Is space still threatening the Earth recently as it threatened it in the past?
In more than one historical scientific reading of thinkers, scientists, and writers, we find that the majority of ancient civilizations directed their focus towards space, and built edifices on Earth consistent with the stars and planets, and this is what we see in the Great Pyramid, the pyramids of the Mayan civilization, and many historical buildings that were considered as astronomical observatories. And the question remained… Why?
The only rational explanation seems to be that humanity has learned a lesson, and perhaps frightening lessons from space before, some of which led to the annihilation of species of living beings, as is the case with dinosaurs, and others caused global disasters for humans in different parts and regions.
Those who have followed the statements issued by the US Space Agency (NASA) over the past few days, have the same fear, that the story of humanity with more asteroids falling from the sky is still there.
(NASA) says that an asteroid called EG1988 is expected to approach Earth at a distance of 6.1 million kilometers on August 23, at 8:18 am GMT, as its path will intersect with Earth’s orbit.
The diameter of the asteroid is about 960 meters, and its speed is 14.3 kilometers per second, and it is known that objects that approach the globe for a distance of less than 7.5 million kilometers potentially pose a threat to the inhabited earth and its inhabitants.
One wonders: What can happen to the magnitudes if the asteroid changes its trajectory and gets closer or, God forbid, if it collides with the Earth?
This question is now bothering scientists of the entire universe, not just NASA scientists, which prompts us not to delve into the depth of analyzing the asteroid scene physically, but rather to search for the most effective ways to confront and confront them, so that the catastrophe does not occur… Where does the beginning come from?
Why do cosmic collisions happen?
This question seems to be the key to the main research on the phenomenon of asteroids and comets colliding with meteorites on planet Earth, and the best answer is provided by the book Vision How Sciene Will Revolutionize the 21st Century and Beyond, authored by Michio Kaku is the Henry Simat Professor of Theoretical Physics at City College in New York.
According to Kaku, the Earth lies inside a cosmic gray hall filled with thousands of “NEOS” (near-Earth objects) that could wipe out life from the surface of the blue planet.
Some scientists at the Jet Defense Laboratory “Caltech” in California believe that 2,000 or more mountain-sized asteroids are hovering in space, undetected.
In 1991 (NASA) estimated that there are 1,000 to 4,000 asteroids with a width greater than half a mile intercepting Earth’s orbit, and they could cause great damage to human civilization.
As for the University of Arizona scientists, they estimate that there are 500,000 asteroids close to Earth with a width of more than 100 meters, and 100 million asteroids intercepting the Earth’s orbit with a width of 10 meters.
Surprisingly, each year there is an average asteroid impact, creating about 100 kilotons of explosive force, but fortunately, these asteroids usually break up high in the atmosphere and rarely strike the Earth’s surface.
Going back to recent history, we find that in 1996 an accident almost occurred with these asteroids, as the asteroid JAI 1996, which is a third of a mile wide, approached a distance of 280,000 miles from Earth, or a little farther from the moon, and it could have hit the planet with a force equivalent to 10,000 megatons of explosive energy, which is greater than the stocks of Russian and American nuclear weapons.
Were there, and may still be, troubling facts about these asteroids?
That is indeed the case, as the asteroids that appeared in the years from 1993 to 1996 were first undiscovered, and suddenly appeared as if they were coming from a void, and the danger appears again in that they were not discovered by any monitoring organization supported by governments, but they were discovered by chance only, and it is very funny. The JAI asteroid was accidentally discovered by two students from the University of Arizona.
If some asteroids hit the seas and oceans, the tidal wave they create could be a mile high (pixabay)
What happens if asteroids collide?
Through more than one verified and verified scientific study, one can conclude that one asteroid with a diameter of one kilometer, i.e. close to the one that approaches Earth on the day of August 23, can cause cosmic destruction when it collides with the Earth.
Astronomer Tom Gerless of the University of Arizona estimates that the energy of such an asteroid would be about a million Hiroshima bombs. He adds, “If this asteroid hits the western coast of the United States of America, it will collapse as in an earthquake, and all buildings in New York will collapse, and the collision wave will level most parts of the United States to the ground.”
And if some of these asteroids hit the seas and oceans, the tidal wave they create could be as high as a mile, and this is enough to submerge all coastal cities in the world. On land, the dust and dirt caused by the asteroid collision, which is released into the atmosphere, will block the sun’s rays, and cause the temperature to drop dramatically.
Is there a real live example of what such a collision could do?
The last huge collision that occurred on the globe was the one that took place in Siberia at the time of Tsarist Russia, specifically on June 30, 1908, near the Tunguska River, when a comet or meteor with a diameter of 50 yards (about 45 meters) exploded in the air, causing The reason for the flattening of nearly 1000 square miles of forest, and the scene looked as if a huge hand had descended from the sky, and the scene was so fierce that the vibrations were recorded from very great distances, as they reached London.
Ancient history is full of many such incidents, so geologists tell us that about 15,000 years ago a meteor hit the US state of Arizona, causing the famous “Barringer” gap, and leaving behind a hole about four miles wide, and scientists suggest that the meteorite was of the iron type and the size of 10-storey building.
Here the conversation also brings us back to the conversation related to dinosaurs, which many scientists believe were exterminated from the surface of the earth about 65 million years ago, according to the radioactive dating of the newly discovered fossils, by a meteor or meteorite that struck the Yucatan region in Mexico, digging a hole. With a diameter of 180 miles, it is the largest object to hit the Earth in the last billion years.
What if the “G” shrapnel hit the ground?
Someone believes that life on planet Earth will inevitably end, it’s only a matter of time.
The author of this belief is Bill Maguire, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Climatological and Geophysical Hazards at University College London, and Director of the Penfield Center for Hazard Research.
Maguire is the author of several books related to space and the asteroid and meteor threat to Earth, including The Angry Planet: The Tectonic Threat to Life on Earth and Surviving Armageddon: Solutions to a Threatening Planet.
In his book “Global Disasters / Short Introduction”, he tells us that in 1993, the discovery of Caroline Shoemaker, the wife of the late planetary scientist Eugene Schoemaker (an American), whose passing was mourned by many, and her colleague David Levy, changed forever our perception of the Earth as a safe and comfortable haven isolated from The buzzes and explosions that occur in a violent volatile universe.
Shoemaker’s team had spotted 21 huge boulders that were once part of a comet being ripped apart by the massive gravitational field of Jupiter, a giant ball of hydrogen and helium bone large enough to hold within it more than 1,300 Earths like our own, but instead of spinning. Around the sun – as most comets do – Jupiter’s gravity grabbed them, and those rocky fragments now orbit Jupiter itself, the so-called “king of the planets”.
The point is that since Jupiter already has a large number of moons, adding a few more to those moons would not have been interesting, if not surprising.
However, the strange thing is that these new “moons” were ephemeral, as soon as a year passes, they end their existence by colliding with the surface of Jupiter, which gives scientists on Earth an opportunity to look at what happens when a planet hits a large mass of space debris.
On July 16, 1994, the first fragment of Comet Shoemaker struck Jupiter, sending up a huge cloud of gas and debris and setting off a rapidly spreading shock wave.
Fragment after fragment hit Jupiter, and many images were collected by the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits the Earth.
Two days after the first collision occurred, a rocky mass four kilometers in diameter – called “fragment G” – collided with Jupiter, with a force equivalent to the force of the explosion of a billion tons of high explosive TNT, which is approximately equivalent to eight billion atomic bombs in size. The one that hit Hiroshima.
The flash from this exciting collision was so intense that several infrared telescopes observing the event temporarily blinded them.
As the flash faded quickly, it revealed a massive dark impact trail larger than Earth.
The terrible images generated a terrifying question in the mind of everyone who saw them: What would have happened to the globe if the “fragment G” had hit the planet Earth instead of Jupiter?
What happened on Jupiter in 1994 prompted the acceleration of efforts by scientists in anticipation of the horror that was yet to come (pixabay)
Earth is hit by a deadly asteroid?
What happened on Jupiter in 1994 prompted the acceleration of efforts by scientists, in anticipation of the horror that is yet to come.
In 1996, just two years after the collision with Jupiter, an international body known as the Space Conservancy Foundation was formed, dedicated to promoting the search for potentially dangerous asteroids and comets.
NASA and the US Department of Defense have begun funding projects related to that body, and the UK government has established a working group to study the risk of asteroids and comets colliding with Earth.
Suddenly everyone wanted to know what are the chances of a fragment like “J” colliding with Earth in the future, and what would be the impact of that collision on our planet and on the human race in general?
The answer to the first question seemed easy: the probability is 100 percent.
Does this mean that the question is no longer: Will asteroids collide with Earth, but rather when?
Witness that throughout Earth’s long history, the earth has suffered many strikes from debris that came from space, and although such collisions are now much less common than they were billions of years ago, our planet will strike again, and the fundamental question: When will this be? As for the last question regarding how bad this will affect the human race, it depends a lot on the size of the rock that will collide with the Earth.
In another reading, it published a set of estimates for the number of near-Earth asteroids with a diameter of one kilometer or more, and the latest estimates indicate that their number is close to 1,000.
In August of 2005, scientists had identified 794 of these objects – perhaps three-quarters of their total number – and their expected future orbits to see if they pose a threat to Earth in the medium term, and research is continuing to find all of these objects, which are important from That would take at least another decades.
Once this is over, and assuming that they will be far from us, then we can feel a measure of even a little reassurance, but unfortunately the problem does not end there, as we still have to worry about another danger, which is comets.
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Comets and the future of human civilization
The talk of comets needs a stand-alone reading, but in short, it can be defined as huge quantities of rocks and ice that may reach 100 kilometers or more in diameter, and in contrast to the semi-circular orbits of asteroids, we find most comets follow elliptical (oval) paths, carrying them from positions Extremely cold in the outer solar system, or what lies behind it, until it gets close to the sun, and then goes out again.
In the depths of space, comets are mysterious objects that are difficult to detect, and yet when they enter the solar system they undergo a remarkable transformation.
Humanity has always viewed the appearance of comets as an ominous harbinger of death and disasters, a belief that is not far from the truth in any way, especially since the speed of these comets usually ranges between 60 and 70 kilometers per second, and this speed exceeds the speed of a Concorde plane 100 times, and is equivalent to about three times. The speed of asteroids near the Earth, and this makes a collision between a comet and the Earth more effective, and then more destructive and deadly.
One of the conclusions from this is that comets or meteorites hitting Earth could threaten human civilization in the future.
More than that, by analogy with previous incidents, we can give an estimate close to reality for the period of time in which we can expect another collision, as deductions from Newton’s laws of motion, there are 400 asteroids with a diameter greater than one kilometer that intercept the Earth, and will inevitably hit it at some point in the year. The future, therefore, we expect to see in the next 300 years another collision of the aforementioned size of the Siberian explosion, which could wipe out a large city from the ground.
Over thousands of years we expect to see another Barringer-type collision that could destroy an entire region, but over millions of years we expect to see another collision that could threaten the existence of humans.
Unfortunately, these asteroids have a high fluctuation factor, and as a result, NASA has allocated millions of dollars to identify these planet-killing objects, and a small number of amateurs accomplish this work.
