Nuking an incoming asteroid is a daft idea

Nuking will change the asteroid for sure the only problem is there is no way of knowing if it will make the situation better or worse.
If it doesn't work just punch the reset button and try again.
Many heavy contaminated radiative rocks are probably not a bad choice either. ;)

If it's big enough to shoot at, we're probably screwed either way.

...since were having so much fun.

Solution is simple, you send up a bunch of oil-riggers and they drill it and nuke it.

Sheesh. Problem solved!

(Ok. Obligatory Armageddon comment taken care of - now intelligent conversion can start.)

Get a few graffiti artists up there and just spray paint the thing.

Drilling a hole in an asteroid and ejecting the material is one plan for dealing with the problem. If you get to the asteroid early enough, say several years, and do this continuously, you can alter the asteroids mass and trajectory just enough that it misses the earth.

The calm acceptance of all celestial-earth occurrences as the unavoidable result of divine will or of the natural order, whose logic deems "exterminate, exterminate." Don't get me wrong. Some of my best bins were Derelicts.

Laugh! Funniest comments I have read on this site yet.

Why not just lob an enormous tube of Preparation-H ?

What about an enormous tennis racket? Of course, we would need an enormous tennis player. NASA could do it!

Let's get back to that other NASA guy that was talking about UFOs.

We find out that the asteroid has Uranium, we assume its going to enrich it for weapons, since obviously it's going to hit us

We start with sanctions first and a lot of blustering. We threaten the asteroid, while the asteroid doesn't change it's course

Next we hear that the asteroid is threatening the moon, it wants to wipe it out of our solar system.

We will have to use preemptive self defense to nuke to asteroid, to preserve our freedom. There are always going to be people telling us not to go to war to preserve our way of life, but that Asteroid obviously started it.

Once we nuke the asteroid, we'll realize that it didn't really make any difference, and that it was only really using the uranium for power generation. But we'll change Presidents, and forget all about it, until the next asteroid "threatens" us, maybe one with a South American accent.


Surely I can't be alone in thinking that attempting a head on deflection is absolute rubbish. Why not use the explosive to accelerate the asteroid thereby changing its intersection point with the Earth's orbit. 

Its ridiculous to think that even a massive 100MT explosive could directly change an asteroids trajectory. Or am I just misunderstanding his usage of the word "pull"?


something like a satellite which focuses the sunlight into a laser beam and directs it to the asteroid. This could heat one part and cause it to move in a slightly different direction over a few years?

How are we going to power a nuclear missile that far?

Will it be the size of a lander/orbiter and try to land on the asteroid and travel along it before detonating?

Maybe we should build lots of nuclear space rockets and leave them up in space, just in case? Or is this the excuse for star wars weapons?

If we do manage to blow up the asteroid, the smaller pieces should just burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Views on this issue are conveniently polarised between two groups: those who know basic physics, and those who don't. Obviously, the second group includes most political decision-makers, and much of the electorate. The popular image of a "nuclear device" is one of almost infinite destructive power; hence, anything that is "nuked" should cease to exist for all practical purposes. Unfortunately, that is not true in the celestial sphere, where 50 megatons or whatever is barely a love-tap. (Anyone remember watching Shoemaker-Levy deliver energy to Jupiter's atmosphere?) Also, of course, Newton's laws do tell us that unless an oncoming asteroid is vaporised (indeed, even then), its mass will continue to approach us with very much the same net momentum. As Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle so memorably put it in "Lucifer's Hammer", blowing up an asteroid or comet merely turns a rifle bullet into a far more damaging shotgun blast.

Maybe because a nuke in space cannot "push" anything ?
Given that there is no air in space, there is nothing for the nuke to push against - so no shockwave, which would certainly be quite useful in this particular case.
Some seem to think that the radiation and high-energy particle bombardment would do the trick.
I suggest you take a deep breath and blow on you car as hard as you can and see if it moves. Methinks a nuke in space will have just about the same effect.
The only sane way to deviate an asteroid from hitting Earth is to strap a rocket to it and fire said rocket for long enough for the asteroid's orbit to be substantially changed.

if they detected the asteroid early enough you could change its trajectory with things a lot more subtle than nukes. ANything from a tiny ion engine to a mass driver could be used to change it's course without the breakup problem. Hell, use that boeing laser of doom concept to heat heat it up and cause it to outgas and change it's own course.

" blowing up an asteroid or comet merely turns a rifle bullet into a far more damaging shotgun blast "

At what range? I would rather be "shot" by a shotgun at 1000 yards than by a rifle! Sure, nuking the asteroid right before it hits earth would be pointless.... nuking it several AU or years away (as the orbit flies) would reduce the number of (and size of) fragments that would hit us.

Clearly we're looking at this from the wrong point of view... Why are we trying to send bits of technology billions of miles across space to move an asteroid when we could just build a massive engine in the desert and move the earth? :p

A huuuuuuuuuuge rocket pointing at the ground with some big, spread out foundations on a very sturdy continental plate could speed the earth up a little and then another could slow it down again :p

Note - this could also be used to fix global warming, adjust the earth's tilt / spin or what not. - Just don't stop it spinning! I don't like sleeping when its sunny :(

hehe, i remember that proposal, like from 40 years ago...gee, what talent we have here (lol). heck, rusty has a clue...