this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Is there any way we can speed it up?
Let's point all our magnets towards the sky!
🧲🌠
Probably a carbonic asteroid rather than ferrous
No worries! We’re working on that, too!
Melting the ice caps shifts mass, and therefore, gravity, away from the largely unpopulated poles and nearer to where the people live.
But this problem will not solve itself with any one solution. We must also petition our government to act now to stage a mission to nudge the asteroid into earth’s orbit! With modern science, we can do this.
I believe in humanity’s power to defeat humanity!
Gonna take a bit more than a nudge. Even if we put it on a collision course, it would only be travelling ≈ 17,000 kph, on impact. Barely even moving in intrastellar space. That's only 0.0000157024 times C. We'd need to get it moving to at least 0.0001 C to get it to be a world killer, maybe even 0.001 C. So somehow we need to figure out how to get the thing moving at ≈ 170,000 kph to ≈ 1,700,000 kph for it to have enough energy to be a world killer. Right now it's a measly little one megaton explosion.
A large enough impulse could knock it onto an impact trajectory in 2028. "Large enough" would be absolutely gigantic though, and we have to catch up with it, making it quite impractical. It would be cheaper to just build some more multi-megaton nukes for the same effect.
Having seen Scott Manley's video on the topic, it seems well within the realm of possible.
That's for changing the trajectory of the 2032 encounter by a few thousand km, not changing the 2028 encounter by 8 million km. And if we're changing the 2032 encounter we can smack it as it goes by in 2028 instead of playing catch-up before then.
The one mentioned above is 2024 YR and is slated to pay a visit in 2032. The 2028 one is 1997 XF11, and poses no risk.
(But I was confused, too - I only looked up because of the 2028/2032 discrepancy. I made a joke to my wife about emailing a state senator and suggesting they fund a mission to knock the asteroid into earth, so that they can help their constituents by ensuring that they no longer have a state to be a senator over. 2028 is during their term, and god willing, 2032 won’t be.)
2024 YR4 has a close(ish) encounter with the Earth every 4 years; it will pass within 8 million km in 2028 before the very close pass/potential impact in 2032. You can see info for close encounters here.
Coming back to this: You mean to say we’ve got three years to execute a mission to give it a little nudge now, so we don’t have to give it a big nudge in 7 years? (Into earth’s orbit, of course.)
Yep, the plan to redirect it, if needed, would've been to hit it as it went past in 2028. (Its orbit has been refined enough by now to be nearly certain it won't hit the Earth).
Well, huh. TIL.
Serves me right for half remembering something and assuming the first search result explains it.