Scientific American: “Will Asteroid 2024 YR4 Strike Earth in 2032?”

If an asteroid the size of YR4 were to hit our planet, it would not end life on Earth, but it would be devastating. At that size, the impact would be equivalent to a 10-megaton bomb, Tonry says—more than enough to cause widespread regional decimation. Everything within three or four kilometers would be incinerated, Tonry says. Everything out to maybe 10 kilometers is smashed. It’s not a nuclear explosion, but it’s an extremely hot explosion. There would be a huge fireball that would start fires out to 15 kilometers, something like that. It would kill a lot of people if they haven’t moved out of the way.

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And time is of the essence. The asteroid is currently moving away from Earth, and by April, it will no longer be visible to telescopes. Outside this slim window of opportunity, the next chance to observe the asteroid to assess its threat won’t arrive until YR4 next swoops near Earth in 2028—the only such pass before the unnerving deadline of December 22, 2032. If the asteroid still poses an impact risk by then, there would be perilously little time to stand up a robust response. Prudence may thus demand devising a mitigation strategy in the interim on the off chance—even if remote—that the asteroid could hit.

When it comes whipping by in 2028, we could have a mission basically all ready to go when new observations come in, Tonry says. Alternatively, he adds, we could decide to leave it alone if forecasts show the asteroid won’t strike Earth.

Jonathan O'Callaghan

In the meantime an impact in 2032 from this asteroid has been almost completely ruled out – though there’s still a chance it will hit the Moon instead. But even if the likelihood of impact would have remained perilously high, I very much doubt a mission to deflect it would get off the ground in due time. Like in the movie Don’t Look Up, most of the world would likely shrug the threat off as too distant, or simply dismiss it outright as misinformation or some sort of government conspiracy. Every attempt to advance the planning or launch would be flooded with social media posts asking why are we spending money on this instead of the countries on the projected impact path, or people claiming the mission would instead divert the asteroid towards Earth to use as a weapon against the enemy of the day.

PetaPixel: “The Sigma BF stands for ‘Beautiful Foolishness’”

BF stands for beautiful foolishness, Yamaki says. This is a phrase taken from the book, the very old book — I think probably over a hundred years old — called The Book of Tea by Okakura Tenshin, the Japanese researcher. At that time, he wanted to tell the spirit of the Japanese culture and we have the tea ceremony. And through the tea ceremony, he tried to tell what is the essence of Japanese culture.

In the book he said, let’s enjoy the time and the beautiful foolishness with a cup of tea. So this camera is for daily use. Daily life is full of joy and nice relaxing time which he calls it the beautiful foolishness.

Yamaki designed the camera with the intention of making it as easy as possible to use without feeling constrained to older design elements that are, Sigma argues, not necessary and overly complicated.

Jaron Schneider

I’ve seen a number of people praising the design as Apple-esque on various social media, and all I could think was: these must be people who never used anything other than an iPhone to take photos. This camera is nothing more than a smartphone with a lens mount, down to the internal, non-swappable storage – the perfect showcase of form over function.