Just watched Armageddon last night and it got me wondering -

>>8492452
Make it explode via an atomic detonation such that the pieces will not hit the earth.

>>8492462
I didn't think we had enough nukes in our arsenal to be able to budge one.

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>>8492467
Do you know how powerful a hydrogen bomb can be? I mean, if it's a rogue planet on a collision course, we're fucked but rocks that the size of states, we can handle.

Real answer: There are several ideas and project currently being developed. First step is obviously thoroughly scanning the sky so that we can predict dangerous impacts years or decades in advance. This has been partially done at least for medium size asteroids. The second part is avoiding the collision. Most concepts involve planting a small rocket or installing sun sails on the asteroid to slightly nudge its trajectory away from earth. There are even concepts that involve putting a satellite into orbit around the asteroid and let its gravitational pull do the work. Many of these ideas are still very conceptional, and so far none have been thoroughly tested. Afaik all we've done up to now is land a probe on a comet (which is a first big step, but there still is a long way to go).

Explosions btw do not seem to be a viable option: They might shatter the asteroid, but not give enough sideway momentum to all the parts to ensure that they're missing us, nor is it clear weather all the parts would burn up in the atmosphere.

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We would vaporize the fuck out of it with our long range class 4 focused lasers.

The problem is that our icbm's are not designed to go away from Earth. Basically if an alien ship parked between the Earth and the Moon and bombarded the Earth there is nothing at all we can do.

>>8492452
If we had enough time, the best option would be to go out to the object, and build/place a giant rocket upon it, to slowly but surely deflect it from its collision course.

>>8492534
Even if you nuked the asteroid into powder, it would still cause mass heating in the atmosphere and earth would be fucked. If anything, smashing it would actually make it worse, since it would have greater total surface area and therefore more of it would be vaporized in the atmosphere.

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See this little beauty? Hell, it could even vaporize a plantet!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance

>>8493482
americans shouldn't play with this shit, with their shitty trackrecord of building self-blowing rockets they'll most probably destroy half of their country.

>>8493487
Shut up or we will declare your country as a planetary threat.

That would depend on how far (in time) the asteroid is before being detected. If you detected it 2 years before hitting earth, any little push you give it will make it miss. If it's a matter of hours, we are doomed.

Fuck like bunnies until your dick falls off