Ryan Mercer's Thoughts

Ryan Mercer's thoughts, mostly random musings, spanning form 2001 to present. Freemason, geek, nutter, Whovian, 8-bit Atari enthusiast, SciFi fan.

 

 

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“Calculations by NASA and Harvard say the closest the asteroid will get to Earth is about 2.7 million miles – over 10 times the moon’s distance – in April 2047.”

This Week in Space: 2014 UR116 - Mountain Sized Asteroid

December 11, 2014 by Ryan Mercer in This week in space
Artists concept of an asteroid breaking up, via NASA JPL.jpg

While 2014 UR116 doesn't appear to pose a risk to us, there are an unfathomable amount of similar objects zipping around the solar system (and possibly zipping THROUGH the solar system, in fact rogue planets may be hurtling between star systems) and this is one of the main reasons why we need to start colonies off-world, starting with either the Moon or Mars in habitats and then working toward either a faster than light travel device or start building large enough ships (from resources mined from asteroids) and use propulsion technology that already exists like Project Orion (nuclear propulsion that reaches worthwhile fractions of the speed of light) to start several decade long missions to nearby stars in hopes of finding habitable worlds or worlds/moons good for building more habitats on to repeat the process of mining resources for sending more ships out towards stars nearby those.

We HAVE to stop fighting each other, we have to stop operating as hundreds of independent nations and operate as humans. We can fracture back into independent nations when we've colonized other planets/moons. One day another asteroid will impact the earth and cause an extinction level event, one day another super volcano (like Yellowstone) will erupt and seriously disrupt life, one day either a supernova will sterilize Earth or our own star will cool and consume the planet... yes, these things might not happen for millions of billions of years but they COULD happen today, 5 seconds from now (with the exception of our own star cooling that fast, but it could do something terrible fact is we know very little about stars and their life cycles, we haven't been watching them long enough to have a good understanding of them, we won't for another billion or two years). 

December 11, 2014 /Ryan Mercer
2014 UR116, Project Orion, nuclear propulsion, asteroid, global killer, mass extinction event, interstellar travel, colonization, Space, this week in space
This week in space
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