We're all gonna DIE!!!!

Geek news website Slashdot has new news on the asteroid MN4, discovered last year (full name '2004 MN4'). It initially seemed it would hit earth in 2029 but further research is fairly certain it will miss but by the closest margin on record (and if you trust the scientists it's best to be in Europe, Africa or Asia in 2029 to catch the lightshow).

However, the new news is that calculations of its return trip in 2035-37 aren't exactly certain it will miss. They need to know how much effect the Earth's gravitational pull will have on its orbit and can't really work that out until its first pass in 2029. The problem is whether we can respond in the space of five years if it is going to hit. It would apparently have the same force as a Gigaton of TNT, which wouldn't extinguish life entirely but might make it hard to get a good soy latte for a while, and put a dint in the stock market... not to mention the population.

In typical geek style the resulting comments are largely about how we have to have a viable off-planet backup colony ASAP. US TV-movies tend to assume that the technical response to an asteroid is to blow it up with missiles, but apparently the geek community, out of enthusiasm for NASA or sheer realism, tends to favour the "Get the hell on out to Mars or somethin" approach.

The first question we would have to ask is how likely are we to be able to shift the entire population of Earth anywhere fast, and if we can't how are we going to draw lots? The powers that be are fairly likely to favour a user-pays scenario but whether that would be viable in the event is questionable. Then again, people watch Fox News, read the Telegraph and what not; maybe they'd fall for anything...

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