Question The Earth is scheduled for demolition

[Artlav]

Let's assume that there is a planetoid several hundred km across heading towards the Earth, scheduled to arrive in late 2012 and completely wipe out any traces of life from out planet upon impact.

What can be done to preserve humanity, it's knowledge and a hope of long-term meaningful survival, if the news are broken right now?

No place on the planet will be safe (if it is, increase impactor size until it isn't), and no place will become so for maybe millions of years, so going space-wards is the only hope.

Can anything be done?

 

[garyw]

Genetic material onto solar escape rockets? Try to spend the Earths genetic material as far as possible?

 

[Ghostrider]

Yes: put our collective head between our collective legs and kiss our collective ass a collective goodbye.

 

[Urwumpe]

Lets stay by the facts - we can detect 100 km asteroids already 1500 AU away. So it is a very unlikely scenarios and badly hypothetical.

In three years, there is about nothing to be done. Demolition can be ruled out - even turning just a 100km asteroid into gravel is as hard as leveling the Alps.

Deflection would only work decades ahead - three years including travel time is not enough.

Evacuation would also be pretty useless...where should we go and how many can we rescue? Even rescuing 100 people (which will likely be the most degenerated politicians available for starting our new gene pool) is almost impossible in just three years.

Praying and hoping for a life after death would be the best for about 70% of humanity

 

[Artlav]

Lets stay by the facts - we can detect 100 km asteroids already 1500 AU away. So it is a very unlikely scenarios and badly hypothetical.

Why? The sky is big, a low-albedo body coming from below the ecliptic plane at a mildly interstellar velocity can easily be missed until around 50 AU away, and that gives 3 years of warning, no?

 

[agentgonzo]

So it is a very unlikely scenarios and badly hypothetical.

Yes, we all realised that this is hypothetical from the first part of his post. Well done:

Let's assume...

Assuming that the Moon isn't destroyed, I'd go for putting something on the moon at an easily recognisable place - either at the pole(s) or at the prime meridian on the equator. Those places are (slightly) more likely to get looked at than another arbitrary place on the moon. The Earth (and thus the moon) are much more likely to be found by an alien/future race than some probe on a random trajectory in interstellar space. You could even use the Apollo or probe landing sites as a staring point.

The moon is baron and so could preserve things put there about as well as deep space. If you put it in a permanently shadowed area, it will last longer too (as it won't get heated by the sun).

I'd go for the (slightly morbid) storing a preserved human (male and female) body along with something akin to the pioneer record to record where we came from that would be easily understood. I don't know how you could store a load of other stuff about us that would be easily decipherable by alien races.

 

[Urwumpe]

Why? The sky is big, a low-albedo body coming from below the ecliptic plane at a mildly interstellar velocity can easily be missed until around 50 AU away, and that gives 3 years of warning, no?

More no, than yes. What is mildly interstellar? Relativistic speeds? Just a bit higher than escape velocity from the solar system? Coming from outside the Galaxy, though no asteroids should be that?

 

[Notebook]

Yes, we all realised that this is hypothetical from the first part of his post. Well done:


Assuming that the Moon isn't destroyed, I'd go for putting something on the moon at an easily recognisable place - either at the pole(s) or at the prime meridian on the equator. Those places are (slightly) more likely to get looked at than another arbitrary place on the moon. The Earth (and thus the moon) are much more likely to be found by an alien/future race than some probe on a random trajectory in interstellar space. You could even use the Apollo or probe landing sites as a staring point.

The moon is baron and so could preserve things put there about as well as deep space. If you put it in a permanently shadowed area, it will last longer too (as it won't get heated by the sun).

I'd go for the (slightly morbid) storing a preserved human (male and female) body along with something akin to the pioneer record to record where we came from that would be easily understood. I don't know how you could store a load of other stuff about us that would be easily decipherable by alien races.

I like it, archiving Humanity. Thats a challenge!

n.

 

[martins]

Can anything be done?

Party time!

 

[Artlav]

Party time!

Yes, there sure will be someone who will sit back and watch the show.

 

[Sky Captain]

That would be an impact of scale like this

To be detected only few years before collision object of that size must come from interstellar space (a rogue dwarf planet ejected by gas giant from its home star system maybe).

In the highly unlikely event of something like that happening I`d just hope to be in right place to have the best view on fireworks. If death is unavoidable then dying in style is the only hope.

 

[Linguofreak]

Why? The sky is big, a low-albedo body coming from below the ecliptic plane at a mildly interstellar velocity can easily be missed until around 50 AU away, and that gives 3 years of warning, no?

That's 80 km/s which is fairly fast compared to the average velocities of stars in the solar neighborhood.

Of course, this being a hypothetical scenario, we could always assume an arbitrarily small artificial impactor, aimed deliberately and maliciously, coming in at an correspondingly large fraction of c, with correspondingly low warning times.

EDIT: In any case, with current technology, there is nothing that could realistically be done to protect humanity against any threat guaranteed to destroy Earth within three years. We simply do not have the capacity to escape.

The only things we could do would be

A: Take steps to make museum pieces of ourselves, fairly useless in my opinion (I doubt that there exist any aliens in the universe that would stand much chance of actually finding any artifacts), but, with not much time left, about as useful as anything else. We wouldn't be able to send any human group with any chance of survival off into the void, but could probably send a few "Hewminz wuz heer" probes off into the void with a good amount of information on them, and the requisite information to decode that information.

B: Do our best to enjoy the fireworks when it actually hits.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

I think I'd hitch-hike out with the Vogon construction fleet.


Hey, that sounds like a future add-on...

 

[Ark]

Yes, there sure will be someone who will sit back and watch the show.

Bwahahaha, just saw that on Cracked.

For one thing, I think this may finally get NASA's budget into the 25b range.

My theory is the ISS crew will cannibalize fuel from derelict satellites and pack up for Mars.

 

[SiberianTiger]

If this becomes imminent, the idea of sending Putin & Medvedev to space stops being a joke.

 

[Urwumpe]

If this becomes imminent, the idea of sending Putin & Medvedev to space stops being a joke.

Why wait until the world is in danger... do you need any reason for that act of promoting them to MUCH higher echolons? Somewhere behind the moon is work to do.

 

[SiberianTiger]

Why wait until the world is in danger... do you need any reason for that act of promoting them to MUCH higher echolons? Somewhere behind the moon is work to do.

Currently, they don't want to go there together and can't come to the agreement who exactly should be promoted. And this stops the entire affair!

 

[Schimz]

An asteroid ? what a lack of imagination !
http://qntm.org/?destroy

 

[Dig Gil]

http://www.aquiziam.com/end_of_the_world_predictions.html (see number "10." which is at the bottom of the article)

For my hypotesis I suppose that the asteroid will not bring any radioactive contamination (actually hope not)
500 Kilometer Asteroid Hypothesis:
If I knew that would happen and didn't trust in any agency or organization (including the government), plus I could use all money/resources I would need (for such improbable scenario this shouldn't be said stupid), I'd dig 2 kilometers into Northen or Center Tibete (*) and get Svalbard and other genetic/information vaults into the Flak-style-bunker that would be built there. Better also bring some 50 or more people. I doubt that the any impact would damage severely the installations unless the mountains were directly hit. The worst would be to get out of the "BOL" because probably the exit would have been put down.
Another idea was to do this on Mars or the Moon, but it's not reliable with nowdays capacities.
Even another idea! Because no one cares anymore with having electricity or power (highly doubtable I know...) every powerplant would join power to antennas all over the world in strategic positions that would send the information/genetic sequences into all the universe creating something like the Mother of All Omnidirectional Radio Emmiters: luckily there's an alien race that likes to preserve all biodiversity out there and re-create us.

Realistic Asteroid Hypothesis (about 10 Kilometres):
Know where is the Asteroid is going to hit: if the place is nice for my plan, I'd run to Cobber Pedy and build some controlled atmosphere environment in some cave so the climatic changes don't starve me. That's probably the worst that would happen in most of the world, thus (I'm not sure about this one) I think that Cobber Pedy is high enough so that sea level risings wouldn't affect it. In the case of high albedo caused ice age, we could easily move to Darwin because deserts would be gone probably.

NOTES: (*) I don't like downright Himalayas because it sits over a continental border that would probably burst with the pressure.

 

[Ghostrider]

I vote we send a satellite in solar orbit with data on the former position of Earth and the message "WE DID IT OURSELVES FOR THE LULZ. PRAY YOU'RE NOT THE NEXT WE TARGET". So the aliens who will read it will spend countless generations in fear of the mad Earth bogeymen who blow up planets for the hell of it.
Now, if this is not a "cosmic joke"...