You're all gonna die!

Where's Godzilla when you need him?!?

(The scary thing is this almost happened in the late 90's, and there aint a damn thing we can do about it!)

 

It's going to happen again in a couple decades, maybeone. Something like that already happened to this planet, though. It's why Earth is so big, and it's why we have a moon.
A "sister" planet crashed into us a few billion years ago, and then gradually was absorbed into Earth, adding its mass to our own. The impact sent a chunk of earth a couple hundred thousand miles away from us, a chunk massive enough to have its own gravitational field, strong enough to form it into a ball and keep it near the main body of earth. (that's all really just a theory)
About the "it'll happen again soon" thing...it could be another near miss. Or it could hit.
We've got a scale going from one to ten on how much an asteroid or planetoid damages Earth, called the Torino Scale.
To put that all into scale, every time an asteroid or chunk of comet hit the earth, of which we have substantial evidence, nothing has done more than a two.
I think the Japanese video you linked to was a ten, Maximus.

 

IF we survive the bird flu, flesh eating bacteria, biological weapons, etc.

 

I think being sick pales in comparison to the psychological effect of something three times the size of our moon hurtling towards us at 68,000 MPH. It'd be so big that only about five percent of it would ever ignite in our atmosphere.
Oh, my nose is running and my head hurts. This is way more detrimental than being crushed by a small planet.

 

Actually, the devastation is rather common from a galactic point of view. According to the Torino Scale I found, I can think of two big ones right off the top of my head. The first would be a 10 on the scale I found, and that was the one that hit the Yucatan in prehistoric times and mutated all the dinosaurs into birds, lizards, and mammals. The other one I visited on vacation a few years back; and was, according to a local paleontologist at least a 9, and was responsible for a whole chain reaction of volcanic activity in the southwestern US that supposedly killed off most of the animals and plants in the region.



And thats just the obvious ones. I've seen a show on Discovery or some-such that revealed with recent commercial space imagery, that underneath the cities and trees that our planet may be just as pot-holed as the moon. And yeah, I heard the Moon/Earth chunk theory too. Who knows.

Do a search on 'asteroid near miss' and you'll see tons of reports, most sorta like this one.
I especially liked these statements:

 

Dumbass, those might be 10s on other scales. When put into context with this one, they're twos. That is a perfect 10. Watch the damn thing.

 

I was being sarcastic in my sickness post.
There's no way being sick wins over being blown to hell by a comet. I mean, really, what would you say? You can never win a pissing contest with someone who died by being vaporized by space rock.
As for the Torino Scale...I'm disappointed. There's no scale for how much damage has been done to earth over time by asteroids.
The way the scale was described in "Mega Disasters: Asteroid Impact" was as if the scale determined how much damage the impacts were causing.
8, 9, and 10 seem like the only ones that haveany kind of damage scale.
I'm making my own scale.
One is everything from the odd meteorite that hits a dog to something that causes damage to a small town. Ten is that video.
I'll have more later; I need some more research and data to do something like that.
For example, there was a meteorite that broke up over Brazil in the 1930's and killed a bunch of crap. Had the same thing hit New York City, there might be fewer skyscrapers nowadays.
In Egypt, "ancient" Egypt, there's an account of a ball of fire hurtling from the heavens and striking a stray dog, vaporizing it.
Crazy stuff.

 

Yeah, the scale is a little short on the destruction side. Its either near-miss or the end of the world. Stupid astronomers always praying for mass-destruction.
Meteors hit the earth all the time, but the ones that are the size of rocks dont even get noticed. You can go out to the desert and find them with a metal detector.
They should rank it by size and probably damage it can cause. A small rock would be a One, a house maybe a Three, and the one in the video, Twelve. It looked like the moon crashing into the Earth.
Of which, does anyone speak fluent Japanese? All I got out of it was, "...holy crap....its big...you're all gonna die...have a nice day." in a pleasant monotone.

 

You don't need to speak japanese to understand what's going on. Basically, it's a cop-out on my part. I think she's saying "This is a hypothetical impact upon the earth from an errant planetoid. The chances of this happening are low, but it IS possible. The object would eclipse the sun over certain parts of the world, and eventually mke an agonizingly "slow" descent to the earth's surface. It would create fountains of ejecta tens of thousands of miles into thesky, as well as cause a tidal wave of such proportions that it would dwarf the world's mountains. After the initial shock of this massive object burying itself into our planet, incredible seismic energies would be released, as well as an inundating flow of magma. The final crater will eventually overflow with a sea of magma, and this spilling over will cause mountains of molten rock to roll over the surface of the earth, heating everything to intolerable temperatures, and very possibly killing all life on this planet. After the lava flow has stopped, there will be nothing left on earth but the charred ground and dried up ocean beds, a grim reminder of what once was."
Besides, I found a "Hypothetical Impact Calculator". Make your meteor as nasty as you want, set your distance from ground zero, and read the destruction.
Thereshould bea 3-d visual aid to accompany it...but oh well.
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/

 

Nice link Gross. Thanks.

 

The thing with bigger astroids is, that if we're hit, the end of the world will come. Ok, we might survive the impact, but we won't survive the aftermath. A fuckload of ash and stuff like it will be thrown into the atmosphere, and the sun will get blocked. No sun, no life. Everything dies, and there you have it.

 

That's what Hollywood would like us to believe, but in fact after the big one that mutated the dinosaurs into birds, life did go on, at least for those quick enough to adapt to a new environment. Even if all life on the surface was wiped out, the sea is still full of critters who would start the whole evolutionary process over again. Unless it was a planetoid like in the video, then we're all toast.
The scary thing is, is that we're only capable of tracking about 1% of the crap in space thats near-by, and we have zero defensive measures to protect ourselves even if we did know. Ah, but ignorance is bliss, yeah?

 

are you sure this impact calculator is good? with the average values:

impact velocity: 20 km/s
impact angle: 45 °
target: crystalline rock

it needed 5931 km diameter and 8000kg/m^3 to melt the entire earth.

 

I'd like it better if we could see it coming... do you know how much free pussy would suddenly appear? "Hey baby... don't wanna die a virgin, do you?"

 

You're looking for total earth disruption? That's why you have a problem. Crank up the speed to around 72 km/sec (comets), bring the size down to 2500 km, and the density can stay the same. The results are almost identical. This calculator is completely theoretical. The results may or may not occor. Besides, the asteroid you hurled at the earth was nearly 43% the diameter of the earth, and the probabilities of something that big being unnoticed until the last minute (let alone ever hitting the earth) are so low it probably never happened before. If it did, the Earth wasn't even solid yet, and the chances of anything else being solid at that time are very slim.
Like Wolfsbane had said, we'd probably survive the initial impact. The aftermath would kill everything. Everything meaning not small and sub-terranian or marine.
Also, you can make the meteor more dense than 8000 kg/m cubed. I'm not sure wht it could be, other than osmium. Osmium's at around 22610 kilos per cubic meter. 14 ounces per cubic inch.
That's nuts. Imagine having a weight set made of osmium! It would take up such a small space. Then people would say, "Oh, look at mister tiny-weights!"
And then you throw an osmium tennis ball at their head.
At 100 bucks a gram, this stuff is pretty close in value to crack! One of the isotopes is around 30000 bucks a gram. Only the rich could have osmium weights...

 

Hey Gross: A few months back, on the Discovery Channel, there was a program called "Before the Dinosaurs". Postulated there was the current theory that a Mars-sized planet did collide with the mostly molten Earth somewhere around 4.5 billion years ago. That collision gave us our tilt, rotation (much slower now), and Luna.

I far as I know it is still a theory, but the computer models do work rather nicely.

 

Until we find someone who saw it happen, it will continue to be a theory.

 

Ha! By "may or may not" I mean"who would be alive to care".