this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
3 points (100.0% liked)

News

49 readers
2 users here now

Breaking news and current events worldwide.

founded 2 years ago
 

Most meteors are car-sized, and burn up in the atmosphere before reaching us. However, scale it up to a 60-feet-wide two-storey house size, and you have a bomb stronger than the Hiroshima one. - Articles from The Weather Channel | weather.com

top 7 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] tal@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, you could probably do it, but it'd be a lot cheaper and easier to just use nuclear weapons. And you could do it when you wanted, rather than waiting for an asteroid of appropriate size to be passing by.

I don't really see the utility.

[–] Flaky_Fish69@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The utility is in making it difficult to identify who it is that dropped it. Nukes are very easy to identify- down to where the ore was mined before extraction, where the ore was refined and weapons grade materials further extracted.

Also, asteroids would presumably not leave nearly as much radiation. And are relatively common in that part of the world, for some strange reason

In any case, the reality is either the guy is nuts- or this is some kind of false flag: “the us is planning to use asteroids!”…. [proceeds to drop asteroid on themselves]

[–] tal@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The utility is in making it difficult to identify who it is that dropped it.

I think that the spaceship heading up to the asteroid ahead of time might narrow it down a fair bit.

[–] Flaky_Fish69@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

kind of. yeah. i mean, don't get me wrong- it's patently nuts.

in theory, however, there's plausible deniability. Especially if they have some means of disguising the launch. Going up into orbit is common enough it could have just been a satellite launch. or maybe it was really the ESA that's doing it with all their asteroid RV missions.

[–] DrunkenEffigy@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

A 60 foot wide two story house that requires a supercomputer's worth of computing to fire with any degree of certainty at a target the size of a continent. A meteor that would require pulling the trigger probably a month before the meteor would then hit. That doesn't exactly sound like an effective strategic weapon.

[–] tal@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

The utility is in making it difficult to identify who it is that dropped it.

I think that the spaceship heading up to the asteroid ahead of time might provide one with some pretty good guesses.

[–] thesebits@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

it should be a tick episode.