It’s not big enough to fix anything. If it hits, it won’t hit America or Europe
It’s in the big nuke scale of energy, enough to do a lot of damage to a small area. Were it to hit a city, the city would need a lot of rebuilding. Were it to hit, few people would be in danger as we will have years of warning. The only people in the impact area would be “storm chasers” travelling to see the impact
Technically the solar system is a multi-body system, and everything nudges everything else, but the mass of the earth is far greater than the mass of the asteroid, to the point that it doesn’t matter.
One of the things they’re doing is calculating what it’s orbit would have to be to hit the Earth, and where it would have had to have been on its last orbit to be in that orbit
So they can look at any astronomical images of that part of the sky from then and see if it’s in the right place
If they find images of the right part of the sky at the right time and the asteroid is not in it, they know it’s not on an orbit that will hit the Earth in 2032
I science podcast I follow already warned last week that the probability would go up at first as they narrow down its trajectory.
They gave the example of a fan closing, as it gets narrow, the earth represents a bigger percentage of the remaining fan. If you keep closing the fan the Earth eventually will fall outside the fan and the percentage drop to zero.
Forever, humanity could only ever conceivably expand so far due to the expansion of the universe, so as far as we know a still insignificant portion of the universe we could colonize.
Scientists estimate that 2024 YR4 is between 130 to 300 feet (40 and 90 meters) wide, large enough to cause localized devastation near the impact site. The asteroid responsible for the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia, was probably about the same size.
Idk about you but if it levels 1287 km² of forest, I don’t think that would exactly be good news for a populated area. On the upper range, it could be equivalent to a 40 megatonne bomb.
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