A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Everyone saying "they can evacuate" clearly doesn't remember how bad the covid response was.
There will be anti-space conspiracy theorists. The ownership class would demand people continue working until the last possible minute (and beyond). It would be politicized, because some people are unbelievably stupid, cruel, and selfish, and enough people are so stupid they'll buy in.
Now, if we could make the meteor fall on a location occupied solely by the people who don't believe in science...
Look, it's really simple. Just don't look up. If we collectively ignore the problem, it won't be a problem.
They could make a movie about that!
Also the impact risk corridor passes through states that are poorly equipped for large civil defence operations: Ethiopia and the CAR are in civil wars, Yemen is in a civil war with the majority of the country under the control of an unrecognized government, and the South Sudanese government is quite week—being at peace only for the last 5 years
Everyone saying “they can evacuate” clearly doesn’t remember how bad the covid response was.
or not paying attention to political winds welcoming the evacuees.
It would make sense to have a more cooperative world, even if cooperation involves "victims" compensating those able to protect them. Hope the US can continue to contribute tracking resources, at least.
At least "crushed by asteroid" is not contagious.
Thankfully I live in the USA where we're totally safe because we reject science! But don't you try coming here for safety, we hate everybody else. You'll probably just be sent to gitmo.
Just don't look up, duh
"I'm gonna go all in."
this is my favorite poker sim
Ngl mine too. I ended up never finishing it and using it as a great poker sim. 😅
it's definitely balanced towards giving you better hands.
I've pulled like 8 royal flushes out of it with less than 10 hours spent playing poker in there. I've never even seen a royal flush in other contexts.
It's really chill though haha. :)
haha, that's why I've put almost 10 hours into it.
i suspect most mini games start to show their problems and biases when you spend 10 hours playing then lol. like, gwent was sick, but it really was just about stacking the most strong cards intoa single deck as you could.
caravan though... that was a great damn mini game. the interactive and believable element of needing to go around and collect old world playing cards to build out your deck did a lot to extend the game into the broader world. more than that though, it's a genuinely playable and relatively balanced game. i happened to have a lot of incomplete card decks lying around when i grew up. eventually i repurposed those into one big deck that would get split in half to play with people irl and a randomized deck. only fantasy card game I've ever been able to recreate and play at home without buying anything. and it even played pretty well.
With more data collected over time, the chance has already been reduced to 0.28% https://blogs.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/2025/02/20/additional-observations-continue-to-reduce-chance-of-asteroid-impact-in-2032/
Outside of extremely extenuating circumstances, this isn't a worry. We already have proof-of-concept tech like DART to divert asteroids, aerospace engineers can use this to get governments to fund them even better, asteroid goes behind the sun for 3 years, asteroid diverting technology advances even further, in 2028 when the path of travel becomes more precise the chance of hitting us gets revised down to zero, and we've advanced our technology should anything more serious come our way in the future
yeah, we really don't have to worry.
With the DART mission tech, we can get our hit chances into the 90 percents
Gotta pump those numbers up
Backup is that we have a team of deep sea oil drillers go up there
Why are we trying our best idea second?
@OneTwoThree @fossilesque actually we want this asteroid to hit Earth. Remove one threat from the sky. Divert to hit in a safe place. This one is safe if it hit in a remote location.
Is it wrong to hope it hits us?
Yeah, because at best it just splashes in the ocean, worst it hits a city and causes mass suffering as thousands die from the impact and fallout. It's not going to end any suffering
Yes, because it's not going to be nearly as catastrophic as it sounds. What we need is a real world ender.
Gimme that flush COME ON
Am I being wooshed? It's impossible to get a flush with the two spades. Or the Aces.
The sad thing is that according to Scott Manley video the areas it can hit are equatorial Africa or South of India, so lot of countries will try to ignore it
Until those countries start planning a meteor re route, which if done improperly could push the impact zone anywhere.
So what level of calamity are we talking about here? 3% doesn’t sound that low to me.
I recall hearing it was medium-ish nuclear weapon sized, but not wipe out civilisation size. Wherever it's heading would need to be evacuated.
That was a week ago, though, and I'm sure the size projections will be updated as we get more data.
This is correct. Current estimates place a possible impact event at an energy release of ~7.8 Megatons of TNT. Approximately 500 times the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Comparable to the Tunguska Event. This is accounting for current size estimates under 100m in diameter.
It is a very serious asteroid. The Tunguska Event could have killed millions of people. The primary reason it didn't was because it happened in the middle of Siberia. The primary witnesses to the devastation were local native groups who still lived that for out, of which there were few. It wasn't properly investigated for over a decade because of the remoteness of where it happened and the low priority as it didn't affect very many people. If that happened over a major city the consequences would be utterly devastating.
It's not K-T Extinction event level, but it is nonetheless quite serious.
We'll get a better idea of whether it'll hit or not in 2028 the next time it passes close to earth, which will give us plenty of time to respond before it might hit in 2032.
If it is on a collision course we probably have time to do something about it. If we don't do anything about it it'll probably hit the ocean and it's not big enough to cause any kind of crazy mega tsunami or anything like that. If it does hit land it'll probably hit in the middle of nowhere and kill, like, 12 people, and if it does manage to beat all the odds and hit a major city it will be a major disaster, but it's not going to be the apocalypse or anything.
I won't believe it's gonna miss us until it gets to 95% likely it will hit
I’m going all in on the potential straight.
Risk is probability times consequence. Focusing on the odds without considering the second half of the equation is stupid.
Odds are low, but not zero. Still a bit of a nothingburger now that we've been able to successfully land probes on asteroids to sample their contents (and even send back video similar to images taken by Mars rovers). Strap a small thermonuclear warhead to an unmanned probe and redirect its trajectory - not a simple matter but entirely feasible.
Unmanned? Nah, lets just assemble a team of oil drillers and send them up there like space cowboys.
It'll be easier to teach drillers to fly shuttles than it would be to teach astronauts how to dig a hole.
Don't even need a warhead. The Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) just threw the probe itself at an asteroid hard enough to affect its orbit.
Don't give me hope
I begin to worry when I see this asteroid still in the sky and how it becomes gradually bigger