Space Mission Options for Reconnaissance and Mitigation of Asteroid 2024 YR4
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
The timing of an explosion will be tricky, as the combined speed of the asteroid and the nuke will be huge,the only possible intercept is head on, and the detonation will need to be timed to the pico second(dont know, but its way less than a micro). Too early, and we get hit with a slightly warm asteroid, too late and we get hit with a radioactive asteroid. Then the actual asteroid nuking rocket has to sit ready,after of course getting built, the summs involved will of course be thematicaly consistant, for whoever can insist that they get to build and maintain it,in perpetuity.
This is incorrect. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor was very recent and caught on video by many people. It injured nearly 1500 people and damaged 7,200 buildings in six cities.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event in 1908 was several times larger than the Chelyabinsk meteor and leveled 830 square miles of forest. It is fortunate that it detonated over an unpopulated area. It could have completely destroyed any major metropolitan city.
A little further back there's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi... which is controversial but very possibly caused planet wide climate change visible in the geologic record ~12,900 years ago.
Smaller meteors fall into our gravity well regularly, and usually detonate over or impact the ocean, as it covers most of the Earth's surface.
That said, further down the article, there is some legitimate discussion about alternatives and even mention that "Wallace Broecker—the scientist who proposed the conveyor shutdown hypothesis—eventually agreed with the idea of an extraterrestrial impact at the Younger Dryas boundary, and thought that it had acted as a trigger on top of a system that was already approaching instability."
I can't say whether an impact happened for certain or not. I await further evidence. But I do think that the hypothesis is plausible and it's clear from the Chicxulub impact that meteors can have disastrous impact on global ecology.
A rebuttal of a rejection of an "alleged refutation". You can tell there's a lot of academic egos involved here.
I thought I had heard it used as flood explanation, but it seems young Earth creationists know the timeline doesn't fit.
Researchers have verified oral histories of at least 10,000 years age among Aboriginal Australians against date-able geologic events. Consequently, it is now clear that we can maintain such socially important information across such time.
It seems to me that we most likely fudged the exact date somewhere along the way.
Ancient peoples are often underestimated. But they were as smart and capable as ourselves, and possessed of a great deal more contemplative time and opportunity to observe the natural world around them.
Scientists are trained to look for faults and reasons to invalidate. It's the fundamental skill for eliminating hypotheses. And that is OK. But I believe there is useful information to be found in ancient culture if one is willing to consider it in good faith from the perspective of someone living through it.
It is interesting to look at impact structures [0]. Note the highly suspicious correlation of impacts and places where well paid geologists like to live; there are probably a lot of impacts in the last few millennia elsewhere in the world where people just discarded the cultural memory because the stories were too fantastic, or nobody noticed the very large splash in the pacific. A lot as in I don't think we know about the majority of the impacts in any time frame.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart...
> Studies of 2024 YR4’s potential lunar impact effects suggest lunar ejecta could increase micrometeoroid debris flux in low Earth orbit up to 1000 times above background levels over just a few days, possibly threatening astronauts and spacecraft.
Throughout most of human history, an impact event like this could probably have gone completely unnoticed, because we didn't yet have satellites that were vulnerable to micrometeoroid damage. So you can't use the fact that no such event was observed as evidence that it didn't happen.
If that celestial body would have hit a big city instead of hitting unpopulated Siberia, it would have destroyed it completely and it would have been one of the greatest, if not the greatest, catastrophes in human history. Today, with less and less areas that have remained unpopulated, such an event would be more likely to happen in a place where it would cause victims.
While that's true for human history, some of the previous err... "rules of the earth" (specifically ~65 million years ago) might have opinions about whether they should have attempted stopping that big rock from hitting them. ;)
Of course, that's leaving aside that they didn't appear to have a civilisation, nor be aware of the big rock approaching before it happened, etc.