Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
cneos.jpl.nasa.gov
cneos.jpl.nasa.gov
Our knowledge of the diameter of this object is a bit fuzzy, because of surface reflectivity, small shiny things can appear as bright as dark large things. This is one of the motivations of making the NEO Surveyor an IR telescope, since IR we see black body emission off of the objects, which is mostly size dependent, and only weakly albedo dependent.
There is an even tinier chance that if it misses the Earth in 2032, it could hit the moon. I haven't run the numbers precisely for that one, but it impacted a few times in some monte-carlo simulations.
If anyone is interested in orbit dynamics, I have open sourced some of the engine we are using for observation predictions: https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/kete
It is relatively high precision, though JPL Horizons has more accurate gravitational models and is far better suited for impact studies. My code is primarily for predicting when objects will be seen in telescopes.
That is, does the certainty increase steadily or non-linearly over time? Does near certainty of an impact occur from measurements taken just minutes before the impact, or hours, days, years?
If the object really looked like it might impact I'm sure someone would get time on a powerful telescope to lock in the orbit.
Also, if you evacuate New York a year in advance, who's to say that the prediction isn't just a skosh off so that New York is left untouched but the real impact location was hit unprepared?
Knowing where, will depend on the angle of impact - if came basically straight in (tangent to the surface) we can be pretty accurate, but the more shallow the angle the harder it will be.
With a shallow angle, we'll probably be able to tell the latitude pretty well, but not the longitude.
I understand it's hypothetical, but even a 10% chance of hitting a city, for example, would be a crisis.
Where does the uncertainty (1%) come from? For example, is it more from our ability to precisely determine the orbit based on limited observations, or is it because orbits for objects like this just aren't predictable years out, or something else?
MC is numerically approximating an integral. Here it replaces the high-dim integral over the start parameters.
It's not deterministic, it's chaotic. That is the nature of the N-body problem. We can only approximate trajectories in such a system using numerical methods, within a certain margin of error. In principle, the object is gravitationally interacting with everything else in the solar system. But for the most part, most interactions are negligible and could be ignored (eg, other small objects far away), except of the large bodies. But there are many unknowns (as stated before), where initial conditions will affect the outcome of the trajectory simulation, and errors will certainly amplify over time. I'm guessing Monte Carlo is used to "fuzz" the simulations with randomised initial conditions to account for the range of unknowns, and see what the outcome is under these different scenarios.
It's also a reasonable question to ask, because the simulations are deterministic. It's just that because the system is also chaotic and there's noise in the measurement, that can result in a large spread of deterministic trajectory simulations.
Ironically, reality probably isn't deterministic. It definitely isn't at small scales (e.g. radioactive decay). If it's non-deterministic at a macro scale, the effect is small enough that we don't see it.
- "Since we saw it so briefly, our knowledge of its orbit is not that great"
- "[for example, in 2016 the data shows] a large chunk of sky where it could have been, and [the object is quite small."
- "Our knowledge of the diameter of this object is a bit fuzzy, because of surface reflectivity,"
What bodies? My impression is that the only objects around Earth with enough gravity to significantly impact trajectories are the Earth and Moon. Will the other small objects have any significant gravitational impact on this body?
I also understand that in cislunar space, the Earth-Moon dynamic does create a three-body problem and trajectories are fundamentally unpredictable, with some exceptions. I wonder how that affects objects such as this one if they pass through the Moon's gravitational well.
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2024%...
This orbit is around the sun (as asteroids tend to) and the apoapsis is closer to Jupiter's orbit than Mars.
Literally every body in the solar system acts on every other body at all times. All asteroids in the asteroid belt are perturbed by Mars and Jupiter, right? Except if you recognize the need to include Mars in calculating their trajectories, you need immediately to at least also account for the 4 Gallilean moons, who sum to about the same mass as Mars, and now you have a 7-body problem. You won't get correct results on trajectories of Earth approaches if you discount the mass of our moon, nor if you discount the rest of the asteroid belt (4% of our moon's mass)... etc.
The planets, sun and all planetoids orbit the barycenter of the solar system, which in our case happens to be inside the sun. They all affect each other, making more than 3 bodies problematic.
Once you have an estimated orbit, if it has any interactions with planets (IE: flyby of Earth), small differences in positions during the close encounter make LARGE differences decades later. Add to this the effects of photons from the sun pushing on the smaller asteroids or dust, or out-gassing /dust from comets cause these objects to slightly drift from just the basic gravitational forces. Generally inner solar system asteroids (inside mars) are very chaotic over hundreds of years, though typically predictable less than a century.
Note that I am not an expert on impact calculations, I just know a bit about and and can do back of the envelope ones. There are a number of ways to get to the ~1%, the orbit fits have uncertainties on them and those can be propagated forward in time. However there are all sorts of complexities with doing that, and often the easiest method is to sample the uncertainty region a few hundred thousand times (Monte-carlo), and propagate those and see what hits.
1) someone with a telescope sees something moving (typically these days these are bigger surveys)
2) These observations are submitted to the Minor Plant Center (MPC), the clearinghouse of all asteroid/comet observations.
3) Several groups pull observations from the MPC to fit orbits, including JPL Horizons (MPC also fits orbits)
4) You now have a pile of observations which you have to figure out which observation links to other observations, which is a complex math problem on its own. Solve that.
5) JPL Horizons for example then fits the orbits to the observations, and since the observations may be 100 years of data of wildly varying quality, from hand written notes in the 1920s through to modern data, this is very difficult. They publish a covariance matrix with the associated fit (IE: basically a gaussian error fit for the parameters).
6) I grab that covariance matrix and sample from it using some pretty vanilla statistics to build orbits.
7) Propagate and see what happens.
Here is an example of an observation from 1950: https://caltech-ipac.github.io/kete/tutorials/palomar.html The image was developed on a glass plate, this one was never even sent in to the MPC, the guy taking the observation just wrote down "Asteroid" on the cover slip for the image. It was not formally discovered until the 1980s. We now know its orbit very well, so this particular observation is not that interesting other than as a curiosity.
Here is an example of an orbit fit by JPL Horizons: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=c%2F2...
Note the "condition code" on the right, which is a score of how good their orbit fit matches the data, 0 means we know the orbit with high precision. This one is an 8, meaning we have a fit, but its not that great. Most likely because we only have 31 days of observations.
A slight tangent.. but my favorite thing about Horizons is that they still maintain a telnet interface to their system. Once you learn to use it it's quite a bit of fun to play around with it.
Oh, that's not so ba--- Wait, isn't that what happens in Seveneves?
The impact probably wouldn't even be visible with the naked eye unless it hits a part of the Moon not then illuminated by the Sun -- in which case one might see a brief flash of light.
Safe to say, an 8 megaton impact from one that weighs 220,000,000kg would be a bit more substantial! Apparently that would be roughly the size of the Meteor Crater in Arizona (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater).
You could say 65 MPH (megametres per hour) ;-). Or more formally: 65 Mm/h or 18 km/s.
As others have noted, an 8 MT impactor on the Moon would be a quite minor event. It would likely be visible to terrestrial observers (if on the near-side) and leave a visible crater. Might generate ejecta which itself could enter the Earth's atmosphere over time, though likely with little effect on the ground.
Read that book over a year ago and it's still eating at me.
[0] I haven’t tried to calculate how much this would offset the apparent velocity, but it seems very likely to at least be detectable.
I think there's going to be a crisis of media going forwards, because with the very awesome new telescope[1] that's going online this year, the number of these detections is going to drastically go up. The number of objects isn't going up—they've always been there, we just didn't know—but I think the media coverage is not going to absorb that nuance very well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Technical_Impact_Hazar... ("A rating of 0 means the hazard is equivalent to the background hazard (defined as the average risk posed by objects of the same size or larger over the years until the date of the potential impact)")
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/01/1108643/vera-c-r... ("With its capacity to detect faint objects, [Vera] Rubin is expected to increase the number of known asteroids and comets by a factor of 10 to 100")
The universe is a big place with some big rocks in it. There are also some !!fun!! simulations of things like the Vredefort impact on YouTube.
I don't understand why this apt pun on that movie is being downvoted.
Would anyone of the downvoters of parent care to explain?
That's part of why discussion on HN tends to be much higher-signal than Facebook or Reddit.
It's not a costless error if a warped illusion of risk drives countries to, i.e., deploy nuclear-tipped space weapons for asteroid defense, which then precipitate a genuine crisis. It's not obvious that having more defenses is obviously safer than having less; some thoughtful people have argued the opposite:
>"In our view, development of this asteroid-deflection technology would be premature. Given twentieth-century history and present global politics, it is hard to imagine guarantees against eventual misuse of an asteroid deflection system commensurate with the dangers such a system poses. Those who argue that it would be prudent to prevent catastrophic impacts with annual probabilities of 10^-5 would surely recognize the prudence of preventing more probable catastrophes of comparable magnitude from misuse of potentially apocalyptic technology."
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/368501a0 ("Dangers of Asteroid Deflection" (1994), Carl Sagan & Steven Ostro)
The Sagan paper concerns much larger asteroids, which are correspondingly more rare. For asteroids in the 8MT impact range, it doesn't make much military sense to launch deep space missions to divert them years in advance, rather than delivering nukes directly with ICBMs in minutes. Given any competent asteroid defense system, an asteroid diversion would be detected immediately and countered, and the perpetrators would face consequences.
In fact, since we already have rockets that can reach asteroids, I'd say the possibility of malicious diversion makes a defense system more important.
That's a fair distinction—the paper predates the modern telescope surveys that are discovering all the small ones.
- "rather than delivering nukes directly with ICBMs in minutes"
You'd still need multiple years for those nukes to have a useful effect. (The change in velocity is instant; the change in position is not). They wouldn't be ICBM's, either: we'd need a new type of deep-space delivery vehicle, far larger than a suborbital ICBM. That'd probably trigger a new type of nuclear arms race.
One possible reason is plausible deniability, but that goes away if we have a good asteroid defense system with an emphasis on early detection.
For one thing, you could weaponize asteroids as a second-strike response, if there's an imbalance where one superpower has asteroid deflection and one does not. Even if it's delayed by months, the certainty that the asteroid will eventually hit establishes a deterrent against attacking the asteroid-controlling country. If there's defenses against ballistic missiles, this circumvents those.
For another, the asteroid-deflecting nukes are dual-use as weapons themselves. A nuclear warhead in deep space defeats conventional ballistic missile defenses. If that warhead is turned towards Earth, that (first-strike) attack's not visible to the adversary until a few seconds before impact—unlike an ICBM launch, which has tens of minutes of warning, enough to launch (conventional) interceptor missiles.
Part of the reason the US, Russia and China have vast land based missile fields is to visibly show the enemy that they're gonna have to wipe out huge swaths of land with hundreds of nukes (and THEN sink our boomers) to have a successful first strike.
Space-based weapons (which are banned by treaty) are more like submarine-basing, in that the enemy isn't necessarily sure where they are; but, in addition to that, they have potentially very short warning times before a strike. No one actually wants that unstable dynamic, with the short/no-warning; which is why all the nuclear powers have (so far) agreed by treaty not to build any.
edit: But if someone were to build a civilian spaced-based asteroid defense, which involved sending nuclear weapons into space... that could get destabilizing fast. Whether or not Sagan can predict specifics, the big-picture idea of humans not trusting each other with apocalyptic weapons is not wrong. (Worth recalling the USSR genuinely mistook the civilian US Space Shuttle for a nuclear weapons platform).
Nuclear second strike has always been from the submarines, which guarantee a response within minutes.
Versus your proposal here of launching a highly visible rocket, to manipulate a highly visible object, with a flight time measured in days to weeks that's mostly ballistic.
Frankly: this is strategic nonsense.
Put it another way: for considerably less expenditure of effort, you could just build a hydrogen-bomb large enough to obliterate Earth's biosphere completely[1]
Physics isn't changing over time, but engineering is.
But if you could do second strikes with asteroids, that would be a good thing. Second strike capability helps prevent nuclear war. Effective first strikes are what's destabilizing.
Which brings us to your second point. I agree that stationing nuclear warheads in space is a bad idea. But we don't have to do that. With years or decades of advance warning, we can just launch them from Earth.
I don't disagree!
- "You need one that's already going to pass nearby."
There's a very large number of these already, within a small delta-v of Earth. We don't know where they are yet (it was a show-stopping issue with NASA's Constellation (?) program, when they wanted to demonstrate capturing an asteroid, but couldn't find one), but that's going to rapidly change.
- "and during that time your enemy can send their own nuke and nudge it away"
That's pretty useful: that brings it to a point where the defender has to invest an amount of resources comparable to the attacker. That's a win for the economically stronger country. If the difference grows large enough, they can simply overwhelm them with numbers.
That's even before opening the technological possibilities of stealth asteroids.
Like...starship?
> That'd probably trigger a new type of nuclear arms race.
Why on earth would there be an arms race on something designed to deliver nuclear payloads to deep space? The only way I could see that happening is if we had nuclear armed deep space colonies? (See, the expanse)
There is no doubt that an asteroid hitting earth is.
Hint: expertise matters, evidence matters, and in a field where buildings/laws/fields of study get named after successful contrarians, a long streak of effectively unanimous consensus should not be undervalued.
Show me the /unanimous/ consensus that this is an immediate /existential/ issue. I don't believe such a thing exists. When attempting to understand the difference between those who care about an asteroid and climate change, which was the question, this is the critical point to concern yourself with.
For starters, we know corals will be dead in the next few decades, home of 25% of all oceanic species.
The mass extinction event is underway and we aren't doing enough to stop it.
So you are attempting to create an environment where reasonable doubt is impossible. This behavior is actually part of the reason I have doubts.
> we know corals will be dead in the next few decades
Do we?
> The mass extinction event is underway and we aren't doing enough to stop it.
This is a clever dodge of the original question. Can you explain to me when our current inaction reaches a point where no response will ever be able to overcome the drivers of this mass extinction? Do you have an estimate you can share?
Overwhelming agreement among experts is as gold as standards get.
But FWIW, I don't think anyone believes that climate change is a quick duration species-existential event. Massive slow-roll geopolitical destabilization leading to societal collapse? That's definitely on the table.
I know this. I was responding to the OPs appeal to authority.
> Overwhelming agreement among experts is as gold as standards get.
What is this agreement? That it will eventually happen? That's not much of an agreement.
> I don't think anyone believes that climate change is a quick duration species-existential event.
Among those who "agree" is there a common timeframe that they estimate? Or do they all have varying opinions on this?
> That's definitely on the table.
We have nuclear weapons. In bunkers. Aimed at "targets." Everything is on the table. This isn't useful.
Eventually happen? What percentage of the Great Barrier Reef is gone?
How about this every single climate change skeptic I have offered this wager to has declined to take me up: if in the next calendar year, the average global temperature for a given month is below the average global temperature of that month in the year you were born I will pay you 10 times the amount you are willing to wager. If the opposite is true, that the month this year is warmer than the same month in the year you were born you must pay me the amount you are willing to wager.
Care to take that bet? Didn’t think so.
https://frankkliewer.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/sharehol...
Congress did decide that NEO's are an important problem, and eventually money was appropriated to address it, and a technical solution to the detection problem has been found. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEO_Surveyor)
That bit doesn't really seem necessary though?
I take that as meaning a crisis of traditional media. But most of our false-positive and false-negative crises are crises of social media. Look at climate change, vaccines, ethnic hatred, pizza gate, every crazy rumor ...
8.1 megatons of kinetic energy. According to the Torino rating, only risk of “localized destruction” (less than “regional devastation”): https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/torino_scale.html
Just staying behind hill, will be not enough cover from shockwave, so people will suffer from fast pressure changes.
But shockwave quickly weakened as square of distance, and hill will make it's path longer. So, something like 100m hill could be considered as moving border of deadly zone 100m closer to epicenter.
Earthquakes' energy doesn't all go to displacing water and hence generating tsunamis. An ocean impact is significantly more efficient at transferring energy into tsunamis.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97804...
https://web.archive.org/web/20100404013939/http://neic.usgs....
Asteroids mostly contain the same naturally radioactive elements we find in Earth's rocks - mainly potassium, uranium, and thorium in very small amounts. When they hit Earth, they don't typically create radiation hazards. Scientists have checked out famous impact sites like Meteor Crater in Arizona and found normal radiation levels. While impacts can briefly create some radioactive isotopes through the collision process, it's really the impact's explosive force that does the real damage, not radiation.
I'm guessing there's still a lot of uncertainty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
Parlermo Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Technical_Impact_Hazar...
Torino Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale
This is why nearly all nuclear explosions was over land or far from coast. Few experiments near some coast or island, created tsunami-like wave on those coast (island), which considerable widen polluted territory (ocean is usually considered as self-cleaning).
"The final katun in the sequence that must happen before the new cycle of the katuns begins again is 13 Ahau. This starts in 2032 and ends in 2052. It is the time from 2032 to 2052, that great earth changes may take place.
The translation from the codices about 13 Ahau that starts in 2032 is ‘Famine, plagues of locusts, and loss of rulers. The judgment of God’ Mr. Scofield goes on to elaborate on this katun.
‘This is a time of total collapse where everything is lost. It is the time of the judgment of God. There will be epidemics and plagues and then famine. Governments will be lost to foreigners and wise men and prophets will be lost.‘
It is my perception that the great crisis that many fear in 2012 may well start after 2032. An interesting note to this time period is that it did bring great revolution and change during the time period from 1776 to 1796."
https://www.tokenrock.com/mayan-astrology/2012-mayan-prophec...
" This is a time of total collapse where everything is lost. It is the time of the judgment of God. There will be epidemics and plagues and then famine. Governments will be lost to foreigners and wise men and prophets will be lost.‘"
What about empty places? Luckily for Greenland, the calculations predict that the flux of impacts to the poles for Earth is 22% greater than the flux at the equator [1]. So nobody (in their right mind) would want to annex it as an asteroid survival backup site.
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/abefda/pdf
The good news is that, worst-case scenario, this is going to wipe out a city. And cities and their surrounding areas can absolutely be evacuated. We definitely have the cars and buses necessary for that.
Even without incentives, in all likelihood, those who can will evacuate early for peace of mind, and as the prediction becomes more certain on its approach through measurement, individuals will I'm sure even start to return /before/ the pass. You know everyone has their own set of 9s to chase
Even if we had three years to move everyone from one side of the earth to the other and could handle the transportation, and then another three years to move them back, how are you going to keep them fed? We're just going to double our food infrastructure on half of the world?
Where do we house them for several years? We're going to double our housing?
How are we going to find all those people jobs to sustain them for the several years they're spending on the other side of the world?
All those things would have to be part of the logistics too. Energy usage. Health care. The list goes on.
It would be a logistical and economic upheaval the likes of which the world has never seen. It would lead to political chaos and massive wars over suddenly incredibly limited resources.
Humanity would survive, but a lot of people wouldn't. It wouldn't be a question of logistics, but a complete and increasingly violent reconfiguration of society in all spheres.
Supposing we had a good estimate about time and place, it would be similar in scope to evacuating for a hurricane.
If we run a simulation forward to, say, Jan 1 2032, our uncertainty about where the asteroid will be is not only in, let's call it, the X and Y axes, describing a flat circle of where the asteroid might be (see [1]), but also in a Z axis.
That is, our uncertainty of where the asteroid will be can be described as a 3D shape. And if it's further "behind" or "ahead" in its trajectory, then it would be passing through Earth's orbit behind or ahead of time.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale#/media/File:Apoph...
Spoiler: It's an XKCD What If, so lots and lots of people die.
with the earth's surface being 70% water, that means a greater chance of a water impact. so there's hope there, except that damn tsunamis again. maybe we can convince the asteroids to hit the spacecraft cemetery
Like is it possible for an asteroid to give a city a "buzz cut" and then continue on into outer space?
like is doing some heavy lifting here. We have had asteroids pass by at a distance closer than the moon. That's pretty damn close in my book relative to the size of the cosmos. At that scale, that's pretty much a ringer in horse shoes.
The buzzcut is a very strange question though. If the thing enters the atmosphere and does not burn up, it is hitting the ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Earth-grazing_firebal...
https://www.gardenofmemory.net/the-great-daylight-fireball-o...
To have enough energy to come that close without doing so means it has enough energy that superheating the atmosphere or generating nuclear events through impacts with air molecules starts to become a problem (or both: first one then the other). This is the "baseball at the speed of light" type problem from XKCD.
The stress of this maneuver is considerable, especially if you get as low as 20m above ground, so the object would need considerable shear strength and yield strength. Also high density and high thermal capacity. But not unrealistic, I think a tungsten ball (or better yet, a solid tungsten lifting body with aerodynamic steering authority) should make it through.
You can even exit the atmosphere but not have escape velocity, effectively using the aerobreaking maneuver to assist in the gravity capture of your object. But you'd better circularize the orbit shortly after, otherwise your next pass through the atmosphere is going to be terminal.
Relativistic baseball effects aren't very relevant yet, I'm talking about objects hitting the upper atmosphere with around 20-50 km/s. Enough to leave again, not enough to start a fusion reaction.
E.g. an asteroid 100m across with the same density as the earth is going to have ~0.0000000000001 the mass of the earth.
If an asteroid travelling at relativistic velocity passed through the atmosphere, a change in the earth's orbit would be the least of our worries!
An Asteroid is going at most about 70 km/s:
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/20805/what-are...
That's 0.02% of the speed of light (300 000 km/s).
One thing to consider is that for a 55m asteroid like this one to do a lot of harm, it not only has to hit the earth, it has to hit it somewhere very populated. (only about 0.3% of the earth is very urban https://nunosempere.com/blog/2024/10/16/urban-share/)
The Tugunska event of 1908 instead had 50-60m, but caused only three deaths because it was over a sparsely populated area; it still affected 2.1K km2 (or about two NYCs worth).
It's a great read — even if it's a little dated. If anything, you get to see how much we achieved that in the early 90s was still hypothetical, and what things we haven't quite pulled off yet.
I don't see how this could possibly be correct. Earth's orbit is very precisely known.
-the size of the object
-the orbit of the object
-the velocity of the object
-effect of outgassing and solar wind on the object (as mentioned in the top comment)
Rather than uncertainties in the earth's orbit.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor 2. http://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021plde.confE.119A/abstrac...
Unfortunately, humanity now have only small power ready, for such far things just about 50kW, it will need decades to transfer so large energy.
Russians claimed to create nuclear reactor for space with somewhere near 200kW, but unfortunately, now these are just words, very far from real hardware.
When there are hurricanes there are often holdouts that don't abide by the evacuation order. I wonder if there would be holdouts if an asteroid were coming.
https://starwalk.space/en/news/should-you-worry-about-an-ast...
You should personally be more worried about crossing a road or plugging in an electric appliance or being hit by a lightning. For others there's a lot more devastation going on globally that you could even do something about.
https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/pdc25/ImpactRiskIntro-ATAP-...
Isn't it basically a matter of time until we encounter an asteroid the size of the one that hit earth 6.5·10⁷ years ago?
however, if you removed enough mass from the asteroid, would you end up screwing yourself by now changing the orbit so that the next time it swings by it's more of a direct trajectory?
The title bot likes to strip URL parameters.
There's a Sci-Fi Plot in there somewhere:
A hero tries to and succeeds in persuading govts to organize a planet scale skipping effort to get earth closer to a passing by rock and escape an impending disaster on earth.
Since, if we're already doing Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, less than 100 years after we'd learned that Nazis are pure evil, then I'd understand if some higher power was ready to hit the reset button. Maybe tardigrades would evolve better.
(ProTip: Be sure to send a second asteroid, to Mars, ahead of the Nazi escape ship.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law#:~:text=Godwin'...
I'd rather focus on Bitcoin, AI and Blockchain scams as well as nepotism. The official excuse for Ramaswamy's DOGE exit is that Musk has a tech approach to solving (?) the efficiency problems:
https://www.newsweek.com/vivek-ramaswamy-asked-if-elon-musk-...
Expect a lot of blockchain nonsense infiltrating the government, perhaps even a digital currency. That must be avoided at all costs.
I know they are looting the nation. I know they are trying to create their techno-fuedal crypto shithole empire where only Musk and Thiel get to choose who knows and does what.
But they are STILL building internment camps and already have had planeloads of brown people flown to random countries.
Another reminder that Nazis and Facists are utterly inefficient at anything because of their incompetence and stupidity. The price we paid to fly those brown people out of our country could have bought them all first class tickets on civilian planes in the fucking free market.
Nazi Germany and Facist Italy were both staggeringly stupid, incompetent, inefficient, and run by people who spent every day insisting they knew better than anyone around them, and literally criminalized proving them wrong. "At least Mussolini made the trains run on time" was always false. Empirically, the trains didn't run very well.
In my experience, commonly orbits in the solar system are astoundingly accurate over centuries. This prediction is relatively soon, 2032.
So, we have (A) a crude orbit and only 1% prediction of hitting Earth or (B) an accurate prediction of 100% = 1. Between these two, (A) seemed too small and (B) too large. So, I asked.
This question seemed appropriate enough.
Reading the paper, sure, they have a lot of predictions for several decades to come with all the probabilities close to 1% and far from 100%. The paper gives some details on the difficulty of getting a very accurate orbit for the object. So, apparently the 1% is what they have in mind and their title, accurate.
So, if it hits, what might be the damage?
And it it does hit, what would be the probability of it hitting a densely populated area instead of ocean, desert, mountains, ...? Net, with the 1%, the risk of major damage seems quite small.
Hmm, what would the insurance industry think? Vegas?
If you detected 100 objects with a 1% chance to hit, you're actually very likely to be hit by more the 1. There's a lot of objects up there, fortunately the chances they hit us are a lot lower then that so far.
This is so below the threshold of worry, I’m shocked by the points and comments.
Schedule a colonoscopy, quit drinking, resign from your high stress job, drive less, get your moles checked; all better mitigation for prolonging you life than worrying about this.
The 2032 asteroid does warrant tracking, but the Palermo Scale remains below a critical level because:
The impact probability (1.2%) is not high enough to trigger a stronger alarm. The background frequency of 8 Mt impacts is relatively high, making this event less statistically exceptional. The event is still 8 years away, so uncertainties in orbital prediction remain.
Asking a LLM about topics you have no idea about it a great way to be misled by hallucinations, don't do that.
I find it fascinating that people brag about refusing to even try to learn to use new tools just because they don't know how to use them effectively.
Interesting how you jump to conclusion based on nothing. Had you checked my profile (even though it's even more obvious from my Reddit one) you'd have seen that I'm actually pretty savvy when of comes to language models.
But knowing your tools also implies knowing their limits.