I’ve never been a big fan of nuking asteroids, but this test should cause some concern:
Don Korycansky of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Catherine Plesko of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico simulated blowing up asteroids 1 kilometre across. When the speed of dispersal was relatively low, it took only hours for the fragments to coalesce into a new rock.
“The high-speed stuff goes away but the low-speed stuff reassembles [in] 2 to 18 hours,” Korycansky says. The simulations were presented (pdf) last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.
So you have to have a big enough bomb to really do the job. I think there are better, more controllable ways.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people at the conference, and not capturing much of it, but Clark Lindsey has been monitoring the blogs and twitter feeds.
It should be a good show, because there will be no moon, and peak will be about 3 AM on the left coast. I don’t know if I’ll manage to get out of town, though. We both have to work in the morning, and it’s at least an hour drive to get far enough from LA to get a dark sky.
I love new galaxy stories. I love learning that someone pointed a telescope at an empty patch and found 1000 new spiral galaxies, each of which no doubt teems with life. Yes, I think that’s so, and no, I’ve no good explanation for why we haven’t been visited by Vulcans. I’m a fan of the multiverse theory, and I’d also be comfy with the notion that this is one of an infinite number of iteration of the universe, each with their own laws. It would be a pity if we ended up in the one whose laws were A) everything’s far apart, and B) you can’t get there, but them’s the breaks. Some galaxies, however, have it worse off. You get those peculiar ones with enormous rapacious black holes in the middle and just a smattering of stars, you think: bad neighborhood. Imagine being a sentient being in a system that evolves sufficiently to figure out it’s going to be eaten by a black hole in a few thousand years, and how this would affect society. If you knew it would be all over in 2000 years, who would build? Would anyone try to escape if there were no systems to which you could flee? Futility would be the handmaiden at every act of creation. Or it might make everything precious. Or, most likely, both, and neither. Some people would still live their lives, go to work, make what they could for their ration of time. A great many would use the expiration date as the validation of the standard-issue nihilism that affects those with attenuated adolescence, and clothe their selfishness in philosophy.
More where that came from. By the way, the few Mayans still around say that the calendar thing is hogwash. But what would they know?