Re: Earth-grazing asteroids as a military resource

On 6/03/2025 10:54 pm, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-03-06 04:06, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 6/03/2025 1:45 pm, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-03-06 03:05, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 6/03/2025 8:28 am, Dave Platt wrote:

In article <vq8jtq$299g5$1@dont-email.me>,
Bill Sloman  <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

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Do you really expect that any nation can do such a thing, and not have it
detected and traced back to the nation in question?  Outer space is
a lot more "visible" than something like the Manhattan Project was.

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But there is a lot of it, and most of the action would be happening a long way away from the earth - more than 93 million miles, on average.

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Russell's teapot :-p  :-)

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Not exactly. My claim was simply that observation would be difficult - not impossible - in the same way that it isn't impossible to intercept an intercontinetal ballasitc missile in mid-flight, but that the practical difficulties mean that nobody is trying to do it.
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Reagan's "Star Wars" proposal pretended that it was practical.

 The thing is, it is impossible to prove that there are no objects out there in an intercept orbit with earth.
 If you find one, you have proved it exists, but you can not prove the negative.

And you'd be mad to try. Meteorites hit the earth every day, so there are clearly lots of small objects out there with intercept orbits with earth.
Larger objects hit the planet and make it down to the surface less often, and the frequency drops off with size. A really big one killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.
In this particular case you couldn't prove the negative because there isloads of evidence to the contrary. People like Trump do make that kind of assertion from time to time, and some people do seem to take them seriously, but that's all about influencing the hopelessly gullible.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney