Re: Comet impact in the Eastern United States - Feasibility of Evacuation

On Mar 16, 8:12 pm, "Brion K. Lienhart" <bri...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Matt Browne SFW wrote:
On Mar 9, 10:45 pm, "Joel Olson" <joel_ol...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Joetheone" <joethe...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:UHWAj.5690$Sa1.2661@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Matt Browne SFW" <matt.h.bro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Mar 9, 6:37 pm, jdnic...@xxxxxxxxx (James Nicoll) wrote:
In article
<606fddac-d790-45bb-aed8-76aa6aae7...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Matt Browne SFW <matt.h.bro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It is very unlikely that the Earth will be struck by a large enough
object in the next five billion years.
In fact, even if we move the goal posts to mere mass
extinctions,
there's only one mass extinction that is thought to have been caused by
an impact and lots of large craters that are not associated with
extinctions
at all. Your garden variety flood basalt seems to be worse for the
environment and any cooling event that leads to a snowball or slushball
Earth would also be very bad.
I'm actually not talking about mass extinctions here. Our species will
survive. Most species will suvive this. I'm talking about a comet
which is larger than the meteorite that hit Tunguska in 1908, but a
lot smaller than Chicxulub. An impact that is far less dangerous than
the flood basalt events you mentioned. I'm talking about impacts which
are quite possible in a timeframe of several thousand years. How would
we deal with this? How can we prepare for this? Is evacuation an
option? Should FEMA have a plan ready when needed?
--
Matt Browne
If you do any map and compass work, you find that 1 degree=100 feet in a
mile. What's that work out to, say, from the Moon? They couldn't plot the
impact zone even to "Greater Pittsburg Area" with any real confidence, at
best, hours before impact. You'd have just as good a chance of evacuating
people into, rather than out of the impact zone.And ther's still just as
good a chance of it hitting in the ocean or the desert, or the Canadian
tundra.
The only thing to do would be to hope it hit someone else.
Like the quote in your sig.
Disaster movies, whether SciFi, Discovery or History channel are all bull.
There are more variables working on a body falling from space than there
are on a 30-06 bullet trying to hit a pie plate at 1000 yards. Not many
can predict how that will end up, either. And there's generally somebody
that cares about that outcome.
I disagree. Given a reasonable time interval, the trajectory and mass
can be observed to almost total accuracy. Slowing/deflection as it enters
the atmosphere would also be quickly simulated, a little less accurately.
The result will be a calculated impact zone that will most likely be a long
elipse, smaller if the angle of descent is steep. The approach trajectory
may make a difference.

Six months sounds like a reasonable lead time for evacuation.

That's my kind of thinking as well. Telescopes are able to look at
galaxies from the dawn of time. There are plans to take photigraphs of
terrestrial exoplanets using interferometric nulling. And then mankind
fails at building the machinery to improve accuracy of NEO
trajectories? Doesn't make sense to me. Why pour money into NEO
observation in the first place? To boost sales of tabloids with
headlines like "THE END IS COMING! Impact in 365 days!" ? If nukes
won't work why not be more creative about evacuation scenarios?

The main problem with predicting *comet* orbits is that they aren't
totally ballistic. They have random bursts of outgassing that change
their trajectory, pretty much constantly.

Isn't there a way to track the trajectory changes?

--
Matt Browne
My webpage is at http://www.meet-matt-browne.com
"As a race, we survive on planet Earth purely by geological consent."
Bill McGuire
.

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