March 7, 2009

Oh, a spot of good news. All of you almost died on Monday, but you didn't.

Nice to see the governments of the world have this under control too.

Not.

Can you imagine getting hit by an asteroid during the middle of one of the greatest economic collapses of all time?

Now that would be a second shoe to drop for sure.

Whew.

So anyway, you all survived. Go out and celebrate tonight. And remember to ask your bartender what he thinks about gold, houses and stocks. And asteroids too.

25 comments:

Mitesh Damania said...

Pants down. Did Bush fill all our astronomers seats too?

Mitesh Damania said...

You're doing a heck of a job astronomer!

Anonymous said...

As George Carlin would say, it was a near-hit...

Anonymous said...

That would have been the grand finale and God's answer to Global pillage by Greedy/brainless Human Race.

Alice said...

That graphic was so bogus. 44,000 km is way the hell out there. The view of Earth subtends an arc of 17 degrees at that orbit.

Anonymous said...

That would have been a cool way to die.

Anonymous said...

God's target practice.

Anonymous said...

How come they did not see this coming, or maybe they did but did not wanted you to know.

Anonymous said...

This is Obama's baby now!

Anonymous said...

We as a world have been very lucky we haven't had more hits than misses. We can thank Jupitor for taking a lot of the hits from comets in our lifetime.
Now for the fear factor...2012 my take is our solar system has reached the end of a completed cycle around our galaxy, and we are starting the cycle again. Some people fear that there are comets and large chunks of matter we will be exposed to again as we cycle through the path. So Maybe in 500 earth years we might get close to some of these planet killers, or gravitional factors can change the safe orbits of the planet killers in our solar system. The fact is we don't know. The fact is we do not have any means to protect our planet from this. I love the 16 hour warnings. Why give any warnings at all? The end of man kind will either be from one of the Natural Planet killers or from Nuclear weapons or Global Change, or you might walk outside and get hit by a bus, or shot and blown up by a terrorist. My take is enjoy life. However, We need to be smart enough to know potential dangers and create systems to protect our lives. As long as The Greedy people who want to be rich, or are rich and not in Prison are allowed to continue. We as a human race will Not make it in the long term.

Anonymous said...

"...How could they not see it coming?..."

There's a joke in there somewhere about our economic crisis.

Anonymous said...

Such an alarmist! The government will take care of it, just like they did Katrina!

Anonymous said...

'Can you imagine getting hit by an asteroid...?'

Already happened to A-Rod -- he got hit with 'a steroid' in the ass and ended up paying through the nose years later...

Anonymous said...

Geez, thanks BO for being "sooo attentive" to threats that might destroy our civilization. Man, talk about clueless...we're f*cked with these clowns at the helm. We now get info about national security threats from the weather-man at CNN.

Anonymous said...

"The fact is we do not have any means to protect our planet from this."

I am fairly confident that we DO in fact have the technology and that it can be used, that is to say that the devices and trained people are already where they need to be. However the problem is, as usual, a human one.

It is obvious that our government, media, AND now NASA itself has failed the people here. This should have been taken seriously, very seriously, by all of those parties.

What happened is that some people in all of these parties were. Just. That. Confident. and they could do no wrong, make no mistake. They didn't feel that taking precautionary measures were worth it. They made the decision for us.

This is something that has always concerned me since I was little, this issue with NASA specifically. I was right to be concerned.

Someone mentioned that there is a joke in here regarding the economic crisis- he was right but I stopped laughing last year.

Anonymous said...

A speck of rock smaller than the International Space Station and we happened to miss before it raced by? No shit. If it hit Earth, there's a 70 percent chance it would hit water, and we wouldn't have noticed.

Anonymous said...

Folks, you better wake up to the global warming scam and its cap-and-trade Ponzi scheme to transfer American taxpayer money to the European empty coffers:

Scientists abandon global warming 'lie'. 650 to dissent at U.N. climate change conference

WASHINGTON – A United Nations climate change conference in Poland is about to get a surprise from 650 leading scientists who scoff at doomsday reports of man-made global warming – labeling them variously a lie, a hoax and part of a new religion.

Later today, their voices will be heard in a U.S. Senate minority report quoting the scientists, many of whom are current and former members of the U.N.'s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

About 250 of the scientists quoted in the report have joined the dissenting scientists in the last year alone.

In fact, the total number of scientists represented in the report is 12 times the number of U.N. scientists who authored the official IPCC 2007 report.

Here are some choice excerpts from the report:

* "I am a skeptic ...Global warming has become a new religion." -- Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

"Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly ... . As a scientist I remain skeptical." -- Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called "among the most pre-eminent scientists of the last 100 years."

Warming fears are the "worst scientific scandal in the history ... . When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists." -- U.N. IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning Ph.D. environmental physical chemist.

"It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming." -- U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp ... . Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact." -- Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch U.N. IPCC committee.

"For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" -- Geologist Dr. David Gee, the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer-reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.


http://tinyurl.com/7f9fzw

Anonymous said...

(AP) Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009.

..... “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon wrote.

..... Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results.

Saul said...

Yes, that was close -- but in some ways this was closer


In a nutshell : H5N1 (Bird Flu) sent out live in anti-flu shots by Baxter. Mistake? Conspiracy?

Ross said...

Annnnnnnd this is why I don't watch CNN. Were those two drunk and/or high? It had to be one or both.

Anonymous said...

shit, it could take care of Washington, well better luck next time

Anonymous said...

They said one hit Siberia 100 years ago. We would all mostly survive.

If it were to hit land the ensuing dust cloud will reverse some of the global warming that's going on... should make all you inconvenient truthers happy!

-Mike

Anonymous said...

Exagerate much?

I love it when bloggers actually talk about things in an area you know something about and you see that they just talk shit. Hence I'd have to assume that all the things keith says in areas I don't know much about are garbage too.

Rocks that size whiz past all the damn time, usually we don't see them at all, and for the small percentage we do see it's after they go past (which lets us calculate the orbit to see when it'll come close again).

Since "all" of use are obviously not in one locality it couldn't have killed all of us.

Also I knew about it before Monday, it was all over the internet on the weekend, eg: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/highlights/40504617.html

Anonymous said...

Rats...wish it would have hit Washington/New York and removed most of the countries problems (Govt, FED, WS, etc.)

Unknown said...

A real concern will be the object swinging by Earth on 4/13/29 at an altitude of just 18,000 miles and returning exactly seven years later to the day. At this time our astronomers are uncertain how the 2029 pass will affect the object's trajectory for the 2036 return. If its orbit is shortened by a few thousandths of a day, it could conceivably enter our atmosphere or even impact. It is the size of the Empire State Building. Life would not end like in Armegeddon but it could take out a city or cause a tsunami.

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