Veritasium
1 HN recommender · recommended in 6 months, 2021–2023
20:06 · 81M views · Nov 30, 2020
A Veritasium video on the asteroid threat, with UCLA's Dave Jewitt explaining detection efforts and how different asteroid sizes compare in damage.
HN cites it in asteroid threads for how well-tracked large asteroids are and how hard deflection is.
7 comments from Hacker News
How old is the data? You can only forecast an asteroid's future path so far, given the snapshot of data you have. Veritasium video with Dave Jewitt of UCLA explains a lot about what were doing about asteroids. this video
> But I think the point I was making stands. There are certainly innovations that sounds illogical but turn out to be very successful. Just because something sounds like a bad idea doesn't mean it is, it just means it hasn't worked yet. No because your point was about horses being replaced by cars, which is what people (and probably horses) were skeptical about at that time. In the same way IBM was saying that computers will never appear in homes, etc. But these devices were already there. The misconceptions were about predicting demand and miniaturization. This is completely different from terraforming. You are comparing "oh these devices sure never will be popular enough to make this other thing obsolete" with "lets nuke the Mars to create an atmosphere so we can live on it" (always winter, yeay).[0] Your argument is bad because by saying "technologies were laughed at in the past" every technology that sounds laughable should be taken seriously? No. This is the same trap that Theranos investors had fallen in. It is all a fantasy. We humans are very bad at estimating what is possible and what not. E.g. our inability to divert asteroids [1]. That is already a hard problem and currently not possible to do. I am not against crazy technological ideas, for example the space elevator had a surprisingly good feasibility to being realized before we polluted our planet's atmosphere with junk. Terraforming Mars is in the Theranos land of crazy ideas though. > Just like I also didn't t
We've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our solar system [1]. There are smaller ones that won't end life on Earth that are still concerning, but the quandary is we have almost nothing to do even if we detected a threat from an asteroid. [1] this video
Yeah because it's pretty much impossible. It's unbelievably hard even detecting an incoming asteroid let alone prevent it. See: this video
This video has comparisons of devastation that would be caused by different sizes (around 7:50 mark) of asteroids: this video