This morning I saw a link to a news article whose title indicated that a big asteroid is going to pass very close by the Earth this Sunday.

I said to myself, "I already know it's not going to hit the Earth anyway so I'm not even going to click on this link. The article is a waste of my (and everyone else's) time."

And I did not click on it! I said, "next article, please!" LOL.

It's not gonna be close, and it's not big. It's gonna be 25.000 miles away, and it's only 60 feet across (the same size as the one that hit in Russia last year).

Stansfield123 Wrote:It's not gonna be close, and it's not big. It's gonna be 25.000 miles away, and it's only 60 feet across (the same size as the one that hit in Russia last year).

See? I figured it would be a waste of time.

I can almost guarantee that, in the event an actual possibility of disaster from high-speed space chunks, we'd either:
A.) not know it was coming at all
B.) know it was coming (decades) in advance
And the news reports on it in the latter case would either be:
A.) nonexistent
B.) screaming about doomsday and the riots caused by the morning coverage of the new doomsday

Not clicking the click-bait was the right choice.

Y'now how on tv you'd see a bloke looking at a meteor approaching the earth then everyone is panicking and running around? Fiction. They're like bullets and if you do see one then you're nanoseconds from death.

murtada Wrote:Y'now how on tv you'd see a bloke looking at a meteor approaching the earth then everyone is panicking and running around? Fiction. They're like bullets and if you do see one then you're nanoseconds from death.

They're faster than bullets, but still... a nanosecond is a billionth of a second. They're not traveling at the speed of light, you can see them just fine:

They're usually slower than some man made rockets.

You're probably right but I just said what my math teacher said. Maybe he was exaggerating to prove his point that asteroids are really fast? That's a shame....

Remember comet Shoemaker-Levy which broke into pieces and hit Jupiter back in 1994?

This book has an interesting day-by-day description of what we would have seen in the sky if the pieces had hit Earth instead:

http://www.amazon.com/Comets-Creators-De...iter+comet

I just think it's amazing that we have a spacecraft out there orbiting a comet a half billion km from earth. ...and hopefully landing in a few months.