A prediction made in 2011 was that the German Economy would suffer in part due to the lack of nuclear power. This has happened but for reasons I did not predict. cnn.com The war in Ukraine and the collapse of the Russian gas strategy revealed a weakness in Germany’s non-nuclear power strategy. Even without the war the fact they were so dependent on natural gas proves the green energy strategy had failed. Green energy without nuclear cannot work. Not unless we are talking about an all-up program to build solar power collection in orbit using resources mined in space. Basically, the beginning of a Dyson swarm.
Don't worry 2007 FT3 which was briefly seen in 2007, and has a small chance of impact in 2024 is very unlikely to hit us. This being the 2020's when everything unlikely happens, I will discuss below, WHAT IF it did.
Past Predictions Right And Wrong
An article full of predictions for the 2020’s Let's see how they have done so far. I did predict that SUSY string theory would be with us for decades even if evidence for it was not found. Instead it seems that SUSY string theory is fading. That said I would not be shocked if someone does try to reformulate SUSY string/ M theory in a way that does comply with available data. It is too tempting to model everything as being a “vibration” of a fundamental object of some kind.
I predicted that gravitational wave observations, and multi-messenger astronomy, will give us new clues on General Relativity. So far this has been the case.
The TMT being finally constructed remains to be seen. At this point if it is not constructed I think part of it will be due to the increase in light pollution due to satellites such as star link.
Dark matter has so far not been directly detected. Quantum gravity theories other than string/M theory gaining more traction has come to pass. As have the advance of ideas similar to those of mine, but perhaps better executed, by better known names have also gained some traction. Namely the idea that we need to not so much quantize gravity. I called this idea relativization, gave APS talks and published in low impact places a set of axioms on how to do this using algebraic quantum field theory on a dynamically curved space time. I am just happy to see advancement.
LISA making great strides to be deployed. I don’t think I was personally involved with LISA when I predicted this. I can say we are making steady progress to launch.
I have been WRONG so far about Boeing giving us access to space bur right about Space X. I am no longer confident that SpaceX will put humans in lunar orbit before NASA does this again.
I am also no longer confident that we will see desktop quantum computing by 2030. I’d love to be wrong about this.
I have been wrong that we would call this decade “the 20’s” by 2022. At some point in the 2020’s we will stop using the 20 before the decade in daily speech.
No Impact Is Likely.
In 2024 we will not be hit by asteroid 2007 FT3. A report first written in November and updated a couple days ago puts the chance of impact as one in 10 million for March 3 2030 and one in 11.5 million for October 5th 2024. (GBnews.com) In other words don’t quit your day job because of this. The odds are comparable to that of winning the lottery.
NASA has responded to this simply stating that "There are no known asteroid impact threads to Earth at any time in the next century." (standard.co.uk) Meaning fearing asteroid impacts would be like planning retirement based on playing the lottery or fearing lighting on a random sunny day. That said if an asteroid is ever about to impact Earth it will be visible with a telescope for some time before hand. Research grade telescopes would find it, and appropriate actions hopefully would be taken.
If the odds of this come down, and the chance of impact is MUCH more it might even be a good thing. Hopefully humanity would band together to deflect this relatively small asteroid. However, you will see sensational fearmongering stories about this in the lead up to the event. At worst it would be like preventing Y2K or taking measures against covid. One of those things we manage to handle but in doing so some people will think the whole event was made up or at least overblown.
WHAT IF it did hit though?
All of that said this is the 2020's. Every unlikely bad thing seems to happen in this decade. If one power block of countries thinks that they can gain by allowing another one to get the full brunt of this impact, they may just not help out. This would not be a Chicxulub size impactor. This would cause local total devastation and a degree of impact winter, but not enough to threaten survival of global civilization. 2007 FT3 is between 0.29 and 0.59 km in diameter. This is a very big rock but not by asteroid standards. The impact would have 2739 MT of equivalent explosive power. All of this is according to Spacereference.org. A fun little website called asteroid launcher has this nice tool for visualizing such an impact.
Worse still if it hit and hit the ocean it would mean a 450 meter tall tsunami in the middle of the ocean and certainly a meters to tens of meters tall tsunami around the rim of whichever ocean it hit. Hopefully the world would come together to use our resources to prevent such a catastrophe if it were to happen. On the other hand, there are some who if the US was hit would rejoice. There are some who if Russia or China was hit would rejoice. There are some who would think well ... maybe it'll help out with that global warming/ climate change. A shockingly large number of people would think that kinda way about this. We are unlikely to ever find out.
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