The U.S. has a wide variety of agencies, each of which has issued lies on a repeated basis.

And we are supposed to believe NASA when one of their spokespersons tells us that we have nothing to worry about for a long, long time?

Yeah, right.

I would love to know everything that they are not telling us.

Actually, the n-body problem in physics is notoriously difficult. Even for just 3 objects, solving for their subsequent gravitational motion is very difficult. With each additional object, it becomes vastly more difficult. We have to rely on computers crunching out answers numerically. With that in mind, you can imagine the difficulty in predicting the motion of an object like an asteroid 30 years in the future, when it’s unclear what other large objects it may even pass near.

I know this is a way late comment, but this comment almost got me in trouble at work, I was laughing so hard at my own imaginings. I’m sure Alex meant “surreptitiously” but with the slight spelling error sounding like “serpentitiously”, I’m picturing that our robot mercenaries are armed with giant snake-monsters (dragons or some kind of basiliks maybe?) somehow destroying the asteroid…maybe they have sharp horns on their heads that can crush through the rock, breaking it up, then the robots have some way to take those smaller pieces that the giant snake monster broke off, & send them off into their own orbits, and make sure those pieces are small enough that if they hit our atmosphere they’ll burn up! Maybe the robots are RIDING on necks of the snakes…like at the end of beetljuice, with the sandworm!
I’m terribly surprised that with all the people that nitpick over grammar so much on this site, nobody has commented on this yet. (Not to nitpick at your grammar Alex, if you still frequent here, as it’s a hard word to spell and I had to check three times to make sure I had “surreptitious” spelled correctly, but the image brought to mind by the spelling error was just too humorous for me not to comment!)

Finding something in space where it’s size is measured in feet and not in Earth oribt is difficult enough. For it to be an Earth-crossing asteroid means that a good part of the time it is in the sky during the day – which means it is very difficult for telescopes to see it. I’ve only been able to see Mercury once through my telescope, and that was when it was at it’s maximum distance from the Sun in our perspective. Other articles I’ve read also stated that they only had two obersvations of it where they could extrapolate it’s speed and position – the more sightings (photographs with accurate times attached) the greater the accuracy of those extrapolations.

Comet Hale-Bopp that appeared in our skies about 10 years ago was 10 miles across and was discovered independently by two amateur astronomers – one in New Mexico (Hale) and one in Arizona(Bopp), while it was still as far away as Jupiter. And the comet’s tail (which began to appear as it approached Jupiter) was a lot larger – by the time it reached it’s closest approach to Earth the sodium tail alone was 50,000 KM in length.

Something as small as 1,200 feet that doesn’t reflect nearly as much light per square foot isn’t going to be nearly as easy to see.

Your comments always make me laugh or think. Because of your posts Dear Marius this is the first blog where I had the nerve to post. Thank you.
And thank you DI! authors, I love this site!

-L.”

being 29 in 2029 ain’t so bad. if he said he would be 29 in 2036, i’d be a little worried…

-L.

You’re five years old?”

Which is probably why “Alex” was mocking “htid”…