When worlds collide

An asteroid will make a nearish miss with Earth on Boxing Day this year.  It's not all that close, about 4.5 million miles, and it's not all that big, either, less than 2,000 feet in diameter.  For comparison, the Tunguska strike in Siberia in 1908 was less than a tenth that big, while the dinosaur-killing object 65 million years ago probably was in the 7- to 50-mile diameter range.  The one in "Armageddon," of course, was "the size of Texas, Mr. President."  The thing that knocked loose the Moon 4.5 billion years ago is estimated to have been the size of Mars.  Things in the solar system have really quieted down since then.

3 comments:

E Hines said...

I wouldn't even call that thing close. Tunguska was a near miss, as was the rock that exploded in the atmosphere over Russia a couple years ago, for all that those two were pebbles (is there a pattern here? Have the aliens who've been throwing rocks at us all these hundreds of millions of years actually done their due diligence on target ID?).

A near miss, to me would be a civilization killer that passes closer to us than our moon. Those aliens have shown us what they've got, and for all their targeting the right parts, they don't have much.

Eric Hines

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Most of the asteroid scenarios are instant killers. There are some that could be near-misses but catastrophic without completely annihilating us. I'm pretty sure I don't prefer that.

Anonymous said...

Yeah. Reading about a tsunami in what is now North Dakota that came from the Chixulub (dino-killer) event, and the fire storms . . . No, thanks. I'd just as soon skip a minor hit or heavy near miss.

LittleRed1