Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Express reports that a colossal one mile wide asteroid will brush past the Earth this Thursday, with a closest approach of 3 million kilometres – far too close for comfort, with a rock that big.
According to The Express;
The gigantic missile thought to measure almost a mile across will brush closer than previous monsters which have sparked a global panic.
Worried astronomers warned 1999 FN53, which is an eighth of the size of Mount Everest, will skim the Earth in THREE DAYS.
A collision would be nothing short of catastrophic triggering mass destruction, earthquakes and global extinction.
The monster is more than TEN TIMES bigger than other meteorites currently visible on NASA’s Near Earth Object radar.
It is also double the size of the gargantuan 2014-YB35 which had astronomers around the world watching the skies in March.
Experts warn a collision would trigger an explosion similar to millions of megatons of TNT and would be capable of killing 1.5 billion people.
On this occasion a collision seems unlikely – but it doesn’t take much of an orbital perturbation to put an Earth grazer onto a collision course.
A collision of 1999 FN53 with Earth, especially an ocean strike, would be nothing short of catastrophic. The fire and blast alone would likely kill millions. It would cause massive earthquakes across the world. An ocean strike would raise mountain size tsunamis which would smash coastal cities thousands of miles from the strike. The climate impact would also be significant – the Younger Dryas, a brutal collapse in global temperatures which lasted 1200 years, may have been caused by an asteroid impact.
What could we do if a large Asteroid on a collision course was detected? The answer is quite a lot, given a few years warning. The Manhattan Project scientists, in the 1950s, developed a simple design for a space drive whose capabilities were straight out of science fiction – capable of lifting gigantic payloads in a single stage to orbit. The most powerful designs could have powered starships – up to around 10% of the speed of light. Such a ship could be built in a year or two, if it was a priority, and would be more than capable of pushing a dangerous asteroid into a different orbit.
Remember the Chelyabinsk meteor even in Russia in 2013? The cognoscenti and paid help didn’t even see it coming because they were singularly focused on asteroid 2012 DA14.
Gary Hladik says: “Carl Sagan had a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics, was a full professor at Cornell University, published hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, and–unfortunately for Professor Velikovsky–was an acknowledged pioneer and expert on the atmosphere of Venus. He was indeed a “showman”, but if that disqualifies him, remember that Velikovsky was more than his equal in “showmanship”, if not in popularity…”
Actually I think if you had read more of what transpired at the 1974 AAAS Symposium you would find the opposite occurred. The only reason people seem to think Sagan demolished Velikovsky is the media interpretation of it which quite naturally sided with Sagan. If you read the actual transcript of this symposium you will see how foolish Velikovsky’s opponents really sounded. But the entire symposium was a carefully stage-managed ambush where Velikovsky was not allowed any supporters to speak on his behalf and wasn’t given sufficient time to respond all the criticisms thrown at him. There were five critics arrayed against himself with everyone given and equal amount of speaking time. This arrangement guaranteed he would run out of time. He was not given the opportunity either to view the questions and challenges that would be levelled against him, but his critics were allowed to see his paper that he had prepared for the event. Despite this one-sided set up, he still held his own in the time that he had and earned a standing ovation from the 1400 people crammed into the hall. The media and press of course made it sound as though Sagan and his buddies had won the day. I guess they did in the end, but not because of a superior argument. They won because the entire sham event was structured that way with the buy-in of the media. But nothing in this regard has changed as we see today with the AGW nonsense. Anyway, perhaps you should read the AAAS transcript and/or the book “Scientists Confront Scientists who Confront Velikovsky”. It might open your mind a bit.
You can find it here: http://www.catastrophism.com/cdrom/pubs/journals/kronos/vol0402/index.htm
As for his revised chronology, have you actually read his ‘Ages in Chaos’ series? That too would open your mind if you allowed it 🙂
KiwiHeretic, your link requires a subscription, which I don’t have or want. I have used the transcript here:
http://www.varchive.org/lec/aaas/transcripts.htm
prepared by Lynn E Rose, a Velikovsky disciple. As with most verbal debates, there is a great deal of argument over minutiae; it is in fact quite tedious to read. Nevertheless Velikovsky is obviously and resoundingly defeated on the major points, some of which Sagan covered in his brief “Cosmos” segment linked upthread.
Something I missed the first time through: Sagan superbly summarizes the failure of Velilkovsky’s pseudoscience with one remark: “Many of the difficulties with the Velikovskian approach is the absence of quantitative thinking.” Bingo.
Contrary to your claim, Velikovsky had plenty of time to answer his critics; the symposium was extended to an evening session which Sagan unfortunately could not attend. Rose also added a number of rebuttals (marked in brackets) in his transcript, which unfortunately couldn’t salvage his mentor’s thesis.
I have not read Velikovsky’s revised chronologies because (1) I’m not qualified to judge their accuracy based on the historical record, such as it is; (2) They’ve had six decades to enter the mainstream and yet remain, as I mentioned before, fringe ideas; (3) A chronology based solely on nonexistent planetary “collisions” and ancient mythology does not inspire confidence (there’s a reason they’re called “myths”).
Some forty years after the symposium there is even less reason to accept Velikovsky, e.g. the absence of evidence for Velikovskian catastrophes in ice cores, tree rings, and ocean sediments, and errors in his historical scholarship found by Forrest, among others.
I actually read Worlds in Collision (and Earth in Upheaval) with an open mind in the late Sixties. It was Velikovsky himself who lost me with his incredibly sloppy thinking (Venus was “candescent”; Venus was “hot”; Venus had “carbon clouds”; Martian polar caps are “probably of the nature of carbon”–WTF???), impossible claims of the Earth’s rotation stopping and restarting on a timescale of minutes/hours, and supposed repeated close encounters with planet-sized objects at a fraction of lunar distance that left no mass extinctions, physical damage to the Earth, or historical records of the carnage–the last supposedly due–I kid you not–to “collective amnesia”! I would have thought that you just can’t make this stuff up, except Velikovsky did! 🙂
Since then I’ve been mystified that anyone could believe in his fantasies, but then I’m also baffled by the so-called “slayers” (the greenhouse effect would melt your face!) and believers in the “hockey stick”, astral projection, ESP, the Loch Ness Monster…
For someone who supposedly got everything wrong, he got an awful lot right in terms of predictions, eg., the high surface temperature of Venus, far hotter than expected by orthodox theories that allowed at most around 100F (it is in fact around 900F). Yes he said “hot” so Sagan and others seized on it which was pure semantics because they knew precisely what he was getting at, and besides, he also said Venus was incandescent three thousand years ago. He predicted too that Venus would be found to exhibit “disturbed (retrograde) rotation” and that polymerized hydrocarbons would be found in quantity in its atmosphere (confirmed by Mariner II). He deduced that Jupiter would send out radio noises (ie., electromagnetically energetic); that Earth’s magnetosphere would extend at least as far as the orbit of the Moon and that electricity and magnetism play a role in planetary movements in addition to gravitation and inertia; and that the planets and the Sun are electrically charged. These ideas were laughed at when he predicted them. He predicted that the Moon would present many surprises for the Apollo astronauts: that they would detect moonquakes and a steep thermal gradient just below the surface (at a time when the Moon was thought to be cold and dead); and that they would find plentiful evidence for recent melting (within the last ten thousand years), and that they would arrive at conflicting ages for the Moon rocks returned by the astronauts that would challenge existing notions on the age of the solar system. All of these predictions and deductions have since been confirmed. Incidentally, some of the lunar rocks when dated, gave ‘ages’ for the Moon that were older than the universe itself; clearly absurd.
In 1970, Professor V. Eshleman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory admitted that he was “completely mystified as to how Velikovsky reaches his conclusions. It is almost as though he does it through will power alone” considering the fact that his conclusions and prior claims go against the accepted wisdom which of course implies the impossibility of his being correct. Livio Stecchini remarked that, considering the long list of verifications of Velikovsky’s predictions, none being refuted, and the argument of his detractors that they amount to “lucky guesses”, he must have gambled and won the longest shot in history.
Yet at no point could any of Velikovsky’s detractors and critics, from Harlow Shapley in the nineteen fifties to Carl Sagan in the seventies, provide a logically robust, demonstrable proof that he was wrong without resorting to ad hoc arguments, ad hominem attacks on his integrity, or upon appeals to the authority of the greater scientific establishment and other established ideas that were themselves just theories. There was always, and indeed still is, a “consensus” of opinion that Velikovsky is demonstrably wrong, just as there was for Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bruno and many other heretics throughout history who challenged orthodox wisdom, but no one could show categorically why he must be, just as no one could show categorically why Galileo must have been wrong. It was enough for them merely to say so. Sagan says Velikovsky is wrong, ipso facto Velikovsky is wrong. Period. Velikovsky’s detractors scored points in public debates and in science journals by nit-picking and splitting hairs over fine details, to which Velikovsky once retorted with a story by Ogden Nash about a crocodile and the “conscientious scientist” Professor Twist who went on an expedition to the jungle taking his bride along with him; “When, one day, the guide brought the tidings to him that an alligator had eaten her, the professor could not but smile. “You mean,” he said, “a crocodile?”
“For someone who supposedly got everything wrong, he got an awful lot right in terms of predictions…”
Umm, no. He got some things “right” (again, hard to tell when he didn’t give numbers) for the wrong reasons, and he got a lot of things dead wrong. It’s the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.
Quoting from
http://skepdic.com/velikov.html
‘Morrison points out several other misleading claims about Velikovsky being right. For example, Velikovsky was right that Venus is hot but wrong in how he came to that conclusion. He thought it was because Venus is a recent planet violently ejected from Jupiter and having traveled close to the sun. Venus is hot because of the greenhouse effect, something Velikovsky never mentioned. As to the composition of the atmosphere of Venus, Velikovsky thought it was hydrogen rich with hydrocarbon clouds. NASA put out an erroneous report in 1963 that said Mariner 2 had found evidence of hydrocarbon clouds. In 1973 it was determined that the clouds are made mainly of sulfuric acid particles. Velikovsky was also right about Jupiter issuing radio emissions, but wrong as to why. He thought it was because of the electrically charged atmosphere brought on by the turbulence created by the expulsion of Venus. The radio emissions, however, are not related to the atmosphere but to “Jupiter’s strong magnetic field and the ions trapped within it”.’
Incidentally, if KiwiHeretic is writing a book about Velikovsky, he should get the Mariner 2 thing straight. A modern source on the atmosphere of Venus should help.
As long as we’re on the subject of atmospheres, let’s recall that Velikovsky claimed “there was an exchange of atmospheres” between Earth/Venus and Earth/Mars. No evidence for this can be found, e.g. no excess nitrogen on Mars or Venus, no sudden rises in carbon dioxide in ancient times in Earth ice cores, no petroleum or “manna” on Mars. More failed predictions.
“Yet at no point could any of Velikovsky’s detractors and critics…provide a logically robust, demonstrable proof that he was wrong.”
We’re inverting the null hypothesis here. The critics only had to poke holes in the theory. It was up to Velikovsky to prove it. He failed miserably; six decades later, it’s even further out of the mainstream than it was at its birth.
OK so our scientists are very smart and can predict with pinpoint accuracy where this will go over hundreds of years. But do they know if it was hit over the last 30 years by another rock? Did they take into account a double blast from the sun of plazma over the last 7 days? What about extreme solar wind over the last 3 weeks? Do they know if its lost mass of gained mass since then? Do they know if it passed a body in space that the gravitational pull changed its trajectory? The last three times we heard on the news “there’s no chance of it hitting us” we were hit by an asteroid during that time. They played it off as there’s no connection between these two asteroids. BS the truth is they wouldn’t sell you water in the middle of the desert if they didn’t think it would benefit them in some way. We are on our own be your own scientist educate yourselves. Some forms of matter are more dense and weigh more. This thing could weight more than the moon and cause major earthquakes just passing by. Huh sound familiar major earth quakes? No way there connected not possible…….. Everything in our universe is connected.. every action has an opposite reaction. The sun burps we get fried its happened many times and will happen again.
To be blunt, “The last three times we heard on the news “there’s no chance of it hitting us” we were hit by an asteroid during that time”, it wasn’t the one we were watching that hit us; it was some other rock on a completely different trajectory. There are thousands of meteors EVERY DAY. Most are the size of grain of rice or smaller; a few are the size of a basketball. The rare ones are the size of a car, and bigger ones are even less common. However, a meteoroid the size of a house hits the Earth every couple of years.
Most of the time, we don’t see them, because they fall over water, or over the deserts, or Antarctica, or during the day. But there are still a few every day that are bright enough to be seen by the very limited sky cameras located around the mid-west and south, and are displayed on spaceweather.com.
To use the car analogy that another poster used, you’re hardly ever in an auto accident – but you hit bugs every day, and probably the occasional bird.
Ok, Thursday is here. Are we still alive? Righto then, send money to dodgy brothers asteroid removalists P.O Box 6969 you will never see your money again street, scam artist town, and we will make sure to build a perfect 100% accurate laser operated asteroid killing device. Also to make sure your house is not “accidently” hit by flying debris, we can guarantee, nice house you have there, that nothing will happen to it for an extra 1,000 dollars US. 90 day money back guarantee if you get killed, but only if you apply in person after the event.
“The Manhattan Project scientists, in the 1950s, developed a simple design for a space drive whose capabilities were straight out of science fiction – capable of lifting gigantic payloads in a single stage to orbit. The most powerful designs could have powered starships – up to around 10% of the speed of light.”
I don’t think the Orion nuclear pulse rocket will work. The plasma is at 67,000 C. It will vaporize the pusher plate. They have to use magnetic confinement similar to fusion reactors. Like in chemical rockets, the propellant is consumable so it has to carry large mass of propellant. That will slow it down. Magnetic confinement needs a lot of energy to counteract the tremendous force of nuclear explosion. They need electric batteries or electric generator to power the electromagnets. Added mass that will slow it down. If it were practical, they would have built it in the 1960s.
“It will vaporize the pusher plate.”
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Check out the following video. At about 18:50 there’s a story of a scientist actually finding parts of the tower for the first atomic test, which he thought had been vaporized.
At 23:25 Freeman Dyson describes the crucial calculation of how much of the “pusher plate” is lost with each explosion. Theory says the plate survives. I’m wondering if this was actually looked at in any subsequent underground nuclear tests.
“If it were practical, they would have built it in the 1960s.”
It was impractical, but not for scientific or engineering reasons. Nuclear fallout was a political issue at the time, and modest nuclear fallout was an unavoidable side effect of an Orion launch.
Nuclear fallout is the least of my concern. There’s a hole in the center of pusher plate. Hot plasma and shock wave will enter the hole and ignite the pulse units (mini nuclear.bombs) stored in the rocket. The whole rocket will explode with a giant mushroom cloud. I respect Dyson as a theoretical physicist but he’s a lousy engineer.
It’s not just how much of pusher plate is lost with each explosion. The strength of materials weakens tremendously when exposed to 60,000 C and intense pressure. The pusher plate may not be all lost but the remaining will crumble into pieces.
There was a hole in the pusher plate for the conventional explosive-powered test vehicle(s). Multiple explosions below the plate didn’t ignite the next explosive package. Dyson wasn’t the only scientist/engineer on the Orion team, so you’re claiming, in essence, that you’re smarter than all of them. I assume your real name, then, is Sheldon Cooper. 🙂
Conventional explosives don’t reach 60,000 C. Nuclear energy is 400,000 times greater per unit mass than chemical energy. Argument by authority doesn’t impress me. If they were smart, they should have used nuclear explosive in the test. I will be glad to debate any of them.
“Argument by authority doesn’t impress me.”
Nor me, as you can see from my replies to you. 🙂
You invoked Dyson as an authority. I’m no authority.
Assuming the they can fix the hole and pusher plate problems. How will the Orion rocket perform vs. chemical rockets? The nuclear explosions occur in unconfined space. The ions will move in all directions. Only those pointing to the pusher plate will provide thrust to the rocket. This is less than 1/6 of the mass of the propellant.
Conservation of momentum dictates how much propellant is needed:
1/6 Mo Vo = Mc Vc
The equation is a comparison of the Orion rocket with a chemical rocket. Where: Mo is the mass of propellant of Orion rocket; Vo is ion velocity of Orion; Mc is mass of propellant of chemical rocket; Vc is exhaust velocity of chemical rocket. Rearranging the equation to get the mass ratio:
Mo/Mc = 6 (Vc/Vo)
The exhaust velocity of liquid propellant chemical rockets (Vc) is 4400 m/s. The propellant of Orion rocket is tungsten. We can calculate Vo using Maxwell velocity distribution. Tungsten atomic mass = 183.84 and plasma temperature = 67,000 C. The mean velocity of ions (Vo) = 2783 m/s
Solving for the mass ratio:
Mo/Mc = 6 (4400 / 2783) = 9.5
Therefore, to carry a one kilogram payload and accelerate it to X velocity, the Orion rocket must carry 9.5 times more propellant by mass than chemical rockets. It is disadvantageous compared to chemical rockets. Not to mention other problems such as nuclear fallout and the whole thing might detonate like a Hiroshima bomb.
Dyson et al should have done this practical calculation. Instead Dyson did theoretical calculations on the hydrodynamics of shock waves. Interesting stuff but little engineering significance.
“I’m no authority.”
That was clear from your original comment, hence my skepticism.
Project Orion would have used “shaped” nuclear charges, improving your pusher plate mass collection from about 1/6 to nearly 1/2. The actual velocity of the propellant was more like 150,000 m/s, giving a specific impulse in the thousands, roughly 13 times the specific impulse of the space shuttle main engines.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id–Pulse–Orion
“Dyson et al should have done this practical calculation.”
They did, and they did it better than you did. Again, it wasn’t engineering that killed the project, it was politics.
I’m skeptical of you and generally of people claiming authority. Ions have different velocities so you need to compute mean velocity from a velocity distribution, which is dependent on the temperature of plasma. The fantastic exhaust velocities claimed can surely be attained by some fast ions but not all. Believe all you want in authorities. A food for thought. Russia was ahead of the space race in early 1960s and remained a communist dictatorial nation until 1990. They copied the atomic bomb. They copied the H-bomb. But somehow they were not interested in copying Orion. It was not politics. It was likely engineering.
Goodbye and thanks for the info. I will try to convince myself or the Russians or the Chinese to take this seriously.
You were wrong about the pusher plate disintegrating, wrong about embrittlement of the plate, wrong about predetonation of the bombs, and wrong about the specific impulse of the propulsion system. Yet you insist it was dropped for “likely engineering”. WUWT?
“But somehow they were not interested in copying Orion.”
Copy what? Nuclear bombs were real. No Orion spacecraft was ever built.
Perhaps both Velikovskians and anti-Velikovskians should read “Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky” by Charles Ginenthal. Mr Ginenthal picks 8 of the major arguments that Sagan used to allegedly refute Velikovsky’s thesis. He then demolishes Sagan’s work, showing, quite often from Sagan’s own words in his books and articles, that Sagan was wrong in his arguments. This does not prove Velikovsky right, but still, when Sagan can so easily be shown to have been wrong, and even hypocritical ……
Gary Hladik, you state: “I have not read Velikovsky’s revised chronologies because (1) I’m not qualified to judge their accuracy based on the historical record, such as it is; (2) They’ve had six decades to enter the mainstream and yet remain, as I mentioned before, fringe ideas; (3) A chronology based solely on nonexistent planetary “collisions” and ancient mythology does not inspire confidence (there’s a reason they’re called “myths”).”
I would assume that as an unbiased reader, using your commonsense and logic, you would be able to judge, not their accuracy but whether V presents a logical argument or not. (BTW, the only relevance of this “nonexistent” planetary collision to his chronology is his starting point – a “What If”. His chronology does not depend to any extent on ancient mythology, but on documentary evidence.) He observes the “accepted” Egyptian Chronology does not dovetail in any respect with Hebrew chronology, and identifies where there are problems in the “accepted” version. Having done that, he shows that it is possible to align Egyptian and Hebrew chronology in a consistent manner. You should also read “A Test of Time” by David Rohl who, without subscribing to V’s views, identifies at least two major archaeological facts which identify errors of more than 100 years in the “accepted” chronology.
If I remember correctly, V stated that “Worlds in Collision” depended in the first place on his revision of Egyptian history. “Ages in Chaos” was conceived first, and used as the starting point for W in C.
Looks rather like it missed!