If end is near, do you want to know?

(CNN) -- If scientists detect a killer asteroid shortly before it slams into Earth, should the public be informed?

One researcher, Geoffrey Sommer of the Rand Corp., a Santa Monica, California-based think tank, believes the best answer in some cases is no.

Should an alert come too late to make a difference in the outcome of a global catastrophe, Sommer suggests governments should remain silent.

"If you can't do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all," Sommer said earlier this month at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Denver.

"If an extinction-type impact is inevitable, then ignorance for the populace is bliss," he said.

Other space researchers were highly critical of Sommer's views.

"I find Geoffrey's whole idea both irrational and unrealistic," said Benny Peiser, a U.K. scientist at Liverpool John Moores University who monitors asteroid threats.

"The advocated secrecy, far from being cost-effective as Geoffrey claims, would most certainly preclude any attempt at impact mitigation," he told CNN.com.

Regardless, Peiser said, any attempt to keep a killer asteroid quiet would be futile.

"Professional and amateur astronomers from around the world can easily access and confirm observational data and calculations of any discovered NEOs [Near Earth Objects]," he said.

Scientists estimate more than 1,000 asteroids 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter or larger -- big enough to cause global devastation -- lurk near the Earth's orbital path.

NASA expects to finish a census of the so-called NEOs in 2008 and has already identified more than half of the predicted population.

One particularly sizable space boulder is thought to have unleashed global climate changes that hastened the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Yet collisions with such monster rocks are rare. They take place about only once every 1 million years or so.

Smaller asteroids the size of whales collide every few centuries. Most plunk in oceans, but they could spark regional disasters if they were to hit near a populated area, according to astronomers.

Damn.

kinda half and half. in a way yes i would want to be told so i dont go out with out doing what i want to, but then no cos i dont wanna know when ima die!

i'd want to know, so i could go out and fuck mad bitches. if they still fronted on me, even though the end is near, i'm gonna be like :heated:, and she's gonna look like :beat: then i fuck her anyway :crazy:

about the neo thing and how anyone with a good telescope can look up into space and see an asteroid, i think we would know. If we knew we were all going to or alot of us were going to die, everyone would go crazy. sure, id want to know.

"After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendor that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: 'Penance, Penance, Penance!'. And we saw in an immense light that is God: 'something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it' a Bishop dressed in White 'we had the impression that it was the Holy Father'. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God

It would be leaked in 2.2 seconds to the media if this were the case, because some fuck nut would be thinking of themselfs and ask for cash.Maybe some tip stick in bimbple fuck no where would find it on the telescope he got for finshing high school that he treats like a woman on friday nights because he had no friends.Then he would name said NEO after himself and would feel this great sense of power because he found it and named it.Some of us could and might survive HATING THE MAN and making his name outlawed in our new world.

FUCK I JUST WROTE A BOOK PLOT!

"oh no, don't tell the people, they might panic. and panic is no good. what will result from panic? nothing good, that's for sure. and you all know that panic is bad and makes people uncomfortable and will make a whole lot of difference when all life is destroyed. no, we better not tell them. we don't want them to panic"

it would be smater not to say anything due to the chaos that would come as a result. the only way i believe anything should be said would be under 100% accuracy. if this meteor was seen and eveyone in the world was told they were going to die crazy things would happen, and if the meteor missed the world would highly changed for the worse. if this even happened im sure we would find out, but if it missed i'm sure it would be a bad thing. all the chaos wouldn't matter in the end if everyone died, but if the world didn't end it could only have negative consequence.

we have a right...let the people who do not want to be aware cover there ears

Death happens to everyone at some point anyway. If it happens a little

early, yeah that sucks but hey you're not the only one gettin screwed.

I don't know what I'd want. On one hand I'd want to make amends with

anyone I have problems with or am not really speaking to. I'd want to

be able to say I love you to the people I honestly care about, and I'd

want to be able to tell my dad I love him and I'll be seein him soon.

Then again, what would that do for me? I'm torn between belief in the

afterlife and belief in death as a finality. If that was the end, there would

be no point in knowing. Apologies would be nothing but simple organic

molecules that maybe once composed a memory, but now have been

split down into nothing. "I love you's" would be the same... there isn't

going to be any pain or happiness anyway.. so there's no point. The way

I see it, I have no choice in whether I get told or not... so either way

is fine.

I think id want to know......

On the morning of October 22, 1993, local time, the visitor hit the top of the atmosphere over Ellsworth Land in Antarctica. It pierced the sky in a flash of light, moving a hundred times faster than a meteor, passing from the thinnest air and into the ice in a fraction of a second. It cut through the rock below with equal ease, flying through the solid earth in a northeasterly direction. In less than 20 seconds, it had crossed the South Atlantic, deep beneath the ocean floor. When it passed below the southern tip of Africa, it was more or less halfway between Cape Town and the center of Earth.

That was as deep as its straight path through the planet would take it; from then on it headed up. Fifteen seconds later, 6,000 kilometers across the Indian Ocean from Cape Town, it left Earth's crust somewhere between Sri Lanka and Thailand. It lanced up through the afternoon sky and headed back out to the stars. The whole visit lasted less than a minute, and nobody saw a thing.

It's remarkable that some strange guest should sweep through Earth like a hot wire through wax, and that no one would notice as it did so. But though the visitor was very fast and fairly heavy, it was also extremely small: a mass of as much as

10 tons squeezed into something about the size of a red blood cell. If a 10-ton asteroid fell to Earth at 400 kilometers per second, people would notice; something the size of a small car hitting the unyielding Earth at that speed would give up its kinetic energy in an explosion to rival that of a 200-kiloton nuclear weapon. But condensed to the size of a small amoeba, the same mass wouldn't cause anywhere near as much fuss. The fearsome momentum of the microscopic visitor would shatter the bonds between molecules directly in its path and push the bystanders aside. It would do this vigorously enough to melt a small tunnel as it passed, slicing through the rocky earth almost as easily as it passed through air and water...

From last month's Wired magazine... dark matter strikes Earth constantly, and we can now detect it. Full article.

I just got tured on to Wired magazine last month and found it to be the most interesing mag on the news stand.

All of its articles are at least as interesingly written as that little blurb above.

I wonder why I didn't put two and two together and figure out that a magazine called "Wired" had a website. Thanks, El Mamerro!

Anyhow, if we were all going to perish in a firery explosion of course I would want to tell all my loved ones that I love them. But, I would like to think that I wouldn't care that I was going to die because we all were as well. Death inly seems important if there is someone there to miss you.

i would want to know so that i could make paece with the people that i have wronged, and so that i could tell the girl of my dreams how i feel...

im so emo... hahaha:lol:

i would go and bomb the shit out of everything so millions of years inthe future, archeologists look at my stuff as the markings of a great, fallen society...

if Makros end was near id love to know.

FUCK IT !!!

Wasn't there some asteroid scare in 97'?

Harper's had a great article in this months mag about asteroids and end of the world. Well written, good read.

Yeah, I'd want to be told-fuck governments deciding we're not going to tell you that the world is ending because of panic and chaos.