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NASA scientists are studying a massive asteroid hurling towards Earth

GymWolf

Member
Well... yeah. I mean, we could also try shooting it with several warheads but I bet that the resulting debris will be a problem as well.
What would be the plan if they realize that nothing can change the trajectory?

Building underground places to live?
 

Trogdor1123

Member
What would be the plan if they realize that nothing can change the trajectory?

Building underground places to live?
The plans to alter one are broad. There are loads of options given enough time. My favorite is paint. They paint the damn thing with a bright color and it changes it path thanks to the sun. It’s really simple and would work, given enough time.

Lots of other options too.
 

TheInfamousKira

Reseterror Resettler
What would be the plan if they realize that nothing can change the trajectory?

Building underground places to live?

They already have, basically. I think Switzerland in particular has basically an entire labyrinthine web of tunnels underground for scientific purposes, I believe. CERN type shit. Paris has the Catacombs, which, if you haven't done a deep dive beyond "it's the place with rooms of bones," there's an entire subculture and community down there, a room of movie murals, a scale model of a castle, a bone throne, and at one point a working movie theater, all brought down by explorers. There's even a Christmas tree and a shoemaker station down there. Circling to the US, there are DUMBs, deep underground military bases. There's rumors about a substantial amount in Pennsylvania.

Not to get too tinfoily, but I fully believe the governments of the world have shit like this set up, not as an Illuminati Mason type thing, but a system within the infrastructure like banks and hospitals. It's there, out of sight and mind until it needs to be utilized. It's unlikely that government heads would spout to the public "Yeah, we have underground cities built in case the world ends. I mean, it isn't ending, we swear, don't panic," and panic ensues. Beyond that, people would immediately try to find ways in for the yootoob/ecks fame and get shot. But it's inconceivable that there aren't already protocols for such a thing.
 

jason10mm

Gold Member
I think the best case scenario coming out of a big hit is oreservation of our society to reboot much faster with the handfuls of humans left. I thinknthere is a theory that about 80,000 years ago a supervolcano went off and changed the climate to the point that all humanity at the time dropped to just a few thousand breeding pairs across the globe. Imagine how much of a civilization reset that might have been and would be if it happened today.

My fear though is even if we do have archived knowledge and some humans survive the event with the skill, are there enough easily accessible resources to restart our civilization after 30-50 years? Are those Cornish tin mines that started the bronze age still able to be mined with low tech? Are there easy to get sources of iron, petroleum, nitrates? Much less the rare earth minerals and such for batteries and advanced electronics? Or have we surface mined all that stuff away and there is an unbridgable gulf between the tech we have post event and the tech we need to get to oil and ore left?

Otherwise it's back to horses and agriculture and whatever we can scavenge and recycle. Having a detailed engineering database will be useless as there will be no way to make all the cool stuff (unless the asteroid that hits us conveniently leave a bunch of ore scattered around).
 

TheInfamousKira

Reseterror Resettler
I think the best case scenario coming out of a big hit is oreservation of our society to reboot much faster with the handfuls of humans left. I thinknthere is a theory that about 80,000 years ago a supervolcano went off and changed the climate to the point that all humanity at the time dropped to just a few thousand breeding pairs across the globe. Imagine how much of a civilization reset that might have been and would be if it happened today.

My fear though is even if we do have archived knowledge and some humans survive the event with the skill, are there enough easily accessible resources to restart our civilization after 30-50 years? Are those Cornish tin mines that started the bronze age still able to be mined with low tech? Are there easy to get sources of iron, petroleum, nitrates? Much less the rare earth minerals and such for batteries and advanced electronics? Or have we surface mined all that stuff away and there is an unbridgable gulf between the tech we have post event and the tech we need to get to oil and ore left?

Otherwise it's back to horses and agriculture and whatever we can scavenge and recycle. Having a detailed engineering database will be useless as there will be no way to make all the cool stuff (unless the asteroid that hits us conveniently leave a bunch of ore scattered around).

Part of my fringe theory is that a portion of DUMBs and other underground networks are surely dedicated to storing seeds, cultural artifacts, historical texts and manuals about operating and constructing current world stuff in the event of a total planetary reset.
 

jason10mm

Gold Member
Part of my fringe theory is that a portion of DUMBs and other underground networks are surely dedicated to storing seeds, cultural artifacts, historical texts and manuals about operating and constructing current world stuff in the event of a total planetary reset.
That is probably true, but if you can't mine iron, tin, lead, copper, gold, silver, cobalt, lithium, etc cause the easy deposits are all mined out or get petroleum from a surface pool, can you really jumpstart modern society? We'd be back to hunting whales for oil and ambergris and plowing fields with shit.

Though granted just knowing about medicine, micobiology, and good recycling tech could probably get a well located society up to an early industrial age pretty quickly. But it was combustion and steam engines that replaced slaves as the source of labor, without those it's gonna be 90% of the human population back into the manual labor pool doing the hard work yet again.
 

SoloCamo

Member
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TheInfamousKira

Reseterror Resettler
That is probably true, but if you can't mine iron, tin, lead, copper, gold, silver, cobalt, lithium, etc cause the easy deposits are all mined out or get petroleum from a surface pool, can you really jumpstart modern society? We'd be back to hunting whales for oil and ambergris and plowing fields with shit.

Though granted just knowing about medicine, micobiology, and good recycling tech could probably get a well located society up to an early industrial age pretty quickly. But it was combustion and steam engines that replaced slaves as the source of labor, without those it's gonna be 90% of the human population back into the manual labor pool doing the hard work yet again.

True on the being taken back a hundred or two years with living conditions. If they've manage to keep documents/blueprints/skills related though, I think it will be more of a "working our way back up to what we know we're capable of," versus being both technologically *and* intellectually limited as it was in it's original place in human history. Knowledge is key, I think.
 

Bitmap Frogs

Mr. Community
I remember Apophis… back then the press was talking about a gravitational keyhole that if passed by the asteroid would guarantee a future impact.
 
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