“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” - Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
at a bar
Civilian: “I dont get why you’re so bothered by it.”
NASA engineer: looks left, looks right, leans in close “Because it means their aim is getting better.”
I’m from Buenos Aires, and I say kill 'em all
I would like to know more.
Buenos Aires was a false flag!
lol obviously fake because NASA would never calculate anything in miles. They’d use Km like the rest of the planet.
Lockheed Martin: JEEZ NASA it was just the ONE time!!!
When the consequence is world ending, that’s an okay reaction.
People just don’t understand basic probability payouts
I bought my powerball ticket… hopefully the asteroid will hit right after my dopamine and serotonin inhibitors give out
Think of the Earth’s orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is crossed regularly by pedestrians who don’t know enough to look before stepping off the curb. At least 90 percent of these pedestrians are quite unknown to us. We don’t know where they live, what sort of hours they keep, how often they come our way. All we know is that at some point, at uncertain intervals, they trundle across the road down which we are cruising at sixty-six thousand miles an hour.
As Steven Ostro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has put it, “Suppose that there was a button you could push and you could light up all the Earth-crossing asteroids larger than about ten meters, there would be over 100 million of these objects in the sky.” In short, you would see not a couple of thousand distant twinkling stars, but millions upon millions upon millions of nearer, randomly moving objects—“all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth and all of which are moving on slightly different courses through the sky at different rates. It would be deeply unnerving.” Well, be unnerved because it is there. We just can’t see it- excerpt from ‘A Short History Of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson
Geniuses of Lemmy, please help.
Given an asteroid with the mass of X, and velocity of Y. What’s the closest distance it could “missed” earth before the point of no return?
crunching the numbers, it’d be about distance z
I’m glad we have geniuses here on Lemmy!
How did you even do that? 🤯
I mean that’s peanuts in space distances perspectives
Usually when there’s a headline, yes. But 545 million miles is almost six times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. That is a very large distance even in this context.
I was going to say near misses are usually classified as passing withing the orbital distance of the moon, about 225k miles, or 250k miles for convenience.
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