"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

at a bar

Civilian: "I dont get why you're so bothered by it."

NASA engineer: looks left, looks right, leans in close "Because it means their aim is getting better."

lol obviously fake because NASA would never calculate anything in miles. They'd use Km like the rest of the planet.

When the consequence is world ending, that’s an okay reaction.

People just don’t understand basic probability payouts

Think of the Earth’s orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is crossed regularly by pedestrians who don’t know enough to look before stepping off the curb. At least 90 percent of these pedestrians are quite unknown to us. We don’t know where they live, what sort of hours they keep, how often they come our way. All we know is that at some point, at uncertain intervals, they trundle across the road down which we are cruising at sixty-six thousand miles an hour.
As Steven Ostro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has put it, “Suppose that there was a button you could push and you could light up all the Earth-crossing asteroids larger than about ten meters, there would be over 100 million of these objects in the sky.” In short, you would see not a couple of thousand distant twinkling stars, but millions upon millions upon millions of nearer, randomly moving objects—“all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth and all of which are moving on slightly different courses through the sky at different rates. It would be deeply unnerving.” Well, be unnerved because it is there. We just can't see it

• excerpt from 'A Short History Of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson

Geniuses of Lemmy, please help.

Given an asteroid with the mass of X, and velocity of Y. What's the closest distance it could "missed" earth before the point of no return?

I mean that's peanuts in space distances perspectives

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