Where Do We Run To In Order To Survive The Armageddon Asteroid?

[Robert Bruce]

What are the chances of us being hit and when would it happen?



The first thing to remember is that space is big and empty. Which makes the chance that we will be hit by anything from space very small.

In much of space, for example, large-sized objects are hundreds or thousands of light years apart. Even the asteroid belt has so much space in it, that we can send space probes through it without any problems. The asteroids in the belt are spread over a ring that is more than a billion kilometers in circumference, more than 100 million kilometers wide, and millions of kilometers thick.

Here's what JPL's Near Earth Asteroid Tracking team has to say:

    "The most dangerous asteroids, capable of a global disaster, are extremely rare. The threshold size is believed to be 1/2 to 1 km. These bodies impact the Earth only once every 1,000 centuries on average. Comets in this size range are thought to impact even less frequently, perhaps once every 5,000 centuries or so."


The Asteroid and Impact Hazard page says:

    "The threshold for an impact that causes widespread global mortality and threatens civilization almost certainly lies between about 0.5 and 5 km diameter, perhaps near 2 km. Impacts of objects this large occur from one to several times per million years.

    "Because the risk of such an impact happening in the near future is very low, the nature of the impact hazard is unique in our experience. Nearly all hazards we face in life actually happen to someone we know, or we learn about them from the media, whereas no large impact has taken place within the total span of human history... It is this juxtaposition of the small probability of occurrence balanced against the enormous consequences if it does happen that makes the impact hazard such a difficult and controversial topic."

This is a difficult issue because an impact would pose enormous risk, yet because the odds of it occurring within our lifetimes is so low, it is unnecessary to run around believing that the sky is falling.

There are two things to consider: one is that there are many organizations with telescopes trained to the sky, watching and tracking asteroids and comets, compiling a list of potentially hazardous objects to keep an eye on. Many of these objects are decades away from approaching the Earth which gives us a lot of time to track them in order to accurately predict their orbits.

Courtesy NASA
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OK so we can track them. Good. But what happens when we pick up that Armegeddon asteroid on the radar screen?

What do we do about it?

Do we make movie fiction become reality and send up a specialist oil drilling team to land on the object to detonate a nuclear bomb to destroy it?

Who knows? Perhaps there is a project in the making right this second that will be ready to become Earth's gatekeeper against destructive asteroids.

I like to think this possibility really does exist because where is there out there a planet that can harbour human life as we know it?

Send answers on a postcard to Moon Base 1, Sea of Tranquility, MOON, M1 001

[Robert Bruce]

I've just been told we need to run to Bruce Willis's house because it is his fault the meteoroid not get blown up sooner...!