Armageddon It: A Nuke Really Could Save the World from an Asteroid
According to their fancy-schmancy computer model, a 1-megaton nuke could reduce a 1,650-foot long asteroid to tiny, burn-uppable rubble. And yes, they’ve got the animated simulation video to prove it.
Just to make sure, though, it’s probably best to test the theory on other menacing chunks of space-rock before we go putting all our eggs in one basket with this plan.
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“…it’s probably best to test the theory on other menacing chunks of space-rock before we go putting all our eggs in one basket…”
How about the middle-east?
Harvey, Hollywood proved years ago that if you use nukes on asteroids, you just get a bigger disaster. So that guy is wasting a perfectly good supercomputer on nothin’.
But to hedge our bets, let’s combine his method with yesterday’s Russian God Squad. That way, when we see a big flash in the sky, we can all pray his math is right as the Russians Orthodox priests parachute-in wearing their black robes.
Besides, don’t the Russians still have some 40 megatonners laying around?
I agree with Son of Bob (except that) besides the Middle East I’d throw in Afghanistan. After we’ve removed our troops of course. We leave the two faced SOB Karzia to the tender mercies of the Taliban and after they’ve beheaded him and all his crooked pals we nuke the whole effin’ joint……….problem solved.
But zzyzx, if you nuked afghanistan;
A. It would look like commifornistan except for the lack of limos
B. No one wiould be able to tell for years
C. Think of the camels!!
D. Sasquatch’s husband would just take credit
So we may well start out with an asteroid instead of something useless, like the middle east
Why destroy the asteroid, when with a little finesse, we can aim it where it might do some good, or just nudge it into orbit, so we can mine all its asteroidy goodness for ourselves?
The trouble with nuke the asteroid theory is mass, or matter. A nuke converts mass to energy (fission), unless you sink the nuke inside the asteroid, it’s useless in space(no shock wave in a vacuum, or near vacuum)(yes all those Hollywood movies lie). You have to use fusion to convert energy to mass, which does occur to a lesser extent in the atmosphere, or underground. A comparable experiment to shooting a nuke at an asteroid would be shooting a BB, or firecracker(without the fire and shock wave) at a bowling ball. Nuke the asteroid has a common failing in modern science, they fail to include important factors.
That video also specifies a “granite” asteroid, and he implies that it is just a roving pile of loosely bound rocks. Granite, btw, is 70% silica(sand). Ever drop anything in sand? That’s where the bogus billions of tiny asteriods theory comes from. Drop the same object on granite, not the same effect. It doesn’t take billions of dollars and supercomputers to figure out they left clouds out of the factoring in AGW, just as they seem to have forgotten here that not all asteroids are stony. The carbon(fire-proof) and iron(liquid when nuked) ones would be very different, also comet-types which are ice(vapor/sand).