Because, statistical, they're all traveling in all directions at once? IOW randomly like Brownian?
Rap
DrewDad wrote:Timber, quick question:
Are you saying that the vaporized matter ejected from the blast will not contribute to moving the main mass in the opposite direction?
Or are you saying that the entire asteroid, or enough of the asteroid so as to leave only insignificant bits behind, will be vaporized during the blast(s)?
As for the first, the vaporized matter certainly does propel the asteroid. If you take some gravel on the asteroid and make it go thataway then the rest of the asteroid will be pushed an equal amount in the opposite direction. Now vaporize the gravel and make it go thataway... the asteroid's still pushed an equal amount in the opposite direction.
As for the second, breaking up a asteroid into chunks, say, less than 10 cubic meters would certainly keep it from being a single large impact on the Earth.
Take a 1 km chunk of rock and hit it with a 50 mt blast and there probably won't be much left of a solid core. But the whole thing probably won't be vaporized, either. You've created millions of small, fast, randomly distributed moving masses. Better, IMO, to calculate the blasts appropriately so as to leave the mass of the asteroid intact.
Akshully. I was pretty much just havin' fun bein' obstinate. A couple SF novels you might enjoy:
Lucifer's Hammer
and
Shiva Descending
I've read Lucifer's Hammer a couple of times, as well as almost everything else that Niven and Pournelle have written together.
DrewDad wrote:I've read Lucifer's Hammer a couple of times, as well as almost everything else that Niven and Pournelle have written together.
I long ago read "Lucifer's Hammer," "The Mote in God's Eye," and pretty much all of what Niven wrote alone.
I don't want to scare anyone, but . . .
Sky Dust Keeps Falling on Your Head
if we blow up the moon completely or will a large chunk hit us and destroy
all life as we know it
Nuclear devices in space
For accurate information on this topic refer to Wikipedia or several other informational sites. Both the US and the Soviet Union conducted upper atmospheric and outer space testing with nuclear devices. This took place in the 1950s and 1960s.
for iron sun 254
Actually the nuclear reaction in our nuclear weapons is not the combining of different isotopes of hydrogen(titrium and deutrium), this is actually a hydrogen bomb which uses nuclear fusion. The nuclear weapons that most are familiar with utilize nuclear fission, which is the breaking of bond between the subatomic particles of the atom (protons and neutrons)and is far less powerful than is nuclear fusion. Also rather than hydrogen, they use a large isotope of uranium or plutonium.
