Well folks, you may be just shocked that we were never able to come to a decision for those budget cut things because we have a 2 party system and neither side can agree. Thus, spending cuts across the board! Woot! The system has failed!
Good thing this was just over a measly what, $85 billion and hundreds of thousands of jobs being lost AND potential leap into yet another recession… Nothing important right? Uhg!
So what the heck is this comic about? Well, in 867 years, on March 16th 2880 A.D., either 1 of 2 things will happen… If we’re still alive by then… a LARGE meteoroid named 1950DA will either be billions of miles out into the abyss OR collide with earth. Kind of a big gap… but it was discovered and observed a long time ago and they didn’t get a good look at it. However, it will come into view again in about 2o years. At that point, we can figure out what it’s going to do.
Now… there is, unfortunately, a very high chance this thing could hit us. If it does, we’re talking about absolute devastation. This thing is big… like, a kilometer big… like, dinosaur killing mass extinction big. Ok, that one was like 4x bigger than this thing… but still, it has the potential to have the equivalent of 46,300 megaton bomb going off. Hiroshima, that was 16 kiloton. So… think of a nuke times 2.89 MILLION!! That’s big.
But on the plus side, we have 800+ years to prepare! And if we look at the current pace of politics and science, we’ll probably… well… not survive. Let’s face it, folks, the idiots in charge will bicker and argue back and forth, denying it would hit us, diverting the topic, pigeon holing the topic, or just ignoring it altogether. And since we like to cut funding for math and science in this country, our space program will consist of bottle rockets by then.
Oh, don’t worry… I’m sure by then some other smart country with less restrictive politics and large investments in technology will have something ready to save us. Maybe that 1998 movie Armageddon should have been shot in China or Bollywood to be more accurate. >)
I don’t think 1950DA is going to be a problem, if we survive the next 100 years we will be lucky.
100? if we can make it even 10 more years I’ll be surprised.
And you’ld think that Chelyabinsk’s meteor was quite the reminder…
one would think… but they’d also hear “it’s a 1 in 100yr rare event” and thus all politicians and non-sciencey folks assume we’re good for another 100 years… which means it’s not our problem.
joke will be on us soon enough… >)
You realize that it is utterly impossible to predict what will it do in 800 years? Single sneeze now can sent it milion miles away…
psh… butterfly effect…
anyways, many things can be calculated pretty darn “accurately” to within a few thousand miles or so…
buuuuuuut as you said, 800 years is a very long time. and just one change in a variable or it hits a space butterfly then it’ll be flung off course to who knows where. which is why they have a lovely range of “hitting us” to “billions of miles into deep space”. still… it can still be considered a threat with current trajectory calculations.
time will only tell… but none of us will be around for it, so good luck to future generations! still, they’ll have worse to deal with, like the zombie apocalypse, alien invasions and politicians.
Meteor coming towards earth? Better hope China deals with it, America won’t get there in time