[What If} Massive Killer Asteroid to Hit Earth in 50 Years

[Sarevok]

Ah ok then.

What a depressing scenario.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Why off world ? If you can survive on a place as harsh as the moon you can live as well on Earth. The main problem would be surviving the impact. But this could be solved by same means as off world colonization but at fraction of the cost. Just launch people and any hardware too fragile to survive into orbit prior to the impact, then after when the shockwave passes they simply land back on the surface. This is a lot more cheaper than sending a full fledged colony expedition to Mars.

The impact is not survivable. There is no way, at all, to survive the impact. At the very best, 85% of the surface melts, boiling the oceans and turning the planet into a blast furnace which will sterilize everything but the extremophiles. At worst, the planet goes the way of Alderaan and becomes the Earth Memorial Asteroid Belt. This is not some dinky little six mile wide pebble. This is a world on the scale of Mercury.

I was going to suggest mass-drivers as the most likely way to deflect the thing. If we've got fifty years to work with, we should be able to get a diversion program assembled and launched in 10. Nuclear pulse, and maybe its another 2 or 3 years to the asteroid. That gives us over 30 years to work on trying to alter the asteroid's trajectory. For our civilization to survive, we need to divert this thing by at least 100,000 miles, at which point it will only be the biggest disaster in human history (tides, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc). It might put us into a new dark age, but we'll survive.

If discovered fifty years out, it's going to be somewhere out in the Kuiper Belt when we first spot it. We're going to have a bear of a time just getting to it. If you thought getting men on Mars was hard, getting to Earthfucker is going to make a manned Mars mission look like a drive to the local 7-11. If you've got the lifting capacity to assemble a ship that large in a reasonable time, and the propulsion system to go that far in two or three years, then you're practically set to start figuring out how to build colonies. And 100,000 miles is much, much (six times) larger than the estimate I used to derive my 1 to 9 meganewtons (which should actually be 1 to 9 giganewtons, since I forgot to convert metric tons to kilograms...) of thrust over fifty years.

But let's see how much energy you're going to need to put into this world to deflect it by 100,000 miles. We'll even assume that you'll get there in 12 years, leaving 38 years left to achieve the deflection. If it was made of pure ice, you'd need nearly 12 teranewtons of thrust over 38 years. If it was a lump of iron, it'd be more like 100 teranewtons. Pretty much like strapping 375 to 3375 SSTS stacks to this planet and blasting away. If we assumed a 100 meter mass driver providing a meganewton of thrust to 1 cubic meter blocks of iron, these mass drivers would be accelerating their payloads at nearly 13 gees, requiring 8 GW of power to do so. And you'd need to build twelve million of these mass drivers and the power-plants needed to run them. And that's assuming Earthfucker is made of pure ice. If it's a hunk of nickel-iron, multiply that number by nine. Providing 100,000 miles of deflection in under fifty years simply isn't doable without the invention of handwavium.

[Stark]

I was going to suggest mass-drivers as the most likely way to deflect the thing. If we've got fifty years to work with, we should be able to get a diversion program assembled and launched in 10. Nuclear pulse, and maybe its another 2 or 3 years to the asteroid. That gives us over 30 years to work on trying to alter the asteroid's trajectory. For our civilization to survive, we need to divert this thing by at least 100,000 miles, at which point it will only be the biggest disaster in human history (tides, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc). It might put us into a new dark age, but we'll survive.

I love this string of totally unsupported rubbish. Mass drivers are the most likely way to do it? We can build a mass driver to do it in ten years? Where do you get this stuff? I love the idea that we can set up and supply a base on an incoming planetoid for decades to change it's course with magical engines we built.

It'd be pretty ironic if the later shipments of bits/supplies/people either arrived out of order due to propulsion improvements or were destroyed en route and crippled the entire project.

[Darth Wong]

If the world, as a whole, devoted all available resources to getting a self-sustaining colony on mars, we could do it in 50.

Frankly, I think that the most likely result in such a scenario is that the vast majority of the world's population refuses to believe it will happen. Just look at the way they're denying any kind of unusual global warming even though fifty thousand year old glaciers are melting. The capacity of mankind to ignore reality if it threatens his lifestyle is almost unlimited.

Let's look at a list of the arguments people would use:

1) "I'm sick of doomsayer scientists".
2) "They can't be 100% sure it will hit."
3) "One year ago they didn't even know it existed. Now they're sure it will hit us. Yeah, right."
4) "It would be irresponsible to devastate the global economy over something that is not even guaranteed to happen."
5) "Large numbers of leading scientists dispute the impact theory."
6) "The UN report was written by people with a vested interest in getting research dollars."
7) "God would not allow such a catastrophe to happen."
8) "This is the End Times, as prophesied in Scripture. Praise Christ!"

[Stark]

Not even the public; politicians may also not believe it and use it for short-sighted political ends (whether due to fundamentalism, stupidity or simple greed).

[PeZook]

If governments won't believe it will happen, we're fucked. If they do, we may have a chance, provided we managed our resources wisely.

We managed to get from V2 sounding rockets to 3000 tonne monstrosities in a little over 20 years for a total price of a mere 200 billion today's dollars or so. If we dumped all unnecessary spending and funneled all industry into accomplishing the one single goal of saving humanity, we could easily spend orders of magnitude more on these programs.

With a gross world product of around 65 trillion yearly, if we comitted just 10% to saving mankind (a ridiculously small amount for such a gargantually important project), we could spend the equivalent of 6.5 trillion dollars a year in goods, manufacturing capacity and worktime to building launch pads, developing engines and technology for use in self-sustaining colonies, etc.

To get you a sense of scale, one Saturn V launch got 15 tonnes of payload to the Moon and cost around 3.5 billion in 2007 dollars. 6.5 trillion would buy us 1857 Saturn V launches or 27 800 thousand tonnes (1/4 a Nimitz aircraft carrier!) of equipment on the Moon. Over fifty years, that's 1.4 megatonne of supplies, machinery people and shelters. Of course, you'd need to massively up the launch capacity infrastructure, command, control etc which would significantly reduce those figures, but still some people seem to underestimate the sheer industrial power we could commit to the project if we didn't care about economic growth and standards of living. And remember, that's with only 10% of global product comitted to the project.

Of course, if politicians don't care enough to immediately convert to a "save the species" economy, then yeah, we're truly fucked. But at least we'll be able to drive our pick-up trucks, listen to Mp3, watch 60 inch plasma TVs and shoot each other for the last fifty years of human history

[K. A. Pital]

Heheh.

Just as I get to remember "Torment Ships", a very short story I wrote while being at school, SDN has a thread with a similar scenario.

They had the time to expand into a system-wide civilization through a ruthless, essentially hyperstalinist control of the population, creating a unified Earth civilization with Orion ships, but one centered around like technocratic bureaucracy hellbent on getting a systemic Sol Republic (the name Republic was chosen for gigs, in reality a few visionary superpower governments just believed the event will happen and everyone who disagreed with the "global economic plan" they had was carved up and brutally subdued, Third World populations were used as expendable labour force to feed the army of production workers for the hundreds of interplanetary Orion ships).

The Sol technocracy, of course, with a very expanded energy grid and agricultural belts created artificially on other planets, cost regardless, survives the oncoming space threat in the form of large asteroid impacting Earth (in my scenario, it was just a little better than a Theia-like impact) by altering it's course via NPP. The Earth is still devastated by gravitational calamities from the body's pass, but there are colonies which then start providing reconstruction effort for Earth.

But in the end the characters who led this transformation are left to contemplate just how much the citizens of this new civilization might be called "humans" - the population control is done in an extreme fashion by a scientific bureau, just as much of the work (Planners), and individual human lives are no longer considered to have any ultimate value - only the survival of the species. The control is more than totalitarian, with CCTV and the full might of modern technologies, up to implants in humans, collecting the data about the personal life, even the thoughts of each human. All decisions are taken on the basis of industrial utility for space exploration (which is measured in the usefulness for their space satellite energy grid, and any plight of humans is totally disregarded). Widespread and heavy chemical conditioning is used to make humans conform to this civilization - the dire situation allowed scientists to experiment on humans en masse and thus create very potent and efficient biochemical control agents.

That kind of system maybe has a shot at survival of the species, even through the sacrifice of an extreme number of individuals in it. The current international and even intra-national system of economic and social relations, while it's soft on the individual human, had no chances to survive that.

As for the possibility for deflecting the asteroid, if we start earnestly concentrating on Orion ships and deliver pusher plates to the asteroid, starting to detonate meganewton thrust providing bombs (something like from 100 MT to 3 GT charges, brought to the asteroid once again on smaller Orion ships)? Convert the whole asteroid into a gigantic Orion ship and push it as hard as you can? Or is that also impossible? I mean, the nuclear pulse propulsion has the potential for ridiculous upscaling. Humanity should at least calculate if it's possible to devise a large amount of multigigaton charges to alter the course of this asteroid via NPP.

[Sky Captain]

If the world will pool it`s resources together then I think we have good chances of establishing a self sufficient colony on Mars. We could restart an Orion nuclear pulse program which would give us necessary heavy lifting capacity to move people and heavy equipment to Mars. In such an impending doomsday situation no one would care about few percent increase of Earth background radiation. In a 10 to 15 years we should be able to mass produce Orion interplanetary ships. Assuming on average one launch per week for period of 30 years and 10 000 tons of payload to Mars surface in each launch we theoretically could deliver around 15 million tons of cargo and tens of thousands of people to Mars surface. If it`s feasible to ground launch even bigger ships (I was assuming ground launch mass of 40 000 tons and 10 000 tons of that mass to be payload) then amount of payload delivered could be much higher.

I think the biggest hurdle might be overcoming disastrous effects on society what revelation of such an unavoidable doomsday event is going to bring. It`s possible most people won`t be interested in giving up their lifestyles for a project which will save only a small fraction of human population. Many would simply refuse to believe something like a planet destroying event can happen at all. Many would think it`s some sort of NWO style conspiracy to establish a world government.

[PeZook]

I think the biggest hurdle might be overcoming disastrous effects on society what revelation of such an unavoidable doomsday event is going to bring. It`s possible most people won`t be interested in giving up their lifestyles for a project which will save only a small fraction of human population. Many would simply refuse to believe something like a planet destroying event can happen at all. Many would think it`s some sort of NWO style conspiracy to establish a world government.

This is why you build a colony while also running a deflection program. This gives the people who are toiling away hope, and if the program succeeds, well - more power to you. Also, martial law, cessation of production for shit like consumer electronics and personal motor vehicles, rationing of gas, rationing of food, electric power, fuel will have to be instituted. It's literally a project where every effort should go to making supplies, launch vehicles, spacecraft,machinery and habitats.

A bonus will be the ability to finally shut up conspiracy theorists and put them to useful work at the Orion assembly line

[Guardsman Bass]

And that's assuming Earthfucker is made of pure ice. If it's a hunk of nickel-iron, multiply that number by nine.

Considering that said Earthfucker is coming from out yonder in the Oort Cloud, it probably would be mostly ice unless it was a rogue planet coming out of interstellar space.

To offer a weird suggestion - could you move the Earth a little bit instead to move it out of the way, without knocking it out of orbit? The weight requirements to do it would be much higher, but you wouldn't exactly have to go all the way across the solar system to even attempt to change its path.

[K. A. Pital]

The megatonnage requirements to use nuclear pulse propulsion on Earth would probably be several times what is needed to knock the "guest" off-orbit, the mass is several times greater. Would Earth even be able to reach the required tonnage of nuclear explosives before time comes up?

[Guardsman Bass]

The megatonnage requirements to use nuclear pulse propulsion on Earth would probably be several times what is needed to knock the "guest" off-orbit, the mass is several times greater. Would Earth even be able to reach the required tonnage of nuclear explosives before time comes up?

That's one of the problems I thought might come up, which is why I put it out there for people with better math skills. At the very least, you wouldn't have to go across half the solar system to get to the target.

[DaveJB]

Considering that said Earthfucker is coming from out yonder in the Oort Cloud, it probably would be mostly ice unless it was a rogue planet coming out of interstellar space.

I don't think an ice object of that size has ever been recorded has it? Most of the larger Kuiper Belt objects have been theorised to be iron-nickel, like the other solid planets in the solar system. To be fair though it doesn't really matter a whole bunch - I did the impact calculator again, using an ice impactor instead of a rocky metal one, and the result was still 43% of the Earth's crust being melted. We wouldn't exactly be a whole lot better off.

As a sidenote, I also calculated the best-case scenario for this situation, which would be an ice impactor striking an ocean. In this case less than 7% of the crust would be melted, but the combination of boiling ocean, atmospheric superheating and seismic effects would still likely be enough to quickly kill everyone and everything on the planet.

To offer a weird suggestion - could you move the Earth a little bit instead to move it out of the way, without knocking it out of orbit? The weight requirements to do it would be much higher, but you wouldn't exactly have to go all the way across the solar system to even attempt to change its path.

We're going to have a hard enough time moving 2009.Earthfucker in this situation; moving Earth would be ridiculously difficult, and likely a waste of resources. It'd probably be bad news for any structures on Earth as well, though there's more qualified people to answer than question than me.

[Guardsman Bass]

I don't think an ice object of that size has ever been recorded has it? Most of the larger Kuiper Belt objects have been theorised to be iron-nickel, like the other solid planets in the solar system.

I didn't know that. Thanks.

[Sky Captain]

The megatonnage requirements to use nuclear pulse propulsion on Earth would probably be several times what is needed to knock the "guest" off-orbit, the mass is several times greater. Would Earth even be able to reach the required tonnage of nuclear explosives before time comes up?

You would also need bombs powerful enough to throw large amount of mass (probably trillions upon trillions of tons) through the atmosphere faster than Earth escape velocity while detonating them on the ground to get maximum thrust and causing enormous amount of fallout from neutron irradiation. Even events far more powerful than any conceivable nuclear bomb like dino killer asteroid is thought to not have significantly affected Earth orbit.

[K. A. Pital]

Yeah, the lack of atmosphere on Earthfucker and a smaller gravity and escape velocity are beneficial for nuclear pulse propulsion, and that's our best shot at getting it done.

[B5B7]

Some thoughts I have had to deflect it:
if could develop extremely powerful laser could cut part of its edge off
if could coat it in silver changing its albedo, the sun might have an effect on it
If it is metallic, if can somehow arrange a magnetic connection with the sun - don't ask how - near future superscience.
increase its mass by moving a small asteroid to join it

The object in the scenario is much bigger than any realistically expectable collisional asteroid, and it is hard enough to deal with those of predictable size.

[K. A. Pital]

Another idea: "Gun Asteroid" - use Orion drives to propel the largest asteroid we possibly can fit with such a drive in space within several years timeframe, to high velocities, then send this "asteroid bullet" on a collision course with the threatening body to alter it's course.

Several "bullets" should be prepared simultaneously to ensure that we have a fallback option if the first or even several "bullets" fail.

Can something as large as 10-20 km diameter asteroid seriously offset the course of that body if it were moving at relativistic velocities? Is it possible to accelerate a body that fast with Orion drives using accessible nuclear devices like 10-100 Mt bombs?

[Junghalli]

As for the possibility for deflecting the asteroid, if we start earnestly concentrating on Orion ships and deliver pusher plates to the asteroid, starting to detonate meganewton thrust providing bombs (something like from 100 MT to 3 GT charges, brought to the asteroid once again on smaller Orion ships)? Convert the whole asteroid into a gigantic Orion ship and push it as hard as you can? Or is that also impossible?

It could work in theory, the problem will lie with assembling sufficient numbers of nukes and getting them to the dwarf planet. I admit I haven't done the math, but my gut feeling is you'll need considerably more than the present nuclear stockpile.

Hmm, if the dwarf planet had a surface covered with water ice (pretty plausible if it comes from deep space), maybe you could use electrolyses to crack it into hydrogen and oxygen and use that as rocket fuel for giant chemical rockets strapped to the ground? It might be easier than using mass drivers, as chemical rockets are higher thrust.

The thing isn't necessarily that's it's impossible to divert the dwarf planet, it's that all the possible solutions require ridiculously ambitious space projects that we probably just don't have the capacity for. Maybe if you bumped the impact date to 150 years from now we'd be able to do it.

Honestly at this point I'm sort of leaning toward the idea that it might be more feasible to move Earth out of the way. The kind of mega-engineering needed to move a planet would be vastly easier if you didn't have to drag everything across billions of kilometers of space.

The best bet for that might be to take the chemical rocket or mass drivers solutions and apply them to moving Earth instead. Yes, we'll need dozens of times the thrust to move the much more massive Earth, but at least this way we can bring the entire capacity of our civilization to bear on the project, instead of having to funnel everything through the narrow bottleneck of a space program, which I suspect would realistically doom any attempt to divert the dwarf planet. I'm not sure what sort of effect this would have on Earth, but I suspect however bad it is it'll be a damnside better than getting smacked with a Mercury-size impactor.

It basically comes down to whether the logistics problems associated with moving the dwarf planet are such that they make moving Earth more feasible, despite the latter being dozens of times more difficult in terms of energy. I suspect they will.

Actually this might not make a bad story.

[Guardsman Bass]

Another idea: "Gun Asteroid" - use Orion drives to propel the largest asteroid we possibly can fit with such a drive in space within several years timeframe, to high velocities, then send this "asteroid bullet" on a collision course with the threatening body to alter it's course.

I'm wondering about that myself. I imagine it depends on what path Earthfucker would take before impact - perhaps you could take advantage of the Sun's gravity well, wait for it to go past, then send your Counter-Earthfucker asteroid bullet down the gravity well smack into Earthfucker. It may be too late at that point, though, but at least it would save you some fuel.

I'm not sure what sort of effect this would have on Earth, but I suspect however bad it is it'll be a damnside better than getting smacked with a Mercury-size impactor.

If it successfully moved the Earth out of the way of Earthfucker, it'd be worth it even if it turned one of your continents into little more than a wasteland.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Another idea: "Gun Asteroid" - use Orion drives to propel the largest asteroid we possibly can fit with such a drive in space within several years timeframe, to high velocities, then send this "asteroid bullet" on a collision course with the threatening body to alter it's course.

Several "bullets" should be prepared simultaneously to ensure that we have a fallback option if the first or even several "bullets" fail.

Can something as large as 10-20 km diameter asteroid seriously offset the course of that body if it were moving at relativistic velocities? Is it possible to accelerate a body that fast with Orion drives using accessible nuclear devices like 10-100 Mt bombs?

Let's try it. The name of the game is to get Earthfucker and Earth to pass at a distance that doesn't transform Earth into the Earth Memorial Asteroid Belt.
Using at least twelve million one-meter caliber mass drivers firing continuously for nearly forty years to provide a tangential velocity change would do it.

We could also try to slow it down, or speed it up so that it arrives about 89 minutes sooner or later than it would've otherwise (allowing Earth to be at a safe enough distance, as Earth plods along at around 30 km/sec.) At Earthfucker's discovery, you'd need to only change its average velocity by 0.00017 km/sec. Mind you, it's over 80 billion kilometers out at that point, so we may want to wait for it to get closer (and this all neatly disregards the not-insignificant acceleration towards the direction of Earth that Earthfucker will experience courtesy of the Sun's gravitational pull...) Besides, we're going to need time to build up our space infrastructure and build enough nuclear bombs to propel our kamikaze Orion into Earthfucker.

How long will that take? How many bombs will we need? Ideally, we'd have every industrialized nation on Earth cranking out bombs, since we're going to need to provide our Orion with a lot of energy. Practically, it'll be a cold day in Hell before we entrust nuke production to anyone but the Western nations who already produce nuclear weapons, so that'll handicap us some. But let's say that we impose hard limit of 20 years to get it all together. At this point, we'll need to change Earthfucker's velocity by 0.00028 km/sec. Applied by an impact over, say, 1/1000th of a second requires an acceleration of nearly twenty-nine gees. Applying this over the diameter of our 20 km Orion asteroid implies an energy expenditure of 2.9e+29 joules, were Earthfucker made of ice. The astute observer will point out that the energy required by the gun asteroid idea is rather more energy than is required to simply smash Earthfucker into pieces. Only the phrase "holy shit, that's a big shotgun" ought to immediately come to mind.

Disregarding that, you're going to need nearly 700 billion 100 MT bombs to pull it off (assuming 100% conversion of explosive energy into kinetic energy, and assuming you built some sort of mass-driver to shoot bombs at the Orion, so it doesn't have to accelerate any fuel mass.)

[Singular Intellect]

perhaps you could take advantage of the Sun's gravity well, wait for it to go past, then send your Counter-Earthfucker asteroid bullet down the gravity well smack into Earthfucker. It may be too late at that point, though, but at least it would save you some fuel.

LOL!

"Hey, we saved a shitload of fuel!"

"And this saves us from absolute destruction how again?"

"haha...ha....oh."

[Korto]

Only the phrase "holy shit, that's a big shotgun" ought to immediately come to mind.

Would I be safe in assuming that being hit by a bunch of fucking big rocks instead of by one motherfucking big rock is really no improvement at all?
To answer an earlier question, however, I believe that if people knew the world was going to end in 50 years, that there was no hope, no escape, it was all over; then the world wouldn't end in 50 years. It would end now. Not literally, but effectively. Chaos, suicides, wildfire cults, people just giving up; after all, what would be the point to anything?

Of course, this relies on people believing it (Wong has a point).

Hang them out a bit of hope, however, a chance, even if it's just for a representative few to survive while the rest of us die (ie the Mars colony), and I think we'd amaze ourselves at what we can do.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Only the phrase "holy shit, that's a big shotgun" ought to immediately come to mind.

Would I be safe in assuming that being hit by a bunch of fucking big rocks instead of by one motherfucking big rock is really no improvement at all?

Correct. Instead of having one rock to stop, one would have millions. Sure, they're smaller, but the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was six miles wide, and the air friction of all the ejecta from the first impact coming back down to Earth temporarily heated the lower atmosphere to temperatures commonly found inside ovens. With the giant shotgun, you'll still end up melting significant fractions of Earth's crust, while peppering the rest with overlapping impact craters. Earth's days as a planet capable of supporting an ecology more complex than primitive single-celled organisms are over.

[Coyote]

I see three courses of action forming--

1- Some people will hear that "85% of the Earth's surface will be wiped out" so they'll assume that somewhere in the remaining 15% "sweet spot" is a chance at survival (not fully understanding the forces at work). Expect ads from all over as profiteers try to peddle their land as "the scientifically proven sweet spot" and huckster off their worthless territory for maximum dollar value so they can either live out their lives in comfort or buy a ticket on a space ship and leave the suckers to their fate. Also, look for church organizations to liquidate everything to buy this land to "create a new Eden" after the Apocalypse. Bunkers will be built in all the most-likely "sweet spots" in desperation; fights will probably ensue.

2- One course will be the Space Colony option as people try to establish bases on the Moon, Mars, and perhaps the moons of Jupiter. The quickest and easiest thing might well be to find caves in Mars, seal them off (only a few feet/meters of area to seal, rather than a whole dome), pressurize them, and use those to start from before radiating efforts outward. People on Mars will have a better go of it than anywhere else, because the extreme loss of gravity on the other options (Moon, Jovian moons) will have people caving in from bone density loss in short order. Governments will have to pool resources and agree on that option, and who will decide the lucky bastards that get to go to the colonies? Expect seats to be sold to the highest bidders, making class warfare inevitable as "the wealthy are deemed fit to live; the poor are left to die".

3- The less-fortunate nations who can't afford option 2 (and want to do more than grasp at straws offered by option 1) will try to deflect the Earthkiller. They'll spare no expense or resource to focus a laser to heat up a surface and use radiant heat as a deflector; or lob bombs at it; or try to attach bombs, sails, motors, etc, or even just chip off a few thousand tons so the hit "won't be so bad" and improve their odds by a few millionths. Economies, lives, and the environment will be sacrificed to get even a 1% chance of better odds (at either survival or dodging it completely), so much so that even if they pull it off and dodge the planetoid entirely they'll be left in a festering wasteland and riotous conditions.


Actually, an interesting story idea-- Earth expends everything to dodge this bullet, and imagine that they do, getting by with a few hits and lands left blasted and irradiated from desperate Orion launches... what then? Earth survives as a place where there are no natural resources left, all the brains and capital fled to fledgling space colonies under control of a powerful new martial law government, and crazy survivalist warlords and religious freaks are boiling out of the ground from deep bunkers seeking their own brand of jihad. Cool.