Toutatis is coming! Meet this erratic potential threat....

[theophilus]

At the end of September, this year, we are to be visited by Toutatis.
This approximately three mile wide visitor has been by before but will
come this time within a million miles of earth. Rense has posted some
info on this visit but there are tons of sites to look at concerning this event. To me, this is an important problem. Why are we not spending some of our treasure to try and protect our planet from these rocks? We buy insurance in our daily lives ---- just in case. I think the world would be willing to chip in to avert an extinction event. Yes, the odds are against this one hitting us but if the time involved is long enough it will happen again as it has happened in our planet's past.

To say that these things are inevitable and are natural disasters which we don't need to worry about strikes me as horribly silly. Death is a natural disaster to each of us --- depending on circumstances --- yet most of us try to avoid death for a large part of our lives. Why not try harder to avoid a premature human species death?

To those who say that God is responsible.....He has given us several warnings then. There is nothing in the Bible that says we will come to an end by Rock. There are allusions to small scale hits--- but could it be the work of Satan? Don't we want to use the brain God gave us to defend ourselves either way?

Those who don't believe in God should be eager to defend themselves against such a threat to continue our cultures and try to solve other problems as well.

Anyway, why aren't our Fearless Leaders working to defend us against this kind of potential terror? This Toutatis comes around every four years (at about election time?). I think we need to do something.

Here is a link to look at:

http://www.rense.com/general50/sep29th2004.htm

Calling Chicken Little....... :0)

[tigereye]

1. talk about threats from meteors

always make me think of the beginning of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the Vogons sweep away the earth just like that. A bit silly, I know. But wonderfully existential. I don't think it really benefits us to worry about things that we can't control... and there are a lot of them.

[rman]

2. we do spend money (and we do have some control)

NASA has an observation program:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/
Close Approaches:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/
Torrino impact scale:
http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/index.html

Taxes pay for that. Though it isn't nearly enough.

Essentialy we're in the early stages of developing the technology needed to give us warning early enough so that we could at least attempt to do something to reduce the damage. Current technology doesn't have sufficient accuracy.
What can be done, and whether or not something can be done at all depends on the size of the impactor, and the technology that we have at that time. The good part is that meteorites and comets are more rare the bigger they are, and the biggers ones are more easy to detect. The bad part it that for the time being we can't really do much about the big ones.
As it stands now we might get just a few days warning of an impact by a meteorite large enough to wipe out a city (a 'small' meteorite*), and it would probably not be accurate enough to even start evacuating any possible impact area. My guestimate is that if we'd make a serious effort and spend more then just a few dimes on it (relatively speaking), in about a decade we could increase the warning time to weeks if not months and make it accurate enough that it's worth while. Beyond that it may eventually be possible to divert the smaller impactors. Way beyond that would be evacuation of the planet in case of an encounter with a planet crusher. It is only likely such a thing will eventually happen, provided the human race survives that long.
I'd say that in the short term it would be worth while to worry

(* of course there are many meteorites and comets that are still smaller but even though those may kill a few people (far more unlikely then being struck by lightning), those aren't really a hazard.)

[theophilus]

5. Thanks for the info. I agree.

This is the sort of thing I hope we can pursue.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

3. Oh no the sky is going to fall! The only thing we fear!

By Toutatis!

[Dogmudgeon]

4. A Miss by 3.5 Lunar Distances

Nearly a million miles.

I'm not going to spend September drinking, raping, and pillaging like a madman, Celtic or otherwise, over such a threat.

Provided we continue to fund astronomers who look for, and catalog, asteroids and comets, we should be able to avert just about any collision in a few years. We'd have to be facing collision with a planet to be in a hopeless situation.

I fear Team Bush more.

--bkl