Asteroid

I think #Foxxx you might need to do a little research on our solar system. Also, Newton’s three laws of motion. Our solar system is trapped in an orbit from a gravitational pull from the center of the Milky way Galaxy. In turn the Earth is trapped locally by our Sun and the moon trapped by the earth.

Sorry for the basics here, but each object as some effect on another’s determined by mass and distance from each other. As you know Jupiter is our Point Guard. It pulls in rouge elements like asteroids into its own gravitational pull. Look up Shoemaker Levy Nine. Jupiter would have more influence on most inbound objects into our system.

Something of an object you are talking about, and its approach would be hard to imagine with cause and effect. Research the Moon. For its size (Texas-ish) it has little in actual mass. Someone mentioned the collision with earth and it is just a chunk of mass broken off. The Moon is the object you want. Imagine it getting larger and brighter day by day or night by night. Torture...

So, how to change its current orbit with just a nudge? Space 1999 did a nuclear accident, but that’s cliqued a bit. However, Phobos a moon that orbits Mars. Its small, but a nuclear accident there may work. It spins out of orbit to collide with Deimos Mars’s second moon. The impact sling shots Deimos through the asteroid belt, and collides with the Moon.

The Moon’s orbit is tapped tighter with a small acceleration. This causes a slow but inevitable collision with the earth...

MartinM.

 

Anything that size would not only obliterate the Earth, but also be seen for weeks ahead of time. It always amuses me when people talk about the power of nukes compared to the energy levels in space, and they aren't comparable. The nuke barely even register compared to the energies of objects hitting each other in space. 100km asteroid is more likely to sneak in unnoticed. Asteroids are dark, but humans have a net of sensors that continually monitor the sky. The infrared of an object that big would certainly be noticed before it got anywhere near the moon. Still not much time though.

Why didn't I get a notification when he tagged me? It is indeed a simple differential equation, but you don't even need to do that. If the object is coming from interstellar space, it's going to be going very fast because it would have spent the past few years in freewill towards it. It will take about 14 days to go from the orbit of Mars to reach Earth. You don't need to do any math since there is no friction in space, so all objects fall around the same rate (altered only by their initial velocity.). Last year, astronomers caught a glimpse of such an object, and tracked it hurtling towards the sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua. There was another interstellar visitor after that, and it had a very similar speed.

Compared to the impact energy that these objects get on a regular day, they wouldn't notice even the biggest nuke going off. The energy of anything human made is several orders of magnitude too small to significantly change the orbit of anything that big. Orbits are also mathematically stable, meaning if you bump it one way or the other, it'll self correct to an extent. If you slow it down or speed it up the ellipse will increase or decrease, but the angular moment of the moon itself spinning will flatten it back out. With more moons, this effect is compounded by tidal forces that tries to lock them into resonances.

Captures and releases are (usually) very gradual processes. Humans have the technology to move an asteroid given enough time by using what's called a gravity tractor. Remember seeing recently in the news about the mission that grabbed a piece of asteroid and is bringing it back? More months before that, it flew alongside the object, and pulled it a measurable amount. They altered it's course more than enough to deflect it from impacting earth if they needed to. Of course, this was a very small asteroid, but it was also a very small spacecraft. The distances objects travel in space is so huge that changing it's trajectory by a trillionth of a degree could mean it's millions of miles where it would have been after a year.

 

I hope @Foxxx has had success with their story over the months.

Depending on the story, I don’t think you need to worry too much about how your slow motion celestial death sphere came to be on a collision course with earth.

After all, Tom Perrotta just vanished 130 million people with no explanation ever offered, and The Leftovers got picked up by HBO.

 

Thank-you montecarlo^. It's still on the back-burner.

@newjerseyrunner That was a really great explanation, I appreciate it. That will help me out a lot in terms of setting this up. Where I'm stuck at now is: would the agencies in charge of that sensory-net be told to keep silent by their governments, in the event that such a collision event were mathematically guaranteed to occur in the future?

I mean, I can only imagine the sheer chaos that would ensue when our impending extinction is not only publicly confirmed, but we're all aware of it a week in advance, and there's nothing we can do to stop it.

Or maybe it'd be more likely that the governments would claim to have a plan, and that plan fails, and maybe they even kind of know it will fail, but to try and keep order they act very confidently about it? Or maybe they don't think it will fail, but it does.

I don't like conspiracies bigger than a small group of people, because as soon as you start asking hundreds of people to keep a secret, it instantly becomes impossible and lacks the necessary suspension of disbelief in a story.

 

But if the secret only needs to be kept for about a week, it wouldn't be as hard.Plus in the ensuing pandemonium/chaos, people would be too crazy to pay much attention.

 

All good points. So then I would have to go either the "WE HAVE A PLAN! *but secretly it's probability of working is next to zero*" or "WE HAVE A PLAN! And we genuinely think it will work."

@Xoic Maybe not exactly what you intended, but this is one of the things that I wanted to explore with the story. How individuals react. Nothing shows a man's character like a real crisis, or however that saying goes. And there's something to be said about all the confusion that would erupt, all the misinformation, etc.

It wouldn't be far-fetched that media outlets and people on social media would be sharing stories about "a secret mission to evacuate top government officials to a moon base, leaving everyone else to die", or something.

 

Oh hell yeah! People come up with that kind of conspiracy theory stuff all the time, for far lesser reasons. I actually heard from a woman at the bus stop one day that the government released Covid deliberately, after distributing the vaccine to all the elites and their families.

 

@newjerseyrunner That was a really great explanation, I appreciate it. That will help me out a lot in terms of setting this up. Where I'm stuck at now is: would the agencies in charge of that sensory-net be told to keep silent by their governments, in the event that such a collision event were mathematically guaranteed to occur in the future?[/QUOTE]
No, because the number of people who would know before the government even got wind of it would be too high. The government is not running the sensor network, they simply fund it. Universities and the observatories themselves are the ones actually in control. There are procedures in place sort of like a scientific chain of command for extreme circumstances, and by the time any government is really involved it's way too late to keep the lid on. The very first thing they would do it relay the information to two to four other observatories to confirm the information. Then those lead researchers pull in a bunch of junior researchers to double check the math of the computer and track the object for several days to figure out it's real trajectory. By the time they realize what they're looking at, a dozen of the top scientists and a few dozen grad students are already in the loop. The data they are all looking at is also being shared between servers already. It's also not one government funding this, the network is spread out all over the world and so is the data.

 

Read Seven Eves by Neal Stephenson. I think you’ll find a lot of themes very similar to your idea.

Obviously, I like my idea of using an object collision to slow the Moon down. Here allows you to explore the unravel of society at large. This over a time period of several years. I’d imagine somewhat more realistic than having an apolitical event taking place over weeks.

The world Governments and their agencies would not be able to keep a lid on things for any real length of time. At some point things start to breakdown...

In Seven Eves they use the ISS as a life boat, but also the use of Nuclear Submarines in order to save the human race. Nice ideas...

Would the world powers actually come together and try to find a solution? Don’t you think that might depend more on timeline? If the cataphoric destruction of the planet is visible within 20years or so then yes, I can see that. However, if it will take about 100years then no the world governments won’t come together. This even with no technological solutions in sight... Why is that?


MartinM