So I've been thinking about this for a while, you know how one of the more common themes in sci-fi is a big fucking asteroid or comet slamming into earth killing everyone? It's fucking bullshit.
Not that shit doesn't hit the earth all the time, and really really big shit has hit the earth in the past, and well big shit going really fast does a lot of damage (kinetic impact is the fancy way of saying it), no that's not my issue, my issue is how they always "solve" the problem of something really fucking big flying at the earth.
Rock the size of a small country coming at us like a rabid monkey and the first reaction is "err lets blow that shit up with nukes!" it never works, of course fucking not, you can't vaporise something that fucking big and even if you did break it up, you'd go from having one huge ass rock to having lots of fairly big rocks. Even if most of them burn up in the atmosphere you've still got things the size of houses falling on cities with an explosive impact measured in fucking megatons.
So they always move onto some cop-out bullshit sci-fi Dues-Ex plot twist, when in actual fact, nukes would work just fine.
Now you're thinking "Hang on Bunyip you just said it's patently stupid", and I did, but vaporising isn't my goal, you see space is fucking huge, so huge in fact that the human mind (apart from a few really fucking smart people) can't comprehend it, kind of like Will Shatner's ego, and our solar system is full of rocks and shit, and big stuff rarely hits us.
The reason for this is the earth is always moving, so it's two lines having to intersect at the same time in order to do any damage, now as anyone with any grasp of reality will tell you, the farther away the two objects are the less change they need to make in order to avoid hitting each other.
Example, two cars coming at each other head on, now if they see each over 200-300 meters away, they only have to make a slight correction to avoid running into each other, at 20 meters they need to swerve like a mother fucker.
The same can be said for things in space, only more so, a few nukes aimed at the right spot using math worked out by people much smarter then me at a rock far enough away can nudge the big ass thing far enough off course that it will miss us by millions of kilometres.
So in short, Hollywood sci-fi is stupid, I'm cranky and tired and wanted to rant about something.
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