We get a few near-miss events of a given asteroid before an impact happens.

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-space-orbit-oort-cloud.html

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was between 3 and 10 miles diameter. 2014 UN271 is 100km-370km.

Would we have discovered 2014 UN271 earlier had its orbit brought it closer to Earth? It’s making its closest approach in 2031 (ok, 11AU away!), only 17 years after discovery.

And sure, incredibly unlikely something that size would hit Earth, but just an example of something that is very large, and discovered shortly before it makes its closest approach.

Objects with highly eccentric orbits are both very uncommon and very unlikely to intercept Earth. The period in which they have near misses is on the order of thousands of years at least. Even if we could see them from their high altitude we don't have enough information to predict where they'll be on the next intercept.

My understanding is that this kind of threat is usually lumped in with comets, whereas threat asteroids are lumped in with low eccentricity big rocks.

Thanks, I see the difference now.

If something is big enough to wipe us out, you WILL notice it a few decades ahead. The bigger asteroids are, the easier they are to detect.

The tech is not out of reach, it's just not getting funding. See B612 Foundation.

I read as detect, but if you detect it far enough in advance, it gives a lot of time to do something about it. Even a small nudge make a huge change in position decades later.

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