Did the Russian meteorite scare the crap out of you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_the_Skies

Dan Truman: Well, our object collision budget's a million dollars. That allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and beg'n your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky.

-Armageddon

there are even worse possibilities out there, including the gamma ray burst, something that will kill rather more slowly.

Worst of all, a stupid human error somewhere in a bunker deep underground that causes a nuclear holocaust. I would deeply resent being incinerated by human stupidity. The other stuff falls into the category "shit happens."

human stupidity.

Contrary to popular belief, the universe is a very dangerous place, highly inimical to life as we know it.
We could be wiped at any time by a nearby supernova, an asteroid or comet, a major X-class solar flare and who knows what else.
That's not even counting the ways we can do ourselves in.

I find it interesting that it could happen in my lifetime but I'm not going to lose sleep over what the universe decides to do.

I was very interested, as I am in all things space. I do find it horrifying that people were injured. Russia has had enough to deal with in its history without the added space mayhem.

It's such a rare event over human lifetimes that it doesn't worry me.

worrying about anything over which you've no direct control is wasted effort and achieves nothing. So - no I'm not bothered.

And I think it was just a meteor.

I don't recall something of this magnitude happening before in my lifetime? But, just as we see all the meteor craters on the Moon and Mars, is there any reason to believe we would be exempt from similar "hits"?

or even people around.


We are not exempt from hits. There are craters here on Earth too. Our atmosphere does help protect us from some hits. The bigger ones are more rare. The math dictates that we will get hit again. It isn't a question of "if" but "when". The way things are going, Humans may not exist by the time the next large impact event happens. It could be a million years, or two, or twenty.

Most of those craters on the Moon and Mars are ancient. There is no weathering to remove them so they stay there pretty much forever. Hits are less common now. There are fewer items in the solar system to impact here because they have already hit the Moon and Mars (and other locations).

I tend to look at every impact that doesn't kill anyone as one less bullet in the gun. We should take comfort from the fact that this one was not worse than it might have been.

That one was estimated to be an object (a rocky meteor or possibly a comet) about 20 meters in diameter that airburst at an altitude of 10 kms. It left a region of flattened and scorched trees some 30 kms across, about the same blast force as a small thermonuclear device (perhaps 250-500kt yield) but without nearly as much heat and no significant radiation.



By comparison, the object that formed Meteor Crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago was composed of nickel-iron and is estimated to have been about 50 meters in diameter. Because it's higher metallic content, most of that object survived entry and impacted with a force estimated to be equivalent to a 10 Megaton H-bomb.

Nothing to worry about.

Perhaps we go thru this specific asteroid belt every 105 or so years? Just like Haley's Comet comes around every 75-76 years. IF you are around in 2061, you can look for it.

Near Earth Objects, not from the Asteroid belt, which is in a relatively stable orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Occasionally, probably due to some gravitational resonance with Jupiter, an asteroid may be thrown out of the belt and head closer to the sun, but there are hundreds of thousands more objects that already cross Earth's orbit.

Much smaller.

An entire order of magnitude smaller, and then some.

and slam into the ground instead of exploding high up.or it would look like Meteor Crater in AZ.

I tend to not freak out about things I can't do anything about that are massively unlikely to happen to me, but that is just the way I am.

when I did learn of it, I saw dashcam videos which left me thinking about how scared I would have been to see a bright light grow in the sky and seem to move directly into my path. I think being in proximity of the path of an earth striking meteor would be scary. Not something that I worry about very often, but something that would definitely have my attention during the event.


When it was suggested this was a once every ten year event I started trying to remember if I'd seen 6 or 7 of these things.
And, because I've lived in the time of video I have seen evidence of them...

I've seen streaking meteor video from Monday Night Football, as well as video of meteor streaks over a Texas HS football games.

I remember a photo from the wayback of a car somewhere in so. Canada, IIRC, that had a hole in it from being hit by a meteor.

I've seen photographs on the news of 'contrails' of big meteors that ripped across the sky in the US.

I think this is the first time I've seen something like what the dashcam videos showed.

I can thank technology for my awareness. The more cameras humanity deploys the more images of these things will be caught, the internet will rapidly disseminate them, and that is likely to change humanity's appreciation for them.

Was delighted to see footage and can't worry about being hit by one.

I think it is fascinating that the last time it happened it was also in Russia. The scientific data from the meteors will be interesting.

If my number is up, it's up. If not a meteorite, then it could be old age. Everyone checks out sometime. The inevitable is nothing to fear.

It happened on a day when in anticipation of the harmless near-earth flyby of a much larger object, experts were telling us "Earth is perfectly safe, there's nothing to worry about."

The effect of the explosion was similar to that of a high-altitude nuclear explosion. Chelyabinsk is in a region that has a history of Cold War era weapons research.

Most of the damage consists of broken windows, in a city that has a glass factory.

People did exactly what I as a young child was taught NOT to do when there is a bright flash in the sky - They went to their windows to see what was happening, and got sprayed with broken glass from the shock wave.

I was taught to duck and take cover.

in the form of a drill that hasn't been regularly used (well in my life, ever) for probably 35 and probably more years.

i fail to see the irony (except the irony of your post) that would assume that the same drills and warnings of a time when black people weren't even allowed to marry white people in many states and at a time when nobody had set foot on the moon --i just find it ironic that you are surprised that it's any different now!

they only do fire drills in the schools..... they all go out side of the school and line up
no matter what the drill
when I went to Grammar school we had bomb drills but that was in the 60's
we would go into the hallways and crouch down till the all clear. by the 4th grade we all knew we were done for.. being in the hallway did nothing.

lost

...after a sudden bright flash in the sky, or when you feel the first waves of an earthquake.

I thought I did and made a note of the time and place, but when I got home, didn't see any other reports of it so figured not. Now, on that list, I can see a couple other people who report seeing one at the same time.

I'll have to go make a report

with the potential to be deadly. There are lots of them. The odds are where to look to keep from being scared.

You're far more likely to die in your bed than any of them. You're far more likely to die in an auto accident than any of them.

In fact, the odds against your being killed by a meteor or asteroid hitting the earth approach infinity. There are many, many other things you can be scared of that are far more likely.

When/if a big one ever hits, we will probably never see it coming unless an amateur astronomer happens to spot it.

Imagine how folks feel when our drones come a buzzin"! That happens many times a day. Soon to be in your neighborhood! If you want to be afraid pick something reasonable to fear. If you don't want to be afraid ...make a call!

This was the biggest one since the Tunguska blast of 1908.

We need to wake up and smell the vaporized-mineral smoke. Humankind is abusing Gaia, and she is a powerful goddess who doesn't put up with patriarchal planet battering.

Back when dinosaur flatus caused climate change and a bad smell, those terrible lizards were smote by a meteor. Are we so blind as to not see that the same fate awaits us?

Regards,

Moonbat Manny

But this is exhibit A of why we need to fund the search and mapping of near earth objects, something Republicans are against, even if it is a minuscule part of the budget.

Co inky dink? I think (NOT).

would have something like that happen twice?

Russia makes up just a bit less than 1/8th of the Earth's land mass, so the chances of 2 events that occur over land, happening over Russia is ~ 1 in 64.

Sid

Great conversation starter, and you can't be too careful.

...children tend to run when I get near them, I don't know why.

Sid

I'm sure this sort of meteorite event happens every once in a long while.

The area of the earth's surface being 196,900,000 square miles.

Given a population of 7 billion, it would kill 7*10^9 / 196,90 or 350,000 people on average.

Sid

Exactly one (1) person has been struck by an extraterrestrial object in recorded history and she lived. If a big one comes, the earth is quite large. Odds are it will hit somewhere I am not.

I did hear a RWinger frothing that space stuff is more of a threat to humans than global warming. He scared me more than the meteor.

Nature's way of asking, "How's that space program coming"?

as it would have if it had happened in my relative vicinity, I suppose.

Or close to family members.


But what can you do, really...

At least until more recent projections reduced the chances of impact to negligible levels.

they knew that they lived in an area close to secret nuclear warhead development and storage facilities. When they saw the bright flash of light followed by explosions, many immediately assumed that they were under attack.

Although we should have plans to prevent a huge asteroid from hitting earth. Fortunately, we were aware of the asteroid that came within 17,000 miles of earth, so its a start.

It's far away. I guess that is just human nature. If actually affected by it, even then, I'd know it's a rare occurrence, I guess.

It didn't scare me because we know that this kind of thing has happened many times in the past and probably will many more times in the future, and when it's our time to go, then that's it. Not much we can do about it.

(Did I mention that I'm a fatalist?)

Also not particularly concerned because it's not anything new, and it isn't something that I can control or change.

And what astronomers think was a smaller piece of the meteorite that hit Russia, light up the skies over San Francisco on Friday night.

The thing about the meteorite 4 months ago was we all heard the boom in my area, some 40 miles away. Before that, the last time I heard a meteorite was in the Nevada desert during the Leonid in 2001, a shower so intense that from the Nevada desert, the streaking meteors were almost constant, often simultaneous at one point and towards the end of the night, there were two, at different times, that popped and smoked at the end.

from Friday:
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from 4 months ago (lot of us heard this because it was a warm night and people's windows were open):
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Many meteors impact the Earth's atmosphere every day, hell just a month ago I saw one streak the sky briefly at night while out on smoke break at work. Those don't worry me, they vaporize, create a light show, and that's that. Its the bigger ones we should worry about, like the one that hit Russia, that can survive going through most of the atmosphere and cause damage on the surface. Most, as others pointed out, happen above the ocean, or in mostly uninhabited areas, however, just because an event is rare doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to prevent it from causing damage in the future.

I view it as I would any other natural disaster, something to be aware of and prepared for as necessary to try to minimize damage and loss of life. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, fires, tornadoes, etc. all happen, that doesn't mean we roll over and say we can't do nothing about them, we instead build houses and buildings that can withstand all but the worst of these, or develop plans for evacuations, etc.

Most of the injuries in Russia were due to ignorance, if people were instructed, obviously ahead of time, to stay away from windows when a bright flash crosses the sky, many of those injuries could have been avoided. In fact, I imagine it would be similar to Earthquake drills, stay indoors, away from windows, in the most structurally sound part of your house/building, closets, door frames, bathrooms, etc.

Of course, the biggest difference between meteor strikes and other natural disasters is that we can actually avoid meteor strikes entirely, given enough warning. The one that struck Russia was tiny, in the grand scheme of NEO size, most are larger, quite a few much larger, and they number in the hundreds of thousands, at least. At best we have estimates, but once we do detect potential Earth orbit-crossing asteroids, their orbits are predictable, like Asteroid 2012 DA14 recently. Without another force acting on them, their orbits are predictable, and we can plot them, with great accuracy, as they orbit the sun.

The issue is that space, even in when confined to a bubble out to the orbit of Mars is fucking huge, so objects like the Russian meteor have plenty of opportunity to blindside us. We have the technology to detect them, if we know where we are looking, and we do have some programs in some countries to detect them, they need more funding though. In addition, once an asteroids orbit is plotted, and its predicted to impact Earth, if we have enough time, we could actually change its orbit to avoid a meteor strike entirely. This would be ideal, after all.

Am I saying that its so dire a need that we devote all or even most of our resources to it? No of course not, the odds are against any impacts that can drastically affect us globally or locally of happening anytime in the near future. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep a lookout, just in case, and develop means of dealing with them should we detect any asteroids that pose a threat in the future.

I can't be concerned with what I can't control. I have enough to worry about right now without fear of the elements.

but if I lived in Russia and saw that thing coming down, I would have been scared s**tless.

Though I felt very bad for those injured by it.

I've always been hooked on science documentaries so I've always known that Earth has been struck by objects many times and will certainly be struck again. Just the way it works flying around on a planet.

These things happen. Not very often, and I am glad it didn't happen here, but they don't "scare" me.

The big boys scare me - like Apophis or whatever they've name that one that's coming in a couple of years.