Saturday, December 10, 2011

MOVIE CLICHES .... ASTEROIDS

 

  • Asteroids travel through space making a noise like a powerful but subdued engine.
  • Asteroids are usually locked into orbits, but if a comet comes by, they can be bumped out of their rut and become dangerously unstable.
  • It's only the fact that everything is locked into an orbit which prevents collisions in our solar system. Any asteroid that gets loose is certain to crash into Earth within a matter of hours.
  • It's just barely possible to evacuate any city to a distance of 100 miles in 48 hours. This requires lots of airplanes. It also requires martial law, so that "looters will be arrested on sight".  With 30+ hours to go, people will panic in the streets and run around at random.
  • A mile-wide asteroid can mostly burn up in the atmosphere, causing it to do only a relatively small amount of damage like bursting a dam when it strikes.
  • A river from a burst dam can exactly keep pace with a pickup truck for several minutes. It will then obligingly pause as the pickup truck turns around and goes in another direction.
  • When a raging river washes over a pickup truck on a bridge, the bridge won't be damaged, the truck won't be swept off the bridge, and people in the open back of the truck won't be swept away.
  • A four-mile-wide nickel asteroid which would mass about a *trillion* tons can be destroyed -- literally destroyed, so that nothing remains -- by three airplane-mounted lasers.

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