No Bomb Powerful Enough To Destroy an On-Rushing Asteroid, Sorry Bruce Willis 352
coondoggie writes "Maybe it's the doom predictions about the end of the Mayan calendar this year, or maybe these guys are obsessed with old Bruce Willis movies. Either way a class of physics students from the University of Leicester decided to evaluate whether or not the premise of Willis' 1998 'Armageddon' movie — where a group of oil drillers is sent by NASA to detonate nuclear devices on an asteroid that threatens to destroy Earth — could actually happen. The students found it would take a bomb about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth."
What do you mean OLD Bruce Willis movies (Score:5, Funny)
Armagedon is not that old at all.. uhmm.. ohmm...
Fuck, get of my lawn
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Armagedon is not that old at all.. uhmm.. ohmm...
Fuck, get of my lawn
If you are talking about the original Armagedon [biblegateway.com] it is most certainly a case of "get off my lawn".
Re:What do you mean OLD Bruce Willis movies (Score:5, Funny)
Fuck, get of my lawn
You want them to do both at the same time?
I'll assume the preferred order is in the order written.
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Armagedon is not that old at all.. uhmm.. ohmm...
Fuck, get of my lawn
But Moonlighting [wikipedia.org] is. Now, get off mine.
misplaced modifier (Score:5, Funny)
You've got the brackets in the wrong place.
It's not an old (Bruce Willis movie), it's an (old Bruce Willis) movie.
Quoth North Korea (Score:5, Funny)
We have a bomb that big! OoooOOOOOooh!
Re:Quoth North Korea (Score:5, Funny)
Funny, I thought you were quoting Hollywood. Perhaps The Happening [imdb.com]? One of the biggest bombs I've seen in a long time...
not about destroying (Score:5, Insightful)
is it me or did the class get it wrong, it was never about destroying an asteroid, it was about splitting it up in pieces or nudging it out of the earth direction
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Interesting)
is it me or did the class get it wrong, it was never about destroying an asteroid, it was about splitting it up in pieces or nudging it out of the earth direction
Exactly what I was thinking: Define "destroy". Do they mean completely vaporize or just something that will do the job?
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, if only there was a way to know what the students meant, like, oh I don't know, reading the article?
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Insightful)
What they mean is "break an asteroid the size of Ceres into two pieces, both of which would miss the planet, assuming the asteroid (the size of Ceres) were only noticed heading towards Earth at about the time the guys in the movie noticed it".
And while it is no doubt true that it would take that much energy to break Ceres in half if it were that far away, this says nothing at all about more, shall we say, "realistic" scenarios involving asteroids small enough to actually get that close before we notice them.
Or for that matter, asteroids that big as far away as we'd notice them....
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. A small nudge, if applied when the asteroid is still some distance from Earth, could have a considerable impact on it's trajectory. That would make an interesting project, simulating the relationship between time to asteroid, payload, asteroid mass and what not to determine how quickly we would need to react.
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Interesting)
Arthur C. Clarke's book, "The Hammer of God" was about this exact topic. It featured all kinds of neat furistic technology, like making a huge detonation in the solar system to emit a huge burst of EM radiation to find dark asteroids, and trying to put a mass driver on an asteroid to nudge it off course. It also had a great depiction of a lunar marathon.
All in all, I thought it was a pretty enjoyable read.
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Informative)
One of the simplest ways to slowly nudge an asteroid off course is simply to have your spacecraft hover near it, with its (low thrust/high ISP) jets askew (instead of pointing straight at the asteroid). You don't need to be physically attached to an asteroid to tow it; gravity can be your "cable".
Another even slower but potentially even simpler way proposed to move an asteroid out of an intercept course is to "paint" it (basically, detonate one or more bombs of reflective dust) on particular locations and use the change in solar radiation pressure to do the work for you.
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it will [spacedaily.com]. The details of course depend on the particular asteroid, but even painting the entire surface white will alter its trajectory.
Also, really, pretty much any method proposed for spacecraft acceleration would work for asteroids as well. Laser-pumped? Check. Solar sail? Check. Even some of the less commonly known ones like a magnetic field generator to repel the solar wind would work. It all depends on how big you're willing to go and how quickly you need to move the thing.
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A small nudge, if applied when the asteroid is still some distance from Earth, could have a considerable impact on it's trajectory.
I disagree. It's not about whether there is an effect but whether the effect is big enough.
Actually, that's the whole point. If the effect isn't big enough, you just aren't applying it early enough.
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That would make an interesting project, simulating the relationship between time to asteroid, payload, asteroid mass and what not to determine how quickly we would need to react.
Interesting project to amuse a physics undergrad for a weekend, I guess.
Re:not about destroying (Score:4, Insightful)
Also why not do a case study for thresholds where the bomb might be useful. An asteroid that threatens the planet may not be stopped, but something that could wipe out a metropolitan area and cause trillions of dollars of damage might be a size that could be. An asteroid on that scale may do less or no damage if it could be broken into small enough pieces before it hits the atmosphere.
Also anyone remember that Deep Impact mission with the copper slug slammed into an asteroid some years back? That inert chunk of metal also happened to be very close to the volume and mass of a common nuclear warhead in the U.S. arsenal. (Looking at those numbers, it doesn't appear too random.) It seems somebody was seriously considering the idea.
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Interesting)
I assume everyone here has played around with the Earth Impact Effects Program [ic.ac.uk]?
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Interesting)
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Google Nuclear bunker buster.
They might not burrow into solid iron particularly well but loose rock or even meters of concrete don't stand a chance.
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is it me or did the class get it wrong, it was never about destroying an asteroid, it was about splitting it up in pieces or nudging it out of the earth direction
Indeed drilling a hole to the center of the asteroid and blowing it from inside is inefficient and stupid. The best way would be to aply force to the side of the asteroid, so its trajectory would change to non-coliding with earth. It can be some king of one-time explosion, or it could be small but perpetual force like ion-drive powered space-craft pushing to the side, or even series of mirrors orbiting the asteroid and reflecting sun-shine to its side for prolonged period of time.
See http://www.aljazeera.co [aljazeera.com]
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed drilling a hole to the center of the asteroid and blowing it from inside is inefficient and stupid. The best way would be to aply force to the side of the asteroid, so its trajectory would change to non-coliding with earth.
I'd think that for a small body, the two are the same. A reason for drilling a deep hole first would be to get a much more precise vector for pushing the asteroid.
Sure, you lose a lot of energy that way, but you lose an awful lot with a surface blast too, where more than half the blast force won't hit the asteroid at all. There's no way of making a nuclear explosion into a shaped charge without using the environment to shape it.
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Sure, you lose a lot of energy that way, but you lose an awful lot with a surface blast too, where more than half the blast force won't hit the asteroid at all.
Use something like a penetrating anti-bunker bomb, only with a nuclear warhead (there are bombs like this, and the surface material should be soft). Let it explode slightly underground. A significant mass gets vaporized, and it escapes through the hole on the top. The crater just being formed acts as a nozzle. An inefficient one, but with a nuke, you have a lot of energy to spend. Using the surrounding asteroid mass as the reactive matter increases the impulse, compared to a contact detonation or a proximit
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Insightful)
That wouldnt be a good movie.
Its either.
A. Sir! we got a astroid that is going to hit earth with in 20 years.
Good find private, now send up the ION maker and point at it for the next 15 years, that should move it away to safely pass by
OR
B. Sir we got a asteroid that will hit us in the next few months
Good find private, we will nuke the bastard, but first we must make some realy cool ships, get a few heroes and they can go drill the hole in the asteroid and really get it good.
A is good if it realy happens, B is good for the movie theater...
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Funny)
Don't you mean:
"Siri, we got an asteroid that will hit us!"
"I'm sorry, I didn't quite get that. Would you like me to search the web?"
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Indeed drilling a hole to the center of the asteroid and blowing it from inside is inefficient and stupid.
It was a Michael Bay movie. So what else could it be?
There is hardly a scene in the film that makes sense.
They needed an excuse to use oil roughnecks IN SPACE! and a deadline, and a bomb.
"Deep Impact" was only slightly more plausible. Morgan Freeman and Robert Duvall were impressive, the rest, Spielbergian cloyingly cute kids and family values. So actually I'd much rather watch "Armageddon" again, dumb as it is.
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Informative)
If you'd read the article, you'd know that the calculation was to determine how powerful the explosion would need to be to split the asteroid in half so that the two pieces would pass by the earth. Basically, the same thing that was done in the movie. Only, in their calculation, the explosion occurred when the asteroid was still 8 billion miles away.
Re:not about destroying (Score:5, Insightful)
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splitting up to pieces is a bad idea too. Many pieces will (generally speaking) be large enough to cause devastation, their direction will be unpredictable and the chances of getting hit will increase. You want to nudge it, and using atomic bombs for that is a bad idea. Again.
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You want to nudge it, and using atomic bombs for that is a bad idea. Again.
Why?
Re:not about destroying (Score:4, Interesting)
You can imagine the standard assumption to be that an asteroid is very hard, and that an atomic bomb would mainly give it a good shove that does not break the integrity of the asteroid, and that the heat can be neglected.
Compare instead an asteroid to be a loose snowball and the bomb to be mainly good at breaking it up and heating it.
Except that asteroids are not loose snowballs. Even a nuke is too weak to break up anything larger than, say, half a kilometer into pieces - or rather, an point explosion is a rather inefficient way of using that amount of energy. And even if it somehow got split, its own gravity would hold it together.
(This is, BTW, why the Death Star blowing up Alderaan into pieces in Star Wars is a load of crap - you can see rather solid pieces of matter flying away from the explosion, but the scale doesn't match. The kind of energy capable of instantly propelling a planet-sized load of matter at a few thousand kilometers per second by means of a central explosion with a shock wave would turn the whole thing into plasma instead. (I guess that mentioning that the whole cloud would be rather poor in visible spectrum is a minor bickering at this point.))
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is it me or did the class get it wrong, it was never about destroying an asteroid, it was about splitting it up in pieces or nudging it out of the earth direction
Can't remember where I read it, but the result of splitting up a comet by detonation could be even more catastrophic to the inhabitants on Planet Earth
The reason they say was that many of the split-up fragments, hundreds (or even thousands) of them, raining down on Earth, would create even more damage to our planet, than one single M-F hit
As I am not a planetary scientist, I dunno if TFA that I read made any sense or not
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I did a quick search and found better analysis of the movie. The students fail, even if they pass the class.
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is it me or did the class get it wrong, it was never about destroying an asteroid, it was about splitting it up in pieces or nudging it out of the earth direction
It's you. The class did model it correctly: destroying the asteroid by splitting it into 2 halves, and nudging them so that each passes the earth on opposite sides.
In reality, the picture is actually much more pessimistic than modeled: you wouldn't manage getting exactly two pieces.
If you get more than 2 pieces, the middle pieces would still hit earth and wreak quite some havoc.
If you do manage to get only 2 pieces, but they are not equal sized, the lighter one would clear the earth by a bigger margin th
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Hollywood accountants did the original math. Its the same people that manage to make 200-250m in total expenses cause a movie that makes 1 billion lose money.
Its called the "fudge it until its believable to the idiots we're dealing with and most beneficial to us" branch of mathematics. They would have needed more props and more side characters if they'd had more bombs and they didn't want to take away from Bruce's star light.
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No, it's called fudging it until the only people who care that's it's inaccurate are a handful of pedantic, pretentious geeks. Blockbusters are about excitement, they aren't math documentaries.
Easy now.. (Score:2)
Nothing new (Score:2)
It has been well known we can't just blow it up for a while. However all we need is to bump it off course. Something a very powerful nuclear bomb may be able to do
Re:Nothing new (Score:4, Insightful)
You drill a hole in the asteroid and insert a nuclear device. Do not seal the hole. Explode the device. You get a volcano. Asteroid's material becomes the reaction mass (largely gases and small rocks.) Relatively small mass * relatively high speed = decent momentum. Repeat until satisfied. Call this project "Noiro."
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Funny)
Or better yet, say that it's just too expensive to bother with, and do nothing. Engage in a public program of portraying any efforts to deflect the asteroid as "socialism". Call this project "Nero".
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Perfect excuse to develop and deploy Orion Drives [wikipedia.org], IMHO.
I've been curious...
The problem has been detecting it in time.
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Bruce still has a shot (Score:3, Insightful)
"The biggest bomb ever detonated on earth" is a damn sight smaller than the biggest one ever built... Just sayin'.
Re:Bruce still has a shot (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest one ever detonated, the so called "Tsar Bomba", was 50 megatons of TNT. It could have been made 100 MT, but was scaled back to reduce fallout, and was therefore a very clean bomb for its size.
There was however no point in building bombs of this size, so no one has attempted it since, opting instead for clusters of smaller bombs to carpet an area or using modern targeting to accurately take out small targets with great precision,
Bombs that big where shere lunacy and just a demonstration of power.
Re:Bruce still has a shot (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, there was a real, sensible (as things go in the field of nuclear deterrent) reason for them: The USSR did not at the time have anything that could deliver a payload with precision. Plus, they used big and slow bombers, which made it possible to intercept them. Thus, they employed a lesson from Ken Thompson in the future: "When in doubt, use brute force". :)
The design was not scaled down as such - it was a 100MT bomb; they simply substituted lead for U-238 in the tamper.
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why would we detonate a bomb on earth, a bomb large enough to shift an asteroid's trajectory, anyway?
To fight global warming by nudging earth away from the sun?
To be fair, a nuclear winter would probably do wonders to offset climate change... I welcome one for the improved skiing conditions.
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Ugh. The moment we try that Im moving to Canada.
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You're wrong. Just sayin'.
"The biggest bomb ever detonated on earth" is the biggest one ever built - the full yield version was never built.
how they did it (Score:5, Informative)
The students devised a formula to find the total amount of kinetic energy needed in relation to the volume of the asteroid pieces, their density, the clearance radius (which was taken as the radius of Earth plus 400 miles), the asteroid's pre-detonation velocity, and its distance from Earth at the point of detonation. Using the measurements and properties of the asteroid as stated in the film, the formula revealed that 800 trillion terajoules of energy would be required to split the asteroid in two with both pieces clearing the planet. However, the total energy output of Big Ivan "only comes to 418,000 terajoules. The asteroid is approximated as a spherical object 1000km in diameter
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I'm not a bomb geek but even I know that Big Ivan is not the largest bomb ever made.
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Well, I am a bomb geek and Tsar Bomba (the bomb geeks name for Big Ivan), or at least the 50MT version, is in fact the largest bomb known to be ever made. Only a single 50MT device was ever assembled, and no full yield (100MT) was ever assembled.
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I had heard of it as Tsar Bomba, and didn't know Big Ivan was another name for it. My bad.
reading comprehension (Score:2)
I'm not a bomb geek but even I know that Big Ivan is not the largest bomb ever made.
And that relates how to an article quoting the "biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth."
Which is most definitely Big Ivan.
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Not sure if this is what you are talking about, but in The Fog of War (excellent piece of film, please watch it if you haven't) Robert McNamara claims (and quite emphatically at that) that during his tenure as Secretary of Defense, the US tested a 100MT device in the atmosphere.
It's true that he was getting on in years, but he nevertheless seemed to be more lucid than, say, most everyday people, and there doesn't seem to be much point to making such a thing up.
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As I recall, the most powerful bombs in the us was around 9 megatons, and they where dismantled a few years ago.
The American B41s were ~25MT; the last ones were dismantled in 1976. They were never exploded, though. The biggest US explosion was 15 MT in the infamous Castle Bravo test--that bomb was only supposed to be 5MT and the test was supposed to be secret, but unexpected reactivity of one of the lithium isotopes made it go off at triple that, causing severe fallout problems and ensuring that there was
Re:how they did it (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest that the US ever actually popped was Castle Bravo [wikipedia.org]. Design yield: 4-6Mt. Actual yield: 15Mt, resulting in the dry bit of island it was sitting on turning into a deep spot in the reef and destruction of the monitoring equipment two islands over, not to mention dropping fallout all over the local civilians. Oops. The Castle-* designs were weaponized into the Mk-17/Mk-21/Mk-24 with a 5-15 Mt range.
The biggest the US ever deployed was the B41 [wikipedia.org], at a perfectly practical 25Mt.
Yields peaked in the 60s because the complete assemblies were huge and if you could only cart around one bomb on your plane or missile, it might as well be a big one. Since then the trend in big bombs has been toward the 0.5-1 Mt range, like the B83 [wikipedia.org]. The reason doesn't really have much to do with "arsenal reduction"; the real story is they figured out how to shrink midsize ones down to a much smaller package, and it's simply more efficient (more stuff blown up per kg of plutonium) to drop a half dozen 1Mt bombs in a pattern than to drop a single 25Mt one and having most of the energy end up in a stratosphere-bumping mushroom cloud.
Of course that Soviet triple-stage monster [wikipedia.org] takes the cake. There's simply no possible use for a larger one, even as a national dick waving status symbol. 50Mt is basically the most you can ever drop from a plane and live to tell about it, and you HAVE to drop it from a plane because a ground burst would create stupid amounts of fallout while not even being that impressive (air bursts work better); and no one's going to bother building a missile big enough to carry a 27,000 Kg firework just to show off. I hope.
So now you know, and knowing is how we get the next generation interested in one upmanship.
No need to deflect it (Score:2)
Why would we need to deflect it? The assumptions were that the movie was correct, not that the earth is rendered safe from planetary wide extinction. You wouldn't need to deflect the asteroid at all for that.
A sufficiently sized bomb drilled into the middle of the asteroid would with ease break it up into smaller chunks. All those chunks individually would still hit the planet, but if the chunks are sufficiently small you dramatically increase their surface area and the amount they burn up as they enter the
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You're describing Deep Impact [wikipedia.org].
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Think of how much force it takes to nudge a cue ball away from its original destination. Compare with the force it takes to blast a rock to small bits.
If a big asteroid is already too close to nudge away, we're screwed.
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You are begging the question.
You are making far too many assumptions with your argument.
A sufficiently sized bomb drilled into the middle of the asteroid would with ease break it up into smaller chunks.
A 'shaped charge' that exploits a weakness detected at farther away than we are currently able too, by magnitudes of order, are no help, realistically.
What we need to do, is fund advanced detection of these threats, if, and when, they are perceived by 'Joe Six-pack"; or make that happen...
I won't even bother with the rest of your assumptions, they are too ludicrous to even comment on, based on the first assumption.
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Just imagine breaking up an asteroid of 1km diameter in asteroids that all have diameters of less than 50m, with a single bomb. I don't think it'll work. But it does lead to the idea that mass drivers could come in two variants. The efficient one that keeps the asteroid whole, and the wasteful one that just throws aways rocks at escape speed.
The premise of the paper is quite narrowly defined (Score:2)
The definition of "big enough" is apparently "big enough to split a 1000km diameter spherical asteroid in two, and with enough force that the trajectory of both pieces misses the earth". I haven't seen the movie - is that what they did?
It seems to me, though, that the goal should be to break up an approaching asteroid into small enough pieces so the atmosphere can do most of the dirty work for us. Deflecting the asteroid doesn't seem very feasible unless we detect it long before it approaches earth (and the
Not a good idea at all (Score:5, Informative)
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That depends on how fast it's going. . .
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Also, wouldn't an explosion spray all the pieces in 360 degree directions, with many bits going back off into space.
Obligatory Chuck Norris comment (Score:4, Funny)
Forget Bruce Willis, you just have to land Chuck Norris up there and have him stomp his foot once.
Don't forget who directed the movie (Score:5, Insightful)
Plot points based in hard science aren't exactly Michael Bay's MO...
Re:Don't forget who directed the movie (Score:5, Funny)
Plot points aren't exactly Michael Bay's MO...
FTFY
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For those who don't RTFA. (Score:5, Informative)
This is the real paper, coming in at only 2 pages it's a light read: https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/viewFile/390/243 [le.ac.uk]
You weren't going to RTFA anyway, now were you?..
--
P1_1 Could Bruce Willis Save the World?
Back A, Brown G, Hall B and Turner S
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH.
November 1st, 2011
Abstract
The film Armageddon (1998) puts forward the possibility of using a nuclear weapon buried deep within an Earth-bound asteroid to split the asteroid in two, each half clearing opposite sides of the Earth with only relatively minor damage. This article investigates the feasibility of such a plan and shows that even using the largest nuclear weapon made to date, the bomb comes over 9 orders of magnitude short of the yield required.
[...]
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Hollywood Math (Score:2)
We've known for a long time that the guys in Hollywood have been pretty bad at math, though usually they are only out by a factor of a million.
Could we do something anyway? (Score:2)
Scenario : there is 5 years warning, and the asteroid is 10 km is diameter (the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs).
Could we deflect it? Assume that the mission to intercept the asteroid reached it 2 years before impact.
I kind of feel like there would be a way. In this scenario, ALL the resources are going to solving the problem. At least 50 trillion dollars or more. Most other activities are suspended in the western world and china. A salt-water fission rocket or something ought to be powerf
No worries! (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone knows that in such an event Sam will open a hyperspace window and the asteroid will fall right through.
"You know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water."
Lt. Col. Samanth Carter
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You only need to open hyperspace windows if the asteroid has a high concentration of naquadah, else a Mk IX gate buster aught to vaporize everything in a 100 mile radius. So that's solved for anything up to 100 miles.
Doesn't matter (Score:2)
Blowing up asteroids is oldschool. All the cool kids these days just open a hyperspace window and fly them safely through the planet and then conveniently forget that we have a massive object rich with valuable minerals in orbit around Earth for the rest of the series.
New Bomb Powerful Enough... , Says Bruce Willis (Score:4, Funny)
... or so I misread the headline at first glance.
Biggest Bomb Ever? (Score:2)
I bet we could shift an asteroid's course if we packed up all the copies of Battlefield Earth and launched them against it.
/Though I personally think the Mission Earth series was by far the longest series of crap books ever published.
Easy answer - bomb contained a black hole (Score:5, Interesting)
Either than or about the fiftieth continuity or stupidly ignored fact failure of the movie.
There were Highlander sequals that made more sense - even the one where the sword changed from claymore to katana and back again in the middle of a fight.
Bigger bomb? (Score:2)
No problem. If it's one thing the human race is good at, it's making bigger and better bombs.
1000 KM? (Score:2)
A 1000 km asteroid is rather enormous; it's estimated that a 10 km asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. That's got a mass of roughly one millionth that of the 1000 KM asteroid.
Suddenly we go from a billion times more powerful than we've ever detonated, to only one thousand times. That would seem to put it in the realm of feasibility; you build multiple much bigger bombs.
If we need a thousand times more than Tsar Bomba, that means we need a total of 50,000 megatons. An as-designed Tsar Bomba was twice as power
Re:1000 KM? (Score:5, Informative)
Even worse: There are no asteroids with a diameter of 1000km. The largest of them, Ceres, is 950km and at a very safe distance in a very stable orbit. The second largest, Vesta, is less than 600km in diameter.
In fact, the main "danger" nowadays is seen in objects of about 0.1km in diameter, since that is the size at which asteroids are still damaging, but also escape early detection. That takes about 15 orders of magnitude off the energy requirements. But at this point, you wouldn't even need a bomb. Just shoving a few tons of stuff at a few km/s in front of the asteroid is enough to tear it apart. (The kinetic energy of 1t of material at 2.8km/s is equivalent to 1t of TNT.)
The Space Shuttle (Score:3)
Another big point missed in the movie is that the Space Shuttle is only capable of going to Low Earth Orbit. Bruce Willis wouldn't have even been able to get the bomb there even if it was big enough.
There AREN'T any (discovered) asteroids* that big! (Score:2)
I know this is a fault of the movie, not the paper, but there aren't any asteroids 1000 km in diameter (Ceres is just a little bit smaller).
The only way that the movie could be even remotely plausible would be if this were an extra-solar body coming from interstellar space. Otherwise it would have been detected centuries ago. (Actually, I think the movie indicated something like this). It would also probably be traveling at a high rate of speed since it would have been dropped almost all the way down the
Five words (Score:2, Flamebait)
It's just a fucking movie.
Would the bombs destroy Earth (Score:2)
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And in other news, failed hockey players can't play golf either.
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Sophia Loren (Score:2)
You sure? (Score:2)
The students found it would take a bomb about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth."
We have those!
On Slashdot ?
o_0 You sure?
Re:A billion times. (Score:5, Interesting)
Very doubtful. But we could potentially build such a bomb if the Earth depended on it for some reason; the Teller-Ulam configuration scales indefinitely. The problem is it'd be way too massive to get off the ground.
Of course, these students were simply calculating the (very unrealistic) scenario found in the movie, of the asteroid right about to impact, and of deflection involving splitting it in half and having one half go each way around the Earth. As they note, more realistic deflection scenarios involve hitting it much earlier and simply trying to alter it's trajectory intact (but that's not fitting for Hollywood)
Also it should be noted that the Tsar Bomba mentioned in the article was deliberately cut down to half of its design yield (replacing the uranium tamper with a lead one) to make it burn cleaner. It was not only the biggest atomic bomb ever detonated on Earth, but also the cleanest per unit of energy output.
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And I'm not talking about the NASA Orion I'm talking about the DARPA project
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OK. I think I've had this discussion before, but maybe people need a fucking refresher on basic newtonian motion.
BLOWING UP AN ONCOMING ASTEROID will ABSOLUTELY NOT 'MOVE' IT TO EITHER SIDE. My fucking GOD did the entire planet fucking fail basic physics? It WILL guarantee that we are, instead of being slammed with one giant rock, showered with millions of smaller rocks, but WE'LL STILL BE FUCKED SIDEWAYS in that scenario.
We could, yes, potentially build a really big bomb. It's not the fact that it's too
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I don't know about this. Depending on the composition of the asteroid, a bomb placed inside might possibly split it in half, and the force of that explosion would cause the two halves to move in opposite directions. If the bomb isn't powerful enough (quite likely with the size of a giant asteroid, and the size of our bombs), it won't cause the asteroid to be broken into "millions of smaller rocks", just two or so (again, this depends on the rock's composition). The problem is that it's unlikely the halve
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So many things wrong with your comically angry post. Some of the main ones:
1) Only asteroid fragments over a certain size make it to the ground. Blow it up enough and yes, it will not make it to the surface. It would add dust, of course, and impart a heating pulse to the surface, but spread out over however long between the furthest-forward pieces from the blast were and the furthest back ones.
2) Deflecting fragments of the asteroid from a collision course is precisely the point of an explosion, whether
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