> John K Clark said this:
> -- Start of PGP signed section.
> > <snip synopsis of mile wide asteroid>
> >
> > It looks like H bombs may actually find something useful to do.
> >
>
> Don't blow it up! Capture it! It's a 1 mile strip miners dream. This way
> we don't have to go get one. It came to us! Just launch some equipment
> to guide it into the right orbit and mine the hell out of it.
>
> We really need to know its velocity in a bad way. A slow asteroid hitting
> wouldn't be to bad. A fast one would be very bad...
Even if its relavit velocity is less than a few hundred miles per hour, if it were
on an intercept course, the earth's gravity as it approached would accelerate it
to the point that it would be traveling at around 25,000 mph when it hit.
Being a mile wide, it will be spending too little time in the atmosphere at that
speed for it to slow down very much at all.
Don't beleive me? Ask James Rogers, or check the list archives. There was an epic
battle on the subject of using moonrocks and asteroids as weapons in a Moon-Earth
war here a year or two ago(maybe it wason the transhuman list?). John kindly
concured on the usefullness of such large objects. That we now know that there are
at least 100 such large objects that will pass within 1/10th of an astronomical
unit, at least once each in the next 33 years indicates indicates that lunar
rebels will not need the use of a mass launcher to threaten Earth with. There are
plenty of much bigger rocks up there already that are passing by, just ready to be
steered off course.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@together.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive MikeySoft: Graphic Design/Animation/Publishing/Engineering ------------------------------------------------------------ How many fnords did you see before breakfast today?