Tag Archive: space
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Oh About that Asteroid Hit
Pwned!
Fortunately the story posted yesterday turns out to be complete bullsh*t.
The odds of a direct hit are back down to 45,000 to 1 .. or so.
Odds of Direct Asteroid Hit Increased 100x
Plane travel is significantly safer…
The odds of an asteroid 2 miles widing hitting the earth in 2036 have been revised from 45,000:1 to 450:1… by a 13 year old schoolboy who found errors in NASA’s calculations.
NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right. The schoolboy took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13 2029.
If there were a direct hit in, say, the Atlantic Ocean, the resultin Tsunami would destroy “both coastlines and inland areas, whilst creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely.”
Clearly this is not a risk if we all get swept into a black hole next month when the Center for Nuclear Research turns on the $8bn Large Hadron Collider.
…
Killer bacteria from outer space
If you sneeze in space, does it make a sound?
As if cosmic rays and hard vacuum didn’t make space dangerous enough, astronauts might have to contend with an unexpected threat: bacteria. Mice exposed to a strain of Salmonella typhimurium that spent 12 days in orbit on a 2006 shuttle flight were nearly three times as likely to die from the stomach bug than rodents infected with its earthbound ilk, a new study finds. Seems the microbes began to weave themselves into a resilient biofilm, possibly because the microgravity stilled the flow of the fluid bathing them, a study author told the Associated Press.
Odds Are
You’ve got more to worry about than your next plane trip.
Odds of asteroid hitting the earth in 2036 that releases more energy than 100,000 Hiroshimas: 1 in 15,000
Odds of getting killed in a plane crash this year: 1 in 441,000
You have 30 years to mull this over.
Update: I have delinked the odds on the first stat as the relevant webpage went the way of the dinosaurs. However we might still do just that. A more recent article says that we’re not yet in the clear.
