If you're having trouble getting to sleep at night

Poststructural Pub
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This is not going to help-

Orbits of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids

dave boling

Also notice that, during its orbit, Mars gets quite a bit closer. Can anyone say:

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And maybe some day Talby will visit us as he circuits the universe with the Phoenix Asteroids…

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Loved it.

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Not to us, it doesn’t. The closest it can come, theoretically, to us is about 34 million miles. This compares with the moon being only 239 thousand miles away, and many asteroids being much closer, or even hitting us, which they do, apparently, every day. Relatively big ones have come within about 20 thousand miles within the last couple of years, including one in February of this year, measuring 40 metres by 20 metres (for some reason, they never seem to be able to give you the third measurement - or they don’t want to :astonished: ).

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W-e-e-l-l-l, the bolide that caused the Chicxulub Crater is estimated to have had a diameter of 6.2 km. It released an estimated energy equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT. Big enough for me. . . :astonished:

Bob

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It definitely is. Probably hasn’t been another like it in the last 65 million years (I read). But those “relatively big” ones, of 40m would cause damage enough if they hit us.

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Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way’.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it’s just three thousand light years wide.
We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.