A Side Affect of Planetary Bombardment

The asteroid 2022 WJ₁ was discovered heading to Earth with three hours of notice before impact (it did impact) on Nov 19, 2022.

This asteroid was a mere 1 metre wide.

Sure, it was less than half a light-second away when it was detected (just over two fifths), but c'mon, that's the smallest asteroid ever discovered while it was still in space.

tlb wrote:

Theemile wrote:Everyone also forgets the opposing shock impact - the shock energy hits with so much force, it causes a bulge out the other side of the planet. If you look at the opposite side of the planet from Chicxulub, you will find an area of the seafloor that look like a giant scab - risen and broken apart, with the layers upended.

So even if you were on the opposite side of the planet, the force of the impact would set off a 2nd tsunami/seismic event which could endanger you.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:Really? Exactly where is this? Most of the oceanic floor that existed at the end of the Cretaceous is long gone, swallowed by trenches. The biggest piece of oceanic crust that has survived is currently in the North Pacific, being fed into the Izu–Bonin–Mariana trenches.

Theemile wrote:I don't remember exactly where - I saw a documentary about 10 years go where they were running a simulation of the impactor where the outcome showed the far side of the earth distorting from the impact, which completely surprised the geologists. they looked where the models predicted and there was a geologic anomaly there under water. I was expecting the location to the the Siberian volcanic traps, which started erupting "shortly" after the Chicxulub impact - but no direct relation (other than the entire globe would have been flexing from the impact, and popping at the seams.)

After only a brief search I did not find the reference you mentioned, but I did find this speculative video on Youtube. There are articles suggesting earthquakes and tsunamis at the antipode of the Chicxulub impact, but I did not see anything more definite on it. Note that the antipode of the dinosaur killer is not in Siberia, but seems to be off Australia; also that event was about 66 million years ago, not the 250 million when the Siberian Traps event occurred. The event you meant was the Deccan Traps in India.

Asteroid Impacts Cause Volcanoes to Erupt on the Opposite Side of the Planet

The worst mass extinction event on the planet, called the Permian Triassic extinction event, was caused by the eruption of several million cubic kilometers of lava at the Siberian Traps. However, these volcanoes may have an unexpected origin, an asteroid impact. On the exact opposite side of the planet, the large Wilkes Land Crater exists right at the antipode of where the Siberian Traps began. This video will discuss the theory that certain flood basalt volcanoes originated from large asteroid or comet impacts.

Thanks TLB, you saw through the holes in my memory.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:All this said, this is not the way that RFC has made the Honorverse. The one major departure from known physics that the HV got was gravitics, which gave us hyperspace, gravity waves, tractor/pusher beams, impellers and wedges, Warshawskis and Warshawski sails, countergrav, gravity plates and artificial gravity, FTL communication over interplanetary distances, and even TWTSNBN. The wormholes are sort of an after-thought to gravitics, and partially explained by them. The rest of the HV technology appears to be within known science, be it molycircs, genetics, fusion reactors, nanites, or mind compulsion. Sure, extrapolations from known science, but they're reasonably explained by what we know.

I'd say there's a second big departure from "known physics": Telepathy.

And as no one knows how it works after hundreds of years of treecat research (and a few humans capable of teleempathy), their telepathy seems to use some unknown transport medium. They seem to interfere with neither radio waves nor gravity waves or anything else known to science / physics at that time, at least there's no mention of either humans detecting telepathy "signals" with their sensorics, nor any mention of treecats "seeing" or being disturbed by human radiowave or gravity based technologies.

We know that the range is limited to a few kilometers, maybe at most about some hundred or so kilometers, and the signal strength (and detail of transmitted information) decreases with distance, although at least direciton finding seems to be possible over long distances. Stephanie Harrington and her Treecat could locate each other over considerable distances, and even Alfred Harrington had been able to locate the exact position of Allison Benson-Ramirez ý Chu over huge distances back then when she had been kidnapped on Beowulf.

So, as far as I can see, telepathy as described for the HV requires some "unknown" physics to provide the underlying communication medium, so the biological/medical/psychological fiction of telepathy and teleempathy can actually work.

The asteroid 2022 WJ₁ was discovered heading to Earth with three hours of notice before impact (it did impact) on Nov 19, 2022. https://get-mobdro.com/home/

ghazestor wrote:The asteroid 2022 WJ₁ was discovered heading to Earth with three hours of notice before impact (it did impact) on Nov 19, 2022. https://get-mobdro.com/home/

Hello ghazestor

Welcome to the forum (though you joined a month ago).

I also mentioned that asteroid, to prove that we could detect them with today's technology. Though that one was detected inside the Moon's orbit, so it didn't help my case much. What it does show is that we need constant surveillance, because those rocks get thrown out of their orbit constantly. In particular, if you have installations outside of your atmosphere, then those are actually not harmless if they strike anything. And the more you have up there, the larger the chance of there being a collision and a Kessler Syndrome.

That means you want to see anything bigger than the size of a boulder far enough out that you can take corrective action. Particle shielding will deal with most smaller things and some boulders, but above that you may need to use low-power PDLCs. It's much better for the system as a whole if the traffic control does this scanning, instead of each ship and installation, and each independently taking action. Ideally, you'd want ships in orbit to keep their navigational lasers in safe mode, to avoid mishaps.

Therefore, the system's traffic control should be able to spot an unknown asteroid on a collision course with hours to spare. All know asteroids and meteoroids with a danger level would be known well in advance, but unknown ones would still be detected.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Hello ghazestor

Welcome to the forum (though you joined a month ago).

I also mentioned that asteroid, to prove that we could detect them with today's technology. Though that one was detected inside the Moon's orbit, so it didn't help my case much. What it does show is that we need constant surveillance, because those rocks get thrown out of their orbit constantly. In particular, if you have installations outside of your atmosphere, then those are actually not harmless if they strike anything. And the more you have up there, the larger the chance of there being a collision and a Kessler Syndrome.

That means you want to see anything bigger than the size of a boulder far enough out that you can take corrective action. Particle shielding will deal with most smaller things and some boulders, but above that you may need to use low-power PDLCs. It's much better for the system as a whole if the traffic control does this scanning, instead of each ship and installation, and each independently taking action. Ideally, you'd want ships in orbit to keep their navigational lasers in safe mode, to avoid mishaps.

Therefore, the system's traffic control should be able to spot an unknown asteroid on a collision course with hours to spare. All know asteroids and meteoroids with a danger level would be known well in advance, but unknown ones would still be detected.

I would expect that a large portion of the scanning would in practice be done by university astronomy departments. Best case they spot a comet on it's millennial visit to the system to give a light show, worst case they spot some military test that the military would rather they did not see.

In the best case, papers get written, degrees get handed out, plaudits are given and received (some with funds to continue the program). For the spotting of military secrets, funds are given to not publish, pointed suggestions are given to look at some other patch of sky, and hopefully life goes on. If they find some object on a collision course with the planet, someone is sent out to change that course (miners to haul the prospect to a smelter?).

Castenea wrote:I would expect that a large portion of the scanning would in practice be done by university astronomy departments. Best case they spot a comet on it's millennial visit to the system to give a light show, worst case they spot some military test that the military would rather they did not see.

That's a good point too. Any decently-wealthy system will have lots of astronomy and astrophysics students that will be using telescopes and other types of remote telemetry. Unlike our case today, those are probably going to be in far out orbits, exactly because ship traffic would produce noise. For example, in the Sol system, placing them in the Mars-Sun L4 and L5 is probably a good idea: that places them 60° off from any traffic going to or from Mars and the hyperlimit. Saturn's L4 and L5 would be outside of Jupiter's orbit (and thus installations in orbit of Jupiter itself) and would make a good candidate too. Jupiter's is not a good one because it tends to collect a lot of asteroids (the Trojans).

And those tend to be full sky surveys, not limited to the ecliptic. In any target direction that is not a shipping lane, it's going to be far more sensitive than the standard traffic control systems, so it's likely going to spot any weird insertions.

But they are not constant and their schedules are likely published well in advance, so a military tactician can easily find holes in the observation. But they also need to act fast enough to go through those gaps.

In the best case, papers get written, degrees get handed out, plaudits are given and received (some with funds to continue the program). For the spotting of military secrets, funds are given to not publish, pointed suggestions are given to look at some other patch of sky, and hopefully life goes on. If they find some object on a collision course with the planet, someone is sent out to change that course (miners to haul the prospect to a smelter?).

Yup. An oncoming asteroid at regular orbital and escape velocities is not a calamity, it's a windfall.