Asteroid question

willow

hay guys,
not sure how many are aware that an Asteroid passed by our
little planet the other day.
The question that i have is this........
How protected are we,if at all ?

Jpet

Not at all. Have a nice day :D

Amphitrite

Funnily enough I had an interesting conversation about this with somebody last night.

If an asteroid were to pass close enough to the earth - apparently it could have devastating effects such as tidal waves. I don't really know much about it, but apparently asteroids have been the biggest cause for extinction of species on earth.

fish_4_all

Who knows, I doubt that we are totally unrepared for one with all the hsows you see about intercepting one. I would be more worried about the ones that just pass close enough to create who knows how many natural disaters than the direct impact ones. Tidal waves, tides at levels never seen before, earthquakes, and whatever else. Maybe that is what the Mayan calendar is refering to as a world changin event.

Laser systems, rocket systems and batteries, diverting tactics/plans and whatever we don't know about should take care of anything small enough to break up into smaller pieces. Say smaller than a small mountain. Then we just have to hope we don't get hit by one of the pieces.

willow

so i guess we have no super dooper rockets up in space then ?

fish_4_all

LOL, who knows. Maybe we have a rocket base on the dark side of the moon.

willow

lets hope so shall we. :)

iamntbatman

We have Saturn rockets and such easily capable of putting massive thermonuclear warheads into space which could change the trajectory of (or utterly destroy) just about anything that would come our way. Russia, the UK, and France all have similar capabilities. I wouldn't be too worried about a catastrophic asteroid collision.

Now, a nearby gamma-ray burst...that's another story. We'd all be cooked before we ever knew it was coming, and there's no way at all to ever defend against such a cosmological event.

Dave66

Second most, Amphitrite :) 250 Million years ago a massive upwelling of methane from the sea bed followed by catastrophic volcanic activity wiped out 99 percent of all life on Earth. The most successful marine creature of the time, trilobites, who numbered in the thousands of species, ceased to exist. It's like a knife cut in strata of that time; before, life, after, none.
The asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago drove only 75 to 80 percent of animals to extinction, ushering in the age of mammals. Not terribly long ago they found the crater from that asteroid, etched into the sea floor bedrock near the Yucatan Peninsula.
If neither of those extinction level events had happened, who knows what the world would be like today. Perhaps the only creatures still with us from the asteroid 65 million years ago are the crocodilians, who haven't changed very much at all in the last 150 million years. Nature obviously got them right :)

Dave

herefishy

Hmm.... If an asteroid were to hit the Earth, I don't think my umbrella would help, would it? Maybe a hard hat? Guess not...