Monday, August 18, 2014

The Date Of The End Of The World!

We're all gonna DIE!
Planet Earth may be obliterated by an asteroid!!
And the boffins can even give us the YEAR this'll happen!!!
But don't worry: you and I will be long gone.
The coneheads reckon the Big One will happen on 16 March 2880. Riiiiiggghhhttt...
Of course, this is assuming we haven't poisoned, blown up or right royally fucked the planet over first!
However, good news is: scientists are also closer to working out how to stop this asteroid. Researchers at the University of Tennessee have found that blowing up the space rock, like in the movie Armageddon, could cause several collisions with the Earth...and that's not a good thing! So they feel the way to avoid calamity is to make changes to the surface of the asteroid in order to break it up in outer space.
The chances of Asteroid 1950 DA hitting Earth is 1-in-300, which the eggs reckon is small risk. But check out the stats:
This big rock has a diameter of 1km (3,280 feet) and is travelling at a speed of 14km (8.7 miles) per second. It'll hit Earth at around 61,000kmph (37,900 miles per hour).
The force of the collision would be like 44,800 megatons of TNT exploding and result in tsunamis and a huge change to Earth's climate.
OK, I'm rather glad I won't be here that day...

1 comment:

Liz said...

I'll break out the tinfoil hat then?