Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-11-18 (Monday)

On Thu, 21 Nov 2024 11:37:25 -0700, anim8rfsk <anim8rfsk@cox.net>
wrote:

BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:

On Nov 21, 2024 at 12:45:19 AM PST, "anim8rfsk" <anim8rfsk@cox.net> wrote:

As far as I understand, blowing the comet to hell so close that it dumps
all the fragments in the atmosphere is exactly the wrong thing to do.

 
I've never understood this, especially when it comes to a comet, which is just
a big ball of ice. First, I'd think a nuke would boil away most of the ice to
begin with. Second, even if what remains breaks up into pieces, the pieces are
smaller and so are much more likely to burn up in the atmosphere and never
reach the ground. And for those few that do, they're much smaller and while
there would be damage and death, it would be nowhere near on the
extinction-level destruction that the whole thing hitting at once would
cause.
 
Bottom line: a lot less mass will be hitting the earth with a nuke-blasted
comet than one that hits intact.

>
That’s not the problem. The problem is as you divide this thing into
multiple pieces you increase the surface area, exponentially and
geometrically, and literally.  So instead of 3000 miles of surface area,
you’ve got 30,000 miles of surface area super heating atmosphere as it
comes in.
>
I’m not sure that that applies to water ice but Armageddon is a big rock
and deep impact sure looked like a rock despite them saying it was a comet
>
You also want to hope that it hits land and not water. Bring it down in the
middle of the Australian outback.

That's the problem with any of these comet/asteroid disaster type
movies. If the asteroid/comet is big enough and we don't detect it
soon enough there's really not much that can be done. What you really
need is to detect it and work to deflect it or at least most of the
mass away from the Earth.