Astronauts to Reveal Sobering Data on Asteroid Impacts - Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22

[bananas]

http://www.universetoday.com/111278/astronauts-to-reveal-sobering-data-on-asteroid-impacts/

Astronauts to Reveal Sobering Data on Asteroid Impacts
by Jason Major on April 16, 2014

This Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22, three former NASA astronauts will present new evidence that our planet has experienced many more large-scale asteroid impacts over the past decade than previously thought… three to ten times more, in fact. A new visualization of data from a nuclear weapons warning network, to be unveiled by B612 Foundation CEO Ed Lu during the evening event at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, shows that “the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’ sized asteroid is blind luck.”

Since 2001, 26 atomic-bomb-scale explosions have occurred in remote locations around the world, far from populated areas, made evident by a nuclear weapons test warning network. In a recent press release B612 Foundation CEO Ed Lu states:

“This network has detected 26 multi-kiloton explosions since 2001, all of which are due to asteroid impacts. It shows that asteroid impacts are NOT rare — but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought. The fact that none of these asteroid impacts shown in the video was detected in advance is proof that the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’ sized asteroid is blind luck. The goal of the B612 Sentinel mission is to find and track asteroids decades before they hit Earth, allowing us to easily deflect them.”

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In addition to Lu, Space Shuttle astronaut Tom Jones and Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders will be speaking at the event, titled “Saving the Earth by Keeping Big Asteroids Away.”

The event will be held at 6 p.m. PDT at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, WA. It is free to the public and the visualization will be made available online on the B612 Foundation website. http://www.b612foundation.org/

[lordsummerisle]

1. To quote Maynard G. Krebs

We're doomed, doomed, kerboom!

[longship]

2. Phil Plait's TEDx talk. (14:00)

He covers the topic fairly well, except this new scary data makes things look more urgent.

Pretty good talk.

[JayhawkSD]

5. Boring. Reaches too hard for grandiosity.

I never got past his description of the "dinosaur's bad day." He's speaking to ten-year-olds.

[longship]

6. He's relating science to non-scientists.

I expect that he would not be writing differential equation solutions on a blackboard.

Boring? Do you really want people to take that seriously?

Grandiose? In other words, he's simultaneously too boring and too dramatic.

[JayhawkSD]

7. I will stand on my statement. Grandiosity is almost always very boring.

This "take Longs peak. It's really big. Add Mount whatever and it's even bigger. Add Mount Another, and it's even bigger yet. Add all of the Canadian Alps..." After he displays his knowledge of the names of all the mountains in the world, "it's even bigger than that, and the dinosaurs had a really, really bad day." And all of the grade school kids in the audience fall down in hysterical laughter.

Saying once that "the dinosaurs had a bad day" was modestly cute. Repeating it after describing all of the mountains of the world piled into one asteroid in terms a fifth grader would appreciate, is nonsensical. You can explain science in layman's language without descending into childishness.

[longship]

3. Between 37,000 and 78,000 tons of asteroids fall on Earth each year.

That's between about 100-200 tons per day.

And that's just the average humdrum day, not including the outlier continent killer asteroids.

[JayhawkSD]

4. Wel, just in the past 18 months...

...we've seen two of them, both in Russia, so the proposition seems quite plausible to me. Somewhat frightening, but plausible.

However, the luck has not been all that freakishly good. When you consider what a small fraction of the planetary area is occupied by major cities, it's not really surprising that asteroids have landed in areas not occupied by them.