a wayward comet hurtled into Earth’s atmosphere 13 ka ago, where it fractured into pieces and exploded in giant fireballs. Not only did this scatter nanodiamonds across the northern hemisphere, it led to immense wildfires that scorched North America in the aftermath, killing large populations of mammals and bringing an abrupt end to early human culture. A scientist behind the theory states quite bluntly that the entire continent was on fire.
2021-03-30: Not conclusive, but interesting to ponder.
Did impacts and airbursts from multiple fragments of a disintegrating comet cause the onset of the Younger Dryas global cataclysm 13 ka ago? After 10 years of acrimonious scientific controversy around the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH), an important new book by eminent geologist Dr James L. Powell answers this question in great depth and sets the record straight with a resounding YES.
Titled “Deadly Voyager: The Ancient Comet Strike That Changed Earth and Human History”, this thoroughly researched and eminently readable study systematically demolishes all the criticisms of the YDIH that have been made over the years by scientific opponents.
Of particular note is Powell’s careful dismembering of several studies which claimed that the evidence on which the YDIH is built is “irreproducible” – a damning criticism in science and one that opponents of the YDIH often gleefully repeat as though the claim is an established and unquestionable fact that “debunks” the hypothesis.
Welcome to the new and improved Worst-Case Scenarios Online. As with our successful series of books, the principle behind this site is a simple one: You just never know.
The Doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the number of future members of the human species given an estimate of the total number of humans born so far. It says that supposing that all humans are born in a random order, chances are that any one human is born in the middle.
If we don’t do something, sooner or later Earth will be hit by an asteroid large enough to kill all or most of us. That includes the plants and animals, not just people. Maybe this won’t happen for millions of years. Maybe in 15 minutes. We don’t know. For example, on 23 March 1989 asteroid 1989FC with the potential impact energy of over 1000 megatons missed Earth by 6 hours. We first saw this fellow after closest approach. If 1989FC had come in 6 hours later most of us would have been killed with 0 warning.
The total number of known NEAs was 2165 at the end of 2002 and 4647 in April 2007. That trend is not looking good at all.
In 2029, we have an opportunity to smash a small spacecraft into an asteroid so it misses an area of space just 600m across, and won’t come back in 2036 to unleash the energies of 65000 nuclear bombs on earth. If we succeed, we won’t have to call on bruce willis to save the day. We should totally do this: kg for kg, probably the most valuable space mission ever. even if this is a no-op, how cool is that?
Instead of worrying about nonsense like terrrrrrrists, can we start worrying about extinction risk instead? There are 1.5m civilization-ending asteroids in the solar system. Diamandis and musk are doing more for the survival of the human race than all the assholes sucking at the teat of the security theater complex combined.
Asteroid Impacts over Russia – Another Larger Rock Passing Very Close to Earth
As you may know, I’m the co-Founder and co-Chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of 8 billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids. Given my personal interest in asteroids, today is an EPIC day. If you’re interested in more info on this, I urge you to join our mission at Planetary by signing up for the regular updates on our website, PlanetaryResources.com.
In the meantime, I want to fill you in on 2 breaking stories: First: At 9:30 local time, a large meteor exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia just east of the Ural mountains, and ~1500 kilometers east of Moscow. The fireball was incredibly bright, rivaling the Sun! There was a pretty big sonic boom from the fireball, which set off car alarms and shattered windows. Reports are coming in that up to 1000 individuals have been injured (mostly by shattered glass blown out by the shock wave).
Second: This comes exactly at the same time that another asteroid — 2012-DA14, a 45 meter asteroid — is whizzing by the Earth a hair’s breadth from the surface. It’s missing us by only 22k km, well within the 36k km orbit of the geostationary satellites that orbit around the Earth’s equator. I wanted to put this in perspective for you with some of the chilling and fascinating facts:
– This asteroid 2012-DA14 is the same size as the asteroid that hit the Earth in Russia in Siberia (the “Tunguska Event”) on June 30th 1908.
– That impact was equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs and knocked down 80M trees down over an area covering 2150 km2.
– Had it hit near a population center it would have killed millions of people.
Today, there are ~610k asteroids that are actively tracked in our solar system. This number represents less than 1% of the more than 60M asteroids that orbit the Sun. Of these asteroids, about 1.5M are larger than 1 kilometer in size and are what might be described as “extinction-level/dinosaur-killing asteroids.”
Scientists are closely tracking 434 asteroids that are large enough and come close enough to the Earth to be of potential future concern, and while none of these pose any significant risk today, increased surveillance is required.
While the primary business of Planetary Resources is to ultimately prospect and mine the most select of these for fuels and precious metals, the company views that this economically driven activities will assist humanity in the arena of planetary protection in 2 critical ways.
First, the Arkyd-100 Space Telescopes that the company is currently designing and building will assist in the detection and characterization of these small, potentially hazardous, yet undetected asteroids.
Second, as the company ultimately develops the capability and infrastructure for intercepting and mining asteroids, Planetary Resources expects to be able to help in the (slight) redirection of these rocks to keep the Earth safe.
Mining asteroids will ultimately benefit humanity on and off the Earth in a multitude of ways. First, by providing us access to the fuels to accelerate human exploration of space. Second, by expanding humanity’s economic access to platinum group metals important for our rapidly growing high-technology industries; and third, by giving us the infrastructure to routinely and swiftly interact with and redirect asteroids, like 2012 DA14, which could someday pose a threat to Earth.
On the production floor of Planetary Resources Inc, we also now have full-scale mechanical prototypes of the Arkyd-100 Series, which is the first line in its family of deep-space prospecting spacecraft. “The Arkyd-100 Series will be the most advanced spacecraft per kilogram that has ever been built. The system will be highly capable and cost-effective, which will allow for a constellation of them to be launched. That efficiency will not only fast-track our asteroid prospecting effort, but will also lend a hand in scientific discovery and planetary defense.”
8 hiroshima impacts since 2000. It’s amazing to watch the globe spin as 20 of the 26 hit oceans, without human witnesses. 1 hit the Australian outback, 2 hit Northwest Africa, and only 3 others hit land, including Chelyabinsk.
The conclusion of this research: “Near-Earth object impacts could be ~10x more common than we thought they were.”
The Asteroid Grand Challenge Series will be comprised of a series of topcoder challenges to get more people from around the planet involved in finding all asteroid threats to human populations and figuring out what to do about them. NASA recognizes the value of the public as a partner in addressing some of the country’s most pressing challenges.
there’s also
the 100x Declaration, urging a 100-fold increase in the detection and monitoring of asteroids. With the Sentinel Mission, you would know the trajectories 50+ years into the future, and with enough years to play with, a small delta-v imparted early on (easily achieved by just rear-ending the asteroid), alters the course of the solar system ever so slightly to preserve life on Earth.
and as of 2021, things look more promising
Over the long march of biological and now technological evolution, we have finally reached a survival gate — we have enough computational power to model the trajectory all Near-Earth Objects (NEO’s) that could threaten life on Earth. This was not possible in the year 2000, or any time over the prior millennia. We have made a million-fold improvement in computation in just the past 20 years. So, we can see the future and predict decades in advance of an impact event and then give the NEO a nudge such that it misses Earth entirely.
B612 Foundation announced the discovery of more than 100 asteroids.
That by itself is unremarkable. New asteroids are reported all the time by skywatchers around the world. That includes amateurs with backyard telescopes and robotic surveys systematically scanning the night skies.
What is remarkable is that B612 did not build a new telescope or even make new observations with existing telescopes. Instead, researchers financed by B612 applied cutting-edge computational might to 412k years-old images to sift asteroids out of the images. Of the estimated 25k near-Earth asteroids at least 140m in diameter, only 40% have been found. A single point of light that is not a star or a galaxy is a starting point for the algorithm, which they named Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, or THOR. THOR constructs a test orbit that corresponds to the observed point of light, assuming a certain distance and velocity. It then calculates where the asteroid would be on subsequent and previous nights. If a point of light shows up in the data, that could be the same asteroid. If the algorithm can link together 5 observations across a few weeks, that is a promising candidate for an asteroid discovery. The NOIRLab archive contains 7 years of data, suggesting that there are 10s of 1000s of asteroids waiting to be found.
The algorithm is currently configured to only find main belt asteroids, those with orbits between Mars and Jupiter, and not near-Earth asteroids, the ones that could collide with our planet. Identifying near-Earth asteroids is more difficult because they move faster. Different observations of the same asteroid can be separated farther in time and distance, and the algorithm needs to perform more number crunching to make the connections.
“It’ll definitely work. There’s no reason why it can’t. I just really haven’t had a chance to try it.”
2023-03-06: A visualization of the NEO risk. Unclear how they know how many are left to be discovered beyond some vague orbital mechanics reason.
This complex will now “safeguard the world’s agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change. Construction begins in March, and the seed bank is scheduled to open in 2008.” Thus, a whole new building type has quietly emerged into architectural history – update your textbooks. Vitruvius would be proud: it’s the botanical Arctic Ark-archive. But is Spitsbergen really that safe? Perhaps these seeds should really be stored on, say, the International Space Station? Leaving aside how it would be possible to retrieve them, in the event of a truly global catastrophe, the premise nonetheless reminds me of China’s “space seed” project – which seems to have all but disappeared from public discourse.
A companion star orbiting the Sun perturbs the Oort comet cloud every 26 Myr causing comet showers in the inner solar system. 1 or more of these comets strike the Earth causing a mass extinction.
The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future lives. We review the challenges to studying human extinction risks and, by way of example, estimate the cost
‘The problem is you are building a very powerful, very intelligent system that is your enemy, and you are putting it in a cage,’
2014-05-29: Anders Sandberg is one of my heroes, for very good reason:
If humanity becomes extinct, at the very least the loss is equivalent to the loss of all living individuals and the frustration of their goals. But the loss would probably be far greater than that. Human extinction means the loss of meaning generated by past generations, the lives of all future generations (and there could be an astronomical number of future lives) and all the value they might have been able to create. If consciousness or intelligence are lost, it might mean that value itself becomes absent from the universe. This is a huge moral reason to work hard to prevent existential threats from becoming reality. And we must not fail even once in this pursuit.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 