Lifeboat Foundation

“Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are currently defined based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth. Specifically, all asteroids with a minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) of 0.05 au or less are considered PHAs,” NASA said in a statement.

According to NASA, asteroid 2020 ND is about 170 metre-long will be as close as 0.034 astronomical units (5,086,328 kilometres) to our planet. The asteroid is travelling at a great speed of 48,000 kilometres per hour. The distance from the earth is what categories this asteroid as “potentially dangerous”.

2016 DY30 is headed in the direction of Earth at a speed of 54,000 kilometres per hour whereas 2020 ME3 is travelling at 16,000 kilometers per hour. The 2016 DY30 is the smaller asteroid of the two as it is 15 feet wide.

Visiting from the most distant parts of our solar system, it made its once-in-our-lifetimes close approach to the Sun on July 3, 2020 and will cross outside Earth’s orbit on its way back to the outer parts of the solar system by mid-August. Join experts on #NASAScience Live Wednesday, July 15 at 3:00 p.m. EDT to learn more about this comet and how you can spot it before it’s gone. Submit questions now using #askNASA and set a reminder to tune in!

He stresses that these are not “luxury bunkers” for the top 1 percent, and only a small part of the calls are coming from Doomsday preppers or Cold War-era holdovers. Rather, about two-thirds of his business comes from consumers who pay approximately $25,000 for an underground livable dwelling. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Woodworth said he has been unable to keep up with the demand.

When we were told to stay inside our homes, a portion of the population quietly went below ground.

North Korea’s embassy in Moscow has threatened to use its nation’s nuclear weapons against the United States in what they claim would be “a particularly sensational event,” a Russian state-owned news agency reports.

The reporting comes from the TASS news agency, a state-owned wire service known largely as a propaganda outlet for the Kremlin, which claims the embassy sent them the threat in the form of a statement over the weekend.

The agency quotes the embassy as stating, “This year, the U.S. military has been carrying out various kinds of military maneuvers in South Korea and its vicinity with the purpose of striking North Korea quickly.”

Former astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman: For the long-term survival of our species, we have to become a multi-planet being.

With our rising planet’s population competing for space and resources, some people are convinced we need to look beyond Earth to help ensure humanity’s survival. As Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind space tourism company SpaceX told Aeon’s Ross Andersen: “I think there is a strong argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.”

Continue reading “We must become a multi-planet species” »

Sending a handful of people certainly could serve as a proof of concept analogous to America’s Spanish and Portuguese outposts in the early 1500’s, or the English and Dutch settlements in the early 1600’s. In these instances the populations measured in the dozens and would not have amounted to a lasting European presence had they not been followed by thousands of new settlers over the next few decades. But, given our more advanced technology, our level of medicine, the idea that humans could have equipment that will utilize the Martian environment to produce food, air, and other consumables, and the certainty that settlers will not be at war with the Martian equivalent of the Aztecs or Incas—couldn’t a Martian settlement survive long term with just a low number of colonists?

The answer is no—not if the goal is a permanent human presence. Not if the goal is to provide our species with some kind of extinction insurance against planetary disaster on Earth, such as a mega-volcanic eruption, nuclear war, or some other existential threat. Mars setters can use technology to get air and food from the Mars environment, but early European explorers in the New World had access to one natural resource that mid-21st century Mars colonists will not be able to manufacture: a human gene pool.

If we really want Martian colonies, we can’t send just a few Adams and Eves. We can’t set-up a Martian Jamestown of 100 people. Long-term survival will depend on the genetic diversity of a large gene pool, and this means the Elon Musk plan of sending thousands might be the only colonization plan that could work.

The probability of a Carrington-like event is estimated to be 12% per decade – that’s about a 50/50 chance for at least one in the next 50 years. Investments and upgrades, cheap compared to those other natural disasters require, could protect the worlds electric grid against even the nastiest of storms.

Sources here https://sites.google.com/view/sourcessolarflares

Continue reading “Could Solar Storms Destroy Civilization? Solar Flares & Coronal Mass Ejections” »

A research team from ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen counted over 136,000 rockfalls on the moon caused by asteroid impacts. Even billions of years old landscapes are still changing.

In October 2015, a spectacular rockfall occurred in the Swiss Alps: in the late morning hours, a large, snow-covered block with a volume of more than 1500 cubic meters suddenly detached from the summit of Mel de la Niva. It fell apart on its way downslope, but a number of boulders continued their journey into the valley. One of the large boulders came to a halt at the foot of the summit next to a mountain hut, after traveling more than 1.4 kilometers and cutting through woods and meadows.

On the moon, time and again boulders and blocks of rock travel downslope, leaving behind impressive tracks, a phenomenon that has been observed since the first unmanned flights to the moon in the 1960s. During the Apollo missions, astronauts examined a few such tracks on site and returned displaced rock block samples to Earth. However, until a few years ago, it remained difficult to gain an overview of how widespread such rock movements are and where exactly they occur.

The asteroid is estimated to be 1,100 ft. in diameter, while the Empire State Building stands at approximately 1,400 ft. tall.