insane_alien

kuiper belt is outside the orbit of pluto. you are thinking of the asteroid belt which is between mars and jupiter. you mentioned it when you mentioned asteroids larger than pluto. there are only a handful of these discovered and all of those a lot further away than pluto and on non earth intersecting orbits. it would take quite a disturbance for them to get as close as neptune never mind earth.

it uses a lot of faulty logic. for instance, the immortality one. just because i cannot be concious of being unconcious, does not mean that i am immortal. it means i will not be able to percieve being dead. mainly because i will be dead and hence not concious. fact, people die. fact, immortal is defined as undying. conclusion, humans are not immortal.

i never said there would be EMP with a metoerite strike. when i mentioned EMP i was reffering to nuclear weapons. the EMP is caused by the intense heat generate at the moment of explosion in the nuclear blast which is several times the temperature of the suns core. a meteorite explosion does not get hot enough and takes a longer time to complete(several seconds rather than a few microseconds). although if the meteorite was large enough i suppose it is possible there could be some EMP aspect to it. about the same as you'd find in the earths crust. not sure what this has to do with it. not all radioactive materials are suitible for making a nuclear bomb.

that depends on the altitude. there is an optimum altitude for airburst of a specific yield where it will do more damage than a ground burst. above or blow this altitude, the explosion does less damage than the optimum. tunguska likely exploded WAAAAY above its optimum altitude where the atmosphere is still a pretty damn good vacuum which cause the atmosphere to be a poor transmitter for the shockwave. much like how the high altitude nuclear blasts caused little more than a spectacular light show(ignoring the EM pulse effects) with no more blast than a loud noise. just checked up, typical optimum airburst heights for nukes are several hundred meters maybe a kilometer for a really big one. tunguska would have detonated at over 10 kilometers, probably about 30-50km. definitely not an optimum height.

thats the thing though, it never hit the ground, it detonated in the air which lessened the force felt. if it had hit the ground the effects would likely have been more severe.

there are some kuiper belt objects larger than pluto but those are few and far between and just as likely to hit the earth as pluto is.

if anything 96% can kill them more effectively. why do you think 62% is the most effective?

could be the first peaceful nuclear missile launch.

i was talking about a parabolic orbit where the object is travelling at escape velocity at the periapsis.

depends on if the orbit crosses the surface of the gravitational partner. its quite possible to have a paraboloic/hyperbolic orbit that goes below the surface. evidence: every single meteorite.

bit late t the party aren't you? also, when answering try to answer the question rather than just defining part of the question which presumably the poster already knew.

ion engines are really only useful if we have about a decades warning. saying its at the orbit of mars doesn't really tell us much because pretty much all of the objects likely to hit the earth will take many many orbits to hit us and never actually get that far away from earth. robotics are sophisticated enough to launch an automated mission already. including a land, drill and place a nuke in the middle mission.

luckily, we have thousands of nukes to take care of that when brute force doesn't work, use more. yep, this is the current plan of action insofar as we have one. tiny tweaks long before it is a threat. ion engines are actually quite well tested there have been whole deep space missions dedicated to the testing of them and some even exceeded performance requirements. they run fine for years at a time. infact, we are getting ready for the second generation of ion engines that allow for much greater thrust and efficiency (VASIMR). but in a pinch, nukes are good enough delivering huge amounts of energy quickly.

one concept is a bunker buster nuke, the nuke travelsinto the rock a distance then detonates, the vapourised rock acts as reaction mass pushing the asteroid off course. another relies solely on the radiation produced vapourising the surface again using the vapourised rock as reaction mass. its either that or get enough nukes inside it to make sure there are no pieces left that are big enough to make it through the atmosphere.

Europe, its awesome. i live there, i holiday there no need to visit the other ones(though i have been to north america, asia and africa.)

we have a newsletter?

yes, if you are installing something server side you must use something compatable with the host OS. in this case(and in 90% of webservers cases) linux.

actually as i was typing it i was thinking of satellites orbiting the earth rather than planets.

its due to raindrops being spherical, only one certain angle bounces the spectrum of light back towards you, this angle is the same as there is between both sides of the rainbow as you see it. it is also why they always appear a uniform distance away.

well, it shouldn't be hard to find a linux version of dvipng. a quick google should give you that. start with the dvipng homepage. its gpl so the source will be there at anyrate.

well, a circular orbit is one type of elliptical orbit. orbits are not always circular due to the fact that you might be going a little bit faster or slower than the velocity needed for a circular orbit. if you are going faster, you will increase in altitude and if you go slower, you'll drop. the shape this causes in orbit is ellipses with the earth at one of the focus points.

yes, this is because gravity is spherically symmetric(pulls equally in all directions.) although in saying that it is possible to distort the event horizon from a sphere with another gravitational field but your not going to to see significant distortion unless you have another blackhole passing close by.

N/M got ninja posted by mokele

because it would stop exhibiting signs of alzheimers.

the problem with using an RC car controller is the lack of functions. my RC car has two levers. one for forward/back and another for left/right. RC aircraft require more than this. you'd need a throttle, pitchup/pitch down and yaw left/right at the very least for an RC helicopter. if it has proper controls on the main rotor then you'll need a whole bunch more levers and buttons. for an RC plane you can replace the yaw with roll but it would be prefereable to have both. you need more controls than an RC car for one very important yet often overlooked reason, you have an extra dimension to work with. RC cars have nice simple two lever controls because they only have two dimensions you can control travel in. RC aircraft have three dimensions they can move freely in and hence need at least three controls.