Asteroid 2032

[MumofHennHals]

I've seen the news about the asteroid hitting Earth in 2032 anyone else feel really weird about this?

Space creeps me out anyway, but the possibility of it being catastrophic to a entire city is something else to my brain 😂

Fair, but why are you telling me this? 😂

But the ones we can't detect are too small to be a worry. He said there's a scale which was something like

Massive asteroids- called planet killers - there aren't very many of these, we've spotted all of them and tracked their orbit and they won't hit us.

Middling asteroids - called city killers, size of the one the thread is about - there are more of these and we are still trying to spot them all and work out which ones might hit us. These are the ones we would shoot with the 'Dart' robot to change their trajectory if they were going to hit us. He said scientists will probably have spotted and tracked all of these within a few years.

Mini asteroids - there are loads of these and we cant track them but on the other hand they won't do huge damage. They might at worst explode in the atmosphere causing damage to buildings and injuries, but not mass loss of life like a city killer

This is the guy who gave the talk/has written a book on this, and lots of links to articles he's done recently if you want more info https://robingeorgeandrews.com/sciencewriting

Thanks @Squarestones Bennu is massive & they don’t seem to worried about risks way into the future: https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/nasas-most-wanted-the-5-most-dangerous-asteroids-in-the-solar-system#

I thought interesting been in likely contact with a water filled planet.

https://m.jpost.com/science/article-692685 It seems the 2019 asteroid went undetected & there’s a small chance a very large one could sneak up on us.

Would we even be told if one was definitely coming to take us out? There could be lots of good reasons not to.

Thanks for those links @User14March, some more nuance to my understanding of it all :)

Wondering if that risk of us not noticing would apply to medium /city killer asteroids or the smaller ones which explode in the atmosphere (and still cause damage but not mass fatalities).

At the moment I'm more worried about my beeping smoke alarm TBH, and how to get the battery changed as quickly as possible

The Year 2038 problem is another computer time problem. Some computers store time as the number of seconds since 00:00 on 1st January 1970. If this is still stored as a signed 32 bit integer then in the early hours of 19th January 2038 they will overflow and think it is 13th December 1901. Presumably with hilarious results.

Only for very outdated computers, if they aren't upgraded between now and then. It'll be even more underwhelming than the "Millennium Bug".

If you were underwhelmed by the Millennium Bug it just goes to show what a good job was done beforehand on preventing serious problems

Absolutely, but what I mean is the 2038 problem is far smaller in scope and should be far more easily manageable.