Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by lambdadelirium | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

lambdadelirium

What can be done to increase the asteroid impact probability?

View on HN

And can we speed up the timeline? 2032 is too far away.

Can we also add mass to the asteroid?

And speed

We're gonna need a bigger rock.

Monke, smash!!

The best way I can think of is similar to what I heard from Jaron Lanier (he may not be the first person to explain this). Basically what you do is send something massive out there that will gravitationally tug it into a collision course with Earth. Obviously this will take quite a bit of time but if your calculations are correct it will pretty much guarantee impact.

Waiting. In general the probability increases as more data is gathered, and the error ellipse shrinks with the Earth still inside. Then is suddenly drops to zero in the overwhelming majority of cases, when the Earth finally gets out of this shrinking error ellipse.

The precision (of the observed trajectory) increases. If the probability increased in general we should recalibrate our probability estimates.

Get a lot of people to jump at the same time to nudge us into the path.

that's a beautiful idea. it will only work if we act together as one human race. this is the moment where we have to put political conflicts aside and commit collective suicide.

This would move the Earth by less than the width of an atom: https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/

So, we all have to just skip for a while ?

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.

GP didn’t specify Earth.

God I love HN.

We can land on it, drill and plant nukes inside to shatter it

That's not what they asked

It would definitely increase impact probability though.

Not necessarily. See my new comment above. In addition, depending on how far out you do it, gravity will allow it to reform. And if it never reforms because you blew it to dust headed out to interstellar space you wont get an impact either. It's not at all a simple problem.

That would create far more objects, many on the same rough direction, thus increasing the chance of an impact

Only if you managed to leave the trajectory the same if it was already on a collision course or change the direction to a collision course. Do you think you can control that with a nuclear explosion? You probably don't know enough about to the system to make a high confidence prediction of the new outcome.

Not really, blowing it up is going to create a lot of fragments with slightly different orbits, and some are going to have practically the same as the whole Asteroid had before. So the chance of anything at all hitting earth will increase, but the parts will be smaller. It would be like a bullet turning into buckshot during flight.

If we were talking about a projectile fired at relatively close range on the surface of the Earth I would agree with you. But we are talking about a very small object very far away with already only a 1% chance of impact. Buckshotting the object with a random explosion is unlikely to change the dynamics of system to point where you say with high confidence the chance of impact is much higher. Some fragments might hit but it's very difficult to predict.

As long as some part of the asteroid keeps the old trajectory, the chance can only increase because you’re adding particles with slightly different trajectories.

Can't tell why I'm hearing "I could stay awake just to hear you breathin" in my head when reading the above

Someone finally got it! Congrats!

Been rooting for Asteroid/Meteor in the recent presidential elections.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com