myOtaku.com
• Join Today!

My Pages
• Home
• Portfolio
• Guestbook

Contact Me

Website
• Click Here

Vitals

Birthday
• 1988-02-09
Gender
• Female
Location
• The Us of A
Member Since
• 2003-08-28
Occupation
• Student
Real Name
• Lorin

Personal

Achievements
• Softball champ, band nazi, not much else
Anime Fan Since
• 1st grade
Favorite Anime
• .Hack//sign
Goals
• To be a music major at UC
Hobbies
• Rockclimbing, softball, running, marching band, playing in my band, playing my flute...okay, so I'm a band geek!
Talents
• BAND, anime drawing, manga art




Jump to User:

myOtaku.com: Kohana


Saturday, September 6, 2003

   It's the end of the world as we know it!
Doomsday In 11 Years!!!

There's been some hoopla over the news that asteriod 2003 QQ47 may impact the earth in 2014. Just so you know, the media almost always fucks up the science when talking about these things. Just ask Phil Plait.

In case you've heard about this and are living in a misconception, let me make some clarifications:

Most news sources give the impact probability as 1 in 909,000, which is a long shot in itself; but the actual odds, according to NASA, are 1 in 2,222,000 or a 0.000045000% chance of impact. [Link] (Note: impact probabilities can be inacurate up to a factor of ten or more.)

This Guardian article (via Genfoods,) makes the worst mistake I've seen so far in giving the mass of the asteroid as 2,600 metric tons. In reality, according to NASA, the mass is estimated to be 2.8 billion (with a 'B') metric tons.

Another common mistake the media has been making is in the energy of the impact if it hits. They give the force of the impact as 350,000 megatons (it's actually more like 370 thousand,) and compare that to Hiroshima by saying that the blast would be "around 8m times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima." Depending on who you ask, the Hiroshima bomb was between 15 and 20 kilotons, which would make the asteroid impact between 17.5 and 25 million times larger than the first bomb dropped on Japan.

As far as I've seen, all news sources have gotten the speed right, 20 miles (33.5 km) a second, or 75,000 miles (120,000 km) an hour. And they've mostly gotten the width -- .75 mile (1.2 km,) though some have given it as two-thirds of a mile -- right (although that's really subjective since this thing is probably not very spherical at all.)
Comments (0)

« Home