Quote:
Originally Posted by Noclevername
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If I knew ahead of time where it would strike, I would avoid being where the lightning is. The planet Earth can't be moved out of the way, however.
At "2 million per person", you'd think money would be no problem.
Why are so many people dead-set against altering Apophis' course? Is there some upside I'm missing?
ADDED: And why do they keep coming up with completely irrelevant and exaggerated comparisons? It's path is predictable, it can be altered, and the harm it might do is avaoidable. So...? |
I think that last bit is the problem. It's not entirely predictable. They think that it's only a 1-in-45,000 chance of hitting in 3 decades, but if you mess around with it, then you upset the applecart and make those predictions meaningless. By attempting to avert catastrophe in 30 years, you might inadvertently cause it to strike in 3 years. We currently don't have the resources or know-how to make make the threat zero (such as crashing it into another planet) so any messing with it could increase the chance of an impact.
The farther away it is from a collision with earth in time and space, the more a small force can be multiplied into a big change. We don't know enough about it to calculate how human alterations to it might change the orbit. Sure, lots of people assume that lateral vectors would be simple to compute. But what if we change the rotation or the albedo, and cause the Yarkovsky effect to change, then all the pre-messing-with-it calculations will be wrong and the only way to know how it will really be altered is to watch it afterwards... assuming we have enough time to watch it afterwards before it might impact.
Many asteroids cross earth's path but never collide because of orbital dynamics keeps them in a stable, if chaotic, dance. Do you really want to upset that applecart? I'd be okay with slamming it into the moon. We might accomplish some important science that way. But sending it off into space is taking a known quantity and changing it into an unknown quantity, which does nothing to minimize risk. It's not that easy to project the orbital trajectories of small objects like this, and that's why they give odds --because they don't know.