I'm team asteroid.
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Astronomy
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Scientists estimate that 2024 YR4 is between 130 to 300 feet (40 and 90 meters) wide, large enough to cause localized devastation near the impact site. The asteroid responsible for the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia, was probably about the same size.
So nothing to worry about
Provided it enters in a similarly uninhabited location.
Sarcasm?
Idk about you but if it levels 1287 km² of forest, I don't think that would exactly be good news for a populated area. On the upper range, it could be equivalent to a 40 megatonne bomb.
Wow this is the most depressing comment section I've ever seen.
it's just standard "haha self harm funi", it's so easy to post and reliably gets a few upvotes, so it's just a kneejerk response to posts like these.
Yeah, even for Lemmy this is bad. I hope most of them are semi-facetious?
Those are rookie numbers. Gotta pump those numbers up.
Can we speed that up a bit?
Is there any way to get it here sooner?
Reading this headline instantly brought a huge smile to my face 😁
Which direction do I need to fart to up those numbers?
Fucking finally goddamn
Am I supposed to panic because it's unlikely to hit? Meanwhile I'm out here wishing for death by meteor.
Yeah I'll take one for the team. I go to the point of impact and when it finaly hits, I'm gonna try to punch it back into orbit.
You don't have to thank me.
Honestly, at this point, there might be enough of us volunteering to bounce that fucker back to Jupiter. A lot of us will be turned into jam but I think it’s worth the sacrifice.
But I'm on team meteor
Just in case this comment is not a joke, here's the WHO page on suicide prevention.
Either way, there are a few billion other people on this planet who would rather not die by meteor, thank you very much.
I mean, if I was going to go out, then getting my shit mixed by a meteor is pretty awesome. I'm sure I'll make it on to a few Buzzfeed articles over the next ten or twenty years.
All things considered though, it would indeed be nice if it landed somewhere inconsequential like the ocean; the desert; or Florida.
What about hitting the Republican National Convention?
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Panic?!
You mean throw a welcome party?
To people having panic attacks, it is not large enough to destroy the earth, and we would have plenty of time to evacuate the impact location. Though let's hope it isn't anywhere with permafrost.
Aw, you think we'll still have permafrost by then.
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i don't like those odds. anything we can do to bump it up to around 75%-100%?
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Unexpected Waterworld dipstick guy
He's my go-to for posts like these
Underutilized meme format, honestly. It can apply to almost anything in daily life circa 2025.
Panic?
I'm crossing my fingers for the wellbeing of the universe. We're awful.
Worry not, for we are insignificant to the universe.
Right now.
Forever, humanity could only ever conceivably expand so far due to the expansion of the universe, so as far as we know a still insignificant portion of the universe we could colonize.
Until we make some scientific breakthrough which might solve that problem. If there is any possible of course. There is so much we still don't know.
I’ll only panic if it misses
is there any way to hurry it along?
That's 0.9% more than the last time I checked. I know those are still really low odds, but we can hope...
I science podcast I follow already warned last week that the probability would go up at first as they narrow down its trajectory.
They gave the example of a fan closing, as it gets narrow, the earth represents a bigger percentage of the remaining fan. If you keep closing the fan the Earth eventually will fall outside the fan and the percentage drop to zero.
Unless it turns out that it is dead center.
One of the things they're doing is calculating what it's orbit would have to be to hit the Earth, and where it would have had to have been on its last orbit to be in that orbit
So they can look at any astronomical images of that part of the sky from then and see if it's in the right place
If they find images of the right part of the sky at the right time and the asteroid is not in it, they know it's not on an orbit that will hit the Earth in 2032
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