Bwahahahahah!

[mishalak]

"The fools I'll destroy them all! After my birthday."

Well there is a fair chance that the world (well okay, just a small part of it only a 1420 megaton explosion) will be destroyed the day after my birthday... 2029. No really. Look at this JPL page on asteroid 2004MN4. Only a 2.2% chance, so I can be amused rather than horrified and no one has to panic yet. And the numbers will probably go away once they get better observations over the next year. But hey if the numbers stay as they are I should have a really wild 52nd birthday just in case.

Comments

[scottscidmore.livejournal.com]

Interesting on how many people panic over much smaller odds than that; being in a terrorist attack, being killed by a drug-crazed hippie, and so on. However, they'll not worry about a continent scrubbing explosion until a few months before it would happen.

The birthday party sounds like a good idea. And if the numbers go down, you can still have a blow-out to celebrate the likely avoidance of the collision.

Note that the odds of impact have been getting higher :

There's a 1-in-45 chance that Asteroid 2004 MN4, discovered in June and spotted again last week, will collide with the Earth on April 13, 2029.

First calculations suggested there was a 1-in-300 chance of an impact. On December 23, they were 1-in-60, but up-dated figures released today give better odds, if you can call it that.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

If you work it out 1 in 45 works out to be about 2.2%, so just the same as when I posted.

Not to totally dispute your point about terrorism, but if you work out the numbers the chances that even IF it hits it will do very little damage. As I remember form a reply to james_nicoll's post on this we're talking most likely 12,000 or fewer deaths ref (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/report.html). Which seems quite reasonable when you consider that urban areas cover only about 2% of the earth's surface that isn't water and that we'd likely be able to evacuate anywhere if we could do nothing else.

And that IF is still pretty big. Every time numbers like this have come up they go away again later. I'm pretty "cry wolf"ed out on the possibility of death from asteroid strike and I'm a frelling science fiction fan.

After doing some back of the envelope calculations I'm less afraid of this than I am of being killed in a terrorist attack and I'm less afraid of that than I am of getting struck by lightning and so on.

[scottscidmore.livejournal.com]

Yup, the news report that had those 1 in N figures gave 2.2% as the most recent, it was more that the chance had increased over the 3 reports given.

Lightning is a larger risk, especially given where you live. But odds of even 1 : 1000 are higher than being hit by lightning in one's lifetime.

I do disagree with the likely number of deaths. All of the reports I've read give it an impact energy in the range of 1.4 t o1.6 GT. Now, back in the 190s there was concern about the Soviets developing and deploying a GT bomb; the reason being that one such bomb exploded at optimal height would ignited much of the continetal US, two such weapons exploded hundred of miles offshore would wipe out the east and west coast. An asteroid impact would have less radiant energy and more blast and ground wave effect, but still should be nasty. I just can see that there's anywhere you could drop a GT+ impact and not kill a much larger number of people.

There's a wide range of sizes given - from 440 meters to 1.2 km. To me this suggests it is somewhat elongated, making mass calculations more difficult. This site lets you play with impact effects
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects
Using a diameter of 700 meters and assuming it's made of rock, it looks pretty bad if your're within a 100 km of the impact site. The report says that something of that size hits the Earth every 200,000 years or so. Important questions are what it is made of and at what speed it impact (M Vsquared).

I'm not biting my nails over it, but if the odds for impact and/or the object's size don't start going down in a year or so, I'd like to see some planning being started up. I'm not sure evacuations would be practical, in that I doubt that a very accurate impact area can be calculated. And even a water impact would be nasty, as the recent quake in SE Asia shows (there's no proper effect given for a water impact, the seismic effects are lower than the quake, but the conditions are much different - the water splashes before the ground is hit)

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

All I'll say is there are a heck of a lot of assumptions to be made on that page. Which is reflective of the real world situation.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

And now it has a 1 in 526,316,000 chance. About what I expected to happen.