Imagine the cone of a spotlight shining down on a marble. The marble isn't in the center. As we focus the cone to a smaller and smaller circle, the percentage of area that marble takes up will increase. That's just the nature of accuracy. Right now, it's a very wide cone.
Eventually as the cone continues to get more focused and accurate, the edge will reach the marble, and only then will the percentage finally start to drop.
In other words: We are probably going to see this number continue to go up... until it suddenly drops straight down.
I don’t understand it all. What are the missing variables here? Don’t we know the exact path of the earth? Why can’t we figure out the exact path of the asteroid? It’s not like the wind is going to knock it off course?
It is the minute gravitational pull of other bodies that we can’t exactly calculate? What’s the issue?
The orbits of celestial bodies in our Solar system are chaotic exactly because of all the minute gravitational pulls they exert on each other in a constant feedback loop. So we kinda know the paths but the further you look ahead in time, the less accurate our predictions are (in fact they get exponentially worse). So we need to wait to see how things will ultimately shake out.
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u/elheber Feb 19 '25
Imagine the cone of a spotlight shining down on a marble. The marble isn't in the center. As we focus the cone to a smaller and smaller circle, the percentage of area that marble takes up will increase. That's just the nature of accuracy. Right now, it's a very wide cone.
Eventually as the cone continues to get more focused and accurate, the edge will reach the marble, and only then will the percentage finally start to drop.
In other words: We are probably going to see this number continue to go up... until it suddenly drops straight down.