Just blow the dam giant rock up and our problem is fixed. With the loss of about 5 or 6 people.

At 1:13 it looks like Earth has a giant scoop of ice cream made of lava on it.

Popisfizzy wrote:

Kingstone99 wrote:

Just blow the dam giant rock up and our problem is fixed. With the loss of about 5 or 6 people.

Ugh, no. Armageddon is not a realistic depiction of science. Blowing something like that up would be just as bad, if not worse.

To elaborate on why: Instead of one rock of mass M travelling at velocity V towards the Earth, we now have 1000 rocks, each of mass M/1000, travelling at speed V towards Earth. Less damage at each impact site, but much, much more impact sites.

Of course, the thing won't blow up uniformly, and so on, but the general point is that there's still the same amount of kinetic energy dumped onto Earth - all that's changed is how large each individual kinetic-energy-dumper is.

Best strategy for dealing with an asteroid on a collision course - coat half of it in aluminium foil.

No, seriously. One side reflects more light than the other, and there's a slight - very slight - force caused by that. But out in space, where there's no air resistance, and we can see the thing coming by a few years, well, that little push over that long can knock the asteroid well off the (relatively fragile) collision orbit.

(This wouldn't work on Earth because of something called 'static friction' that requires a minimum amount of force to overcome. That's not in play in the case of an asteroid, because it's not in contact with anything and there's no air. Solar wind isn't remotely dense enough to make a difference in these sorts of calculations, either.)

Mobius Evalon wrote:

I wasn't expecting Yakety Sax to be edited in.

It would take a an entire day to kill us all? Can you imagine the anxiety of waiting for your death?

Keep in mind that I haven't watched the video (I can't be arsed installing the Flash plugin for Firefox on Linux. Flash is so rarely worth it.), but I imagine a significant fraction of people would be dead much faster than that. Anyone near the impact site, for starters.

If you're on the other side of the world, though, yeah, it'll take some time for the heat to reach you. If you're lucky, the impact will trigger supervulcanism and you'll die nice and early too.

i wouldn´t mind if i died like this when i´m old......better then the usual stuff

Popisfizzy wrote:

Blowing something like that up would be just as bad, if not worse.

Yeah, but we would do it anyway. If you're going to die you might as well die knowing we kicked the asteroid in the balls before it took us out.

Best strategy for dealing with an asteroid on a collision course - coat half of it in aluminium foil.

And just for kicks, write 'The Earth Rules #1' on the other side. It'd be a lot of hard work, but well worth the investment if it somehow ends up on another collision course with another populated world.