[Speed Gibson,
Tuesday June 27, 2006 at 7:08am]
Just a tad outside
From Yahoo News via The Drudge Report, an asteroid will pass within 270,000 of Earth on July 3. At an estimated diameter of a quarter to half a mile, this rock could no doubt do a lot of damage even if it just splashed in the middle of the Atlantic. The article says there are hundreds of these PHA's - Potentially Hazardous Asteroids out there, out of about 2,000 known asteroids with orbits intersecting that of Earth.
This latest threat was discovered in December 2004, meaning we got about 18 months' notice on this one. They are found telescopically, so we would get proportionately more or less notice depending on their size.
Getting back to asteriod 2004 XP14, I can't help but wonder what the world would be (will be?) like if we were to discover a sizable mass headed straight for us, say with two years' warning. Would we just stop as a civilization? Would we collapse into pockets of anarchy, enclaves, even ritualistic suicide?
Why work? In particular, why continue to farm or pump oil? We might all starve long before impact.
I'm not going to worry about it, even if there is another smaller chunk that will pass within 20,000 miles in the year 2029. The odds against such an event are still, in the final analysis, astronomical.
This latest threat was discovered in December 2004, meaning we got about 18 months' notice on this one. They are found telescopically, so we would get proportionately more or less notice depending on their size.
Getting back to asteriod 2004 XP14, I can't help but wonder what the world would be (will be?) like if we were to discover a sizable mass headed straight for us, say with two years' warning. Would we just stop as a civilization? Would we collapse into pockets of anarchy, enclaves, even ritualistic suicide?
Why work? In particular, why continue to farm or pump oil? We might all starve long before impact.
I'm not going to worry about it, even if there is another smaller chunk that will pass within 20,000 miles in the year 2029. The odds against such an event are still, in the final analysis, astronomical.