Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: existential risks – Page 76

The Dishchii’bikoh meteorite fall in the White Mountain Apache reservation in central Arizona has given scientists a big clue to finding out where so-called LL chondrites call home. They report their results in the April 14 issue of Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

“LL chondrites are fairly common meteorites with low-oxidized and low metallic (LL) iron content,” said Peter Jenniskens, the lead author and meteor astronomer with the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center. “We want to know where they originated because the damaging Chelyabinsk airburst of February 15, 2013 in Russia, was caused by a particularly large 20-meter sized LL chondrite.”

LL chondrites originate from somewhere in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where a parent body broke up and created a family of asteroids long ago. Occasional collisions with those eject rocks into orbit around the Sun. When these small asteroids collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they cause a bright meteor from which pieces survive sometimes and fall on the ground as meteorites.

Read more | >

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A barrage of North Korean missiles fired from both the ground and fighter jets splashed down on the waters off the country’s east coast on Tuesday, South Korea’s military said, a show of force on the eve of a key state anniversary in the North and parliamentary elections in the rival South.

The back-to-back launches were the latest in a series of weapons tests that North Korea has conducted in recent weeks amid stalled nuclear talks and outside worries about a possible coronavirus outbreak in the country.

North Korean troops based in the eastern coastal city of Munchon first launched several projectiles — presumed to be cruise missiles — on Tuesday morning, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.

Read more | >

The cigar-shaped interstellar visitor to our solar system known as ‘Oumuamua could be the remnants of a larger body that was torn apart by its host star, according to researchers.

The dark, reddish object that hurtled into our solar system in 2017 and was named after the Hawaiian word for messenger or scout has long puzzled scientists.

Among its peculiarities is the lack of an envelope of gas and dust that comets typically give off as they heat up. Further work by experts suggested the body was accelerated by the loss of water vapour and other gases – as seen with comets but not asteroids. The upshot was that ‘Oumuamua was labelled a “comet in disguise”.

Read more | >

The huge “potentially hazardous” asteroid 1998 OR2 is just a few weeks away from its close encounter with Earth, and you can watch the giant space rock’s approach online or with a small telescope.

While asteroid 1998 OR2 is large enough to wreak havoc on Earth if it were to strike our planet, it won’t come anywhere near a collision when it flies by on April 29.

Read more | >

This is the latest Lifeboat Foundation update on our worldwide pandemic.

It is also at https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifeboatfoundation/permalink/10158811699298455.

Key summary of this report:

  1. Hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, zinc sulfate, and massive amounts of vitamin C taken intravenously should reduce your chance of death by about 50% and any hospital stays should be reduced by 50% as well. (Freeing up ventilators.) This treatment should be begun within 5 days of getting coronavirus symptoms.
  2. Wearing any type of mask should reduce the chance of transmitting the virus by 50%. You can reuse a mask by placing it in an oven at 170℉/77℃ for 30 minutes.
  3. Taking 2,000 IU per day of vitamin D should reduce your chance of infection by 50%.
  4. Social distancing should reduce the rate of infection by 50%.
  5. Ventilators are being overhyped by the media and you should take steps to avoid being put on them since they are associated with up to 80% death rates.

Following these four recommendations should improve everyone’s chances by a factor of 16 and get this pandemic under control. (All percentages are approximate, of course.) Such recommendations would bring the end to our extreme quarantines.

VENTILATORS
Ventilators can be shared in an emergency by 2 to 8 patients each. Simply sharing with 2 people plus following our four recommendations will increase the overall ventilator supply by a factor of 32. Learn more at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/health/coronavirus-ventilator-sharing.html.

Patients are experiencing death rates as high as 80% on ventilators as discussed at https://time.com/5818547/ventilators-coronavirus. (50% is the best death rate being recorded anywhere.)

Continue reading “Coronavirus Update III” | >

Planetary defense researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) continue to validate their ability to accurately simulate how they might deflect an Earth-bound asteroid in a study that will be published in the April issue of the American Geophysical Union journal Earth and Space Science.

The study, led by LLNL physicist Tané Remington, also identified sensitivities in the code parameters that can help researchers working to design a modeling plan for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission in 2021, which will be the first-ever kinetic impact deflection demonstration on a near-Earth asteroid.

Asteroids have the potential to impact Earth and cause damage at the local to global scale. Humankind is capable of deflecting or disrupting a potentially hazardous object. However, due to the limited ability to perform experiments directly on asteroids, understanding how multiple variables might affect a kinetic deflection attempt relies upon large-scale hydrodynamic simulations thoroughly vetted against relevant laboratory‐scale experiments.

Read more | >