So I got a little curious about astroids hitting earth after watching this VH1 "I love the 90's" marathon and they showed Armageddon. So I discovered this NASA Freqently Asked Questions page here. I'm going to be quite honest. They're not very reassuring, and definitely very blunt. I feel like if an uncharted astroid showed up on a crash course for earth, and this asteroid is any larger than 50m in diameter, somebody is screwed ... larger than 1km and an entire city is instantly screwed while the rest of the world gets impact winter... anything larger than 2km diameter and the whole world will get a wonderful mass extinction impulse. Wow.
I'm looking forward to hopefully not ever having to worry about that. Actually, I think it would all be fine if they didn't say that we'd get zero warning in some cases. Like how do we not notice an astroid headed towards us? (btw, NEO = near earth object)
| With at least half of even the larger NEOs remaining undiscovered, the most likely warning today would be zero -- the first indication of a collision would be the flash of light and the shaking of the ground as it hit. In contrast, if the current surveys actually discover a NEO on a collision course, we would expect many decades of warning. |
Hmpf.
J
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