Who is protecting Earth civilization? The greatest possibility of human extinction, how to prevent the impact of meteorites?

On this planet, five million years have passed since human beings were born. From walking upright to using tools, to learning language and writing, and finally to society, we have to say that we are very lucky. Among the five million human beings In the "childhood" of 2000, we did not experience any major storms. Mother Earth protected us very well, so there was prosperity at this time. But do you know that human beings are still very fragile, and there are countless dangers in the entire universe, such as magnetic pole reversal, nuclear war, solar expansion, gamma-ray bursts, etc. Of course, we will not talk about these today.

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Today, I would like to introduce a kind of "celestial collision" that is the most troublesome for scientists and may be the destruction of human beings in the future. The Earth and other asteroids, comets, meteorites and other celestial bodies collide with each other, which is called "impact event" in astronomy. There are also many cases of ecologically altered species extinction caused by impact events in the history of the earth. There have been five mass extinctions on the earth before. Fragments of the asteroid crashed into Earth and struck near the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America, causing massive tsunamis and powerful earthquakes.

The gas and dust generated by the impact floated into the atmosphere, forming a high-temperature and high-density cloud layer, and then the sunlight was blocked from the cloud layer and could not reach the ground, which caused the surface temperature to drop rapidly. In the end, the plants withered, and then because of the lack of food, the animals on the food chain gradually starved to death, especially the dinosaurs were completely extinct after the impact event, ending the rule of hundreds of millions of years. However, this all happened 65 million years ago, and now this impact event only left the impact crater. Let's turn the time back to the present day to show you a more intuitive impact event.

On February 15, 2013, at 9:15 am local time, an asteroid impact occurred in the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, which was witnessed by tens of thousands of people, and there were a lot of videos circulating. The asteroid was about 15 meters in diameter when it entered the atmosphere, weighed only 7,000 tons, and traveled 18 kilometers per second, or more than 60,000 kilometers per hour. When the asteroid was still in extraterrestrial space, its trajectory was not detected by any equipment on Earth. It was not detected by the satellite until the uninvited guest entered the atmosphere. It left a 10-kilometer-long trail in the air, which eventually exploded 30 kilometers above the ground, with most of the debris falling into the nearby Chebarkul Lake.

1,491 people were injured in the incident, but no one was killed, and the injured were mostly minor injuries from broken glass or building shaking. This matter seems to have ended like this, but many people have noticed a little strangeness. The city of Chelyabinsk is an industrial center, a railway hub, and there is a nuclear power plant nearby. If the asteroid did not explode in the air, but directly hit the ground, the consequences would be disastrous, but the asteroid exploded before hitting the ground, and its fragments fell into the lake and did not hit the densely populated place. , and there were reports of witnesses smelling gunpowder in the air.

This is very interesting, some people carefully studied the asteroid video taken by witnesses, and then they found through slow playback that the asteroid was flying well, but suddenly an object flew behind it and broke it down , and then the asteroid exploded and the debris fell into the lake. So people began to speculate, did the military launch an interceptor missile to prevent a near-miss collision in time? However, the Russian military denied that the asteroid was destroyed by defense systems, and even Komsomolskaya Pravda said that aliens saved the city of Chelyabinsk.

But it makes sense to think about it. The falling speed of the meteorite is 18 kilometers per second. The object that penetrated the asteroid in the video is chasing from the rear. You must know that no missile can reach this speed at this stage. Of course, if it's Russia's secret weapon, it's another matter. But let's think about it, the Tunguska explosion in 1908 was also an explosion in the air. Could it be that a meteorite was also penetrated by something and exploded before it hit the ground? Were there such advanced weapons on earth at that time?

Another way of thinking, humans have survived many impact events over the years, is there really something secretly protecting humans? In terms of the time scale of the impact event on the earth, the earth is in the cosmic space, and it is inevitable that the meteorite orbit will just pass the earth. Some data studies today show that asteroids with a diameter of 5 to 10 meters enter the earth's atmosphere on average once a year, and such a large "extraordinary visitor" can release energy equivalent to the atomic bomb of Hiroshima, but fortunately these little guys will be in the atmosphere. Gasification, we won't even notice they ever come.

Asteroids, about 50 meters in diameter, hit the Earth on average once every thousand years, producing an explosion equivalent to the energy of the Tunguska explosion, or the energy released by a thousand Hiroshima atomic bombs. Asteroids with a diameter of 500 meters hit the earth once every 30,000 to 50,000 years. For example, it was observed that the "Apophis" asteroid may hit the earth in the future. This asteroid hit the earth on June 19, 2004. Discovered by the National Observatory of Kitt Peak in Arizona, the permanent number is "99942", also known as "Destroyer Star" or "Apophis" in Chinese. Apophis is the god of chaos in ancient Egyptian mythology. The name of the asteroid is also based on the destruction it may bring to Earth in the future.

This asteroid will reach the closest position to the earth at 4:49 on April 14, 2029, with a collision probability of 1/37, the impact site is in the eastern hemisphere, and it will reach the "Level 2 Dohring Hazard Index", which is also The asteroid with the highest Dohring risk index to date. At that time, if Apophis hits the earth, it will release energy that is far more than 114,000 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, which is equivalent to the energy of 114 Tunguska explosions. In this regard, scientists advocate spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build an anti-collision system. Reduce the impact of disasters.

But then after hundreds of observations, it was concluded that Apophis most likely did not collide with Earth. So on August 5, 2006, the risk index was lowered back to zero. Earlier in 1950, an asteroid was observed by the Lick Observatory in California. as "1950DA".

The diameter of this asteroid is 1 kilometer, and statistics show that asteroids over 1 kilometer hit the earth once every 500,000 years. Earth, terrestrial ecosystems and climate will have dramatic effects.

But larger asteroid impacts happen less frequently, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It was a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid impact, and the long-term impact at the time of the impact and subsequent long-term effects was enough to change The Earth's environment has led to mass extinctions. These potentially helpful asteroids are constantly being observed, which has also increased human attention and development of measures to avoid impact events. Perhaps in the next few hundred years, human technology will advance to the level that it can intercept or defend against asteroid impacts. Although the impact event is terrible, there are two sides to it.

Just like the fifth mass extinction, asteroid debris hit the earth and caused the extinction of large animals, including dinosaurs, which gave small mammals a chance to survive, allowing them to reproduce and survive to this day. So it can be said that without this impact event, we humans might not have appeared on the earth. In this way, the devastating impact event has also become a catalyst for the development of some new life in a certain sense. Not only that, aside from some larger or more serious impact events, after some meteorites or extraterrestrial materials fall to the surface, these materials are of great research value.

According to long-term statistical data and predictions, about 500 meteorites fall to the ground every year on the earth, and five or six of them will be found and brought back to the laboratory for research, because human aerospace technology is still in the initial stage of development. , Since we are temporarily unable to observe and study some celestial bodies at close range, the meteorites from these celestial bodies have become the best samples for humans to study them. In 1984, scientists discovered a Martian meteorite in the Antarctic region, weighing 1.93 kilograms, which was named "Allen Hills Meteorite 84001". This is a rock on the surface of Mars, which may have been thrown into space after being hit by a comet or an asteroid, and then captured by the Earth's gravity and crashed into the Earth's South Pole region.

In 1996, scientists announced the discovery of worm-like structures on the meteorite, most likely fossilized bacteria. Although further research on this meteorite and the traces of life on it is still underway, this discovery is undoubtedly strong evidence for the existence of life on Mars. They thus know what is going on outside the Earth. Small meteorites and planetary fragments are like alien messengers, bringing news from the outside world.

The earth disaster caused by the impact event is terrifying, but the extraterrestrial material brought about by the impact event is of great value. Humans really love and hate the impact event. I hope the universe can treat us a little better. Less "knock" before developing measures to deal with impact events, after all, humans are already vulnerable enough. Can we deal with the methods mentioned at the beginning that can destroy human beings? What do you guys think, see you in the comments section.