Asteroid may hit earth in 2019

[Cpt_Frank]

Using what? Our orbital Golan Arms III battle stations perhaps?

[Crazy_Vasey]

No, Jesus will protect the faithful from the ice age created by the ashes of the incinerated heathens.

If Jesus has a Death Star laying around then yeah maybe he will protect us.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I saw on one message board that someone said God would protect us from the rock. Then another guy replied by saying it was God's fault the damn thing was coming towards us anyway.

[TrailerParkJawa]

We can create a day labour program that allows workers from other solar systems to come here and chip away at the asteroid for a living wage. Then because they are providing a service no Terran would want to do, we will allow them to attend California Universities at the same tuition rates as California citizens.


Seriously, though. If it is determined that that asteroid will hit, I wonder how many loonie cults would arise. People shaving their heads and chanting "The End is near! This is our punishment for eating too much meat!"

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

If the loony cults arise, let's just fire them into the asteroid. Anyway, it's 2 kilometers wide, and will deliver 1 teraton of force. There's a one in a million change of it hitting us, but that's better odds than any state lottery.

[Alyrium Denryle]

IIRC the US has enough nukes to destroy the earth several times over. If we get into a bind we could just destroy the damn thing(targeting and propulsion could be a problem though)

[Mojo]

i have a p 166, really old about to die..........

[Mojo]

oops., I tried to make a topic, please delete

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

Or, it could be liek Armageddon, and we can get a bunch of morons onto the asteroid to blow it up, after the shuttle they've been in did an 11G maneuver around the moon without crushing the shuttle's passengers.

[Shadowhawk]

Why bother with orbital assembly of nukes? There's not much reason we couldn't just strap a rocket engine and guidance system on a warhead yanked out of an ICBM, stick it in the shuttle's cargo bay, launch the shuttle, and then launch the nuke. We could probably rig something like that and get it up in a couple months. We could even rapid-fire them using rockets instead of shuttle, which would really help error tolerance.
17 years is a -long- time. The first few nukes could have some big, powerful engines with lots of fuel for that quick immediate push (the earlier, the better), but we could send dozens out on gravity-assisted low-DeltaV trajectories and be smacking 20 megatons against one vector every month.
Hell, with 17 years, we could even try some of the weirder shit, like landing solar sails or mass drivers and applying a more-or-less continuous thrust for years on end.