Huge asteroid headed for close encounter with Earth

[JimC]

Sure is lucky we got a Jupiter.

Does a better job that that punzt Jaweh...

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Asteroids ROCK!

[devogue]

What if four bollocks the size of Texas hit the Earth?

[devogue]

I suppose we would all very seriously know what semen tastes like.

[hackenslash]

[Schneibster]

How fast?

[mistermack]

I don't want to dampen the fun, but I would just point out that a quarter inch lump on one of your bollocks is much more likely to kill you than a ten kilometre asteroid.

And in a much more painful way.

Don't worry about rocks, you'd have to be dead lucky to get killed by one.

[Exi5tentialist]

I don't want to dampen the fun, but I would just point out that a quarter inch lump on one of your bollocks is much more likely to kill you than a ten kilometre asteroid.

And in a much more painful way.

Don't worry about rocks, you'd have to be dead lucky to get killed by one.

Quarter of an inch? That's enormous!

You'd have to have a complete lack of self-awareness not to spot that at 1mm. God, what do you guys do at night? Post on Rationalia?

[hackenslash]

I don't want to dampen the fun, but I would just point out that a quarter inch lump on one of your bollocks is much more likely to kill you than a ten kilometre asteroid.

And in a much more painful way.

Don't worry about rocks, you'd have to be dead lucky to get killed by one.

That would be true, if it were actually true, which it isn't, because it's rectal biryani.

Firstly, if your idiotic statement bore any resemblance to reality, a quarter-inch lump on one of your bollocks killing you would render a probability calculation of somewhere close to 1 for every entity regardless of the actual possession of suitable anatomy (this alone is enough to show that your fatuous assertion is precisely that). Since a bolide of that size would wipe out a vast portion of the biosphere, just like last time, and that we fall outside the bounds of survivability, statistically speaking, the probability that we'd be wiped out in toto is as close to 1 as to make the difference negligible, and if we weren't wiped out by the impact itself, we'd certainly be wiped out in the aftermath, with the dissolution of society in every way you can think of, and the species attempting to return to nature and failing dismally to do so, combined with those that actually make it comprising a world population in the low thousands, largely isolated into little clumps of a few hundred, falling well below the minimum viable population thresholds, and eventually those that survive would dwindle through lack of genetic diversity.

Trust me, the probability of being killed by a quarter-inch lump on one of your bollocks is not even in the same ballpark as the probability of being killed in the event of a 10k bolide impact.

[mistermack]

I don't want to dampen the fun, but I would just point out that a quarter inch lump on one of your bollocks is much more likely to kill you than a ten kilometre asteroid.

And in a much more painful way.

Don't worry about rocks, you'd have to be dead lucky to get killed by one.

Quarter of an inch? That's enormous!

You'd have to have a complete lack of self-awareness not to spot that at 1mm. God, what do you guys do at night? Post on Rationalia?

It's not that. From what I've read, you have to squeeze your bollocks between thumb and forefinger to become aware of lumps.
It's not wonder it's so deadly.

[mistermack]

That would be true, if it were actually true, which it isn't, because it's rectal biryani.

Actually, the reason I posted that was that someone I know quite well died last week from the same problem. We saw him two weeks ago, and he looked quite well, although we knew he had cancer.
You would never have believed from talking to him that he would be dead within a couple of weeks.

I have no idea of the dimensions of his lump though.

When it comes to asteroids, it's the chances of it killing me and mine that I'm interested in.
The millions of others are just academic interest I'm afraid.

[hackenslash]

Well, in the event of an impact of that size, the probability of it killing you would be about as close to 1 as it gets. We haven't had an impact of that size for a very long time, but it would see most of the life on the planet off, and our species is pretty resource hungry. Much bigger than that, and it would pretty much sterilise the planet of all life.

Sorry to hear about your friend. It's always hard.

[mistermack]

To be honest, I think you misread my post anyway.
I was making the point that you had more chance of being killed by a lump on your bollocks, than an asteroid. Because the chances of your lifetime coinciding with a time when a major impact like that occurs is roughly a million to one.
It can be read either way, I can see that.

[hackenslash]

I got your point first time, and I demonstrated that it was wrong. From a purely statistical perspective, you're far more likely to be killed by an asteroid. That's even overlooking the fact that, as originally stated, the asteroid impact was assumed. Statistically speaking, you're more likely to be killed by a >10k asteroid impact than you are of pretty much anything else (excepting only the total destruction of the Earth or Sun), simply because of the attrition rates involved.

[mistermack]

Lets assume the average reader has fifty years left to live.
There have been more than a million fifty-year periods since the last impact of that size.
There is no increased chance, just because we didn't have one yeserday.
A million to one is roughly the odds.

And that's the odds of an impact, not of you being killed.