UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report

szyzyg writes: "The UK NEO Task Force which was set up last year has finally delivered its report and recommendations on the Asteroid threat. The recommendations include money to build a 3 metre search telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, and more funding for research in the field. The report is written for politicians and makes a good introduction to the subject, including disturbing facts and figures."

Comments

Armageddon

[Penis Elephant Guy]

was yesterday.

There is a much cheaper solution

[jailbrekr2]

Just keep a team of oil rig workers on standby, in case they are needed for such an emergency....

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Signal 11]

That movie was so unrealistic it wasn't funny. For starters, their bomb wasn't much more than a firecracker, and for an asteroid the size of texas (astrologically speaking - very, very, unlikely) burying it a mere, what, 300 meters down, would do nothing. An asteroid in space would have a very bad case of gas for about 2 minutes and then continue happily on its merry way.

The solution isn't to try to blow it up, because those pieces are all still moving in the same direction - meaning rather than a single impact on a single continent, you now have hundred-meter sized fragments falling over the entire hemisphere, but instead to hook a space tug up to it and gently push it out of the way while it is still 0.5 AMU or so away.

Bombs don't destroy things, they merely take larger things and turn them many smaller things.

--

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[tuffy]

And don't forget to pre-emptively launch Bruce Willis into deep space.

Just in case...

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[schechter]

The solution of "tugging" the asteroid out of earth's way is one solution, but I like the solution posed by Brunching Shuttlecocks, which is to get everyone in China to jump up simultaneously, thus moving earth's orbit out of the asteroids way. Hell, it's just as realistic as the movie...

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Private Essayist]

"...for an asteroid the size of texas (astrologically speaking - very, very, unlikely)..."

Actually, astrologically speaking, it's quite likely as those folks will buy anything. I'm sure you meant astronomically speaking, in which case, yes, it is quite unlikely.
________________

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Kierthos]

Well, the movie may have been crapola, but assuming that the asteroid is not the size of Texas, a large enough bomb (or more then one bomb) could be used to turn the asteroid into small enough chunks of rubble that they will burn up in the atmosphere. It is also possible to use explosives to alter the trajectory of the asteroid. It may not alter it much in the grand scheme of things, but it might be enough to matter. (Of course, I have very little experience with explosives and none with asteroids.)

Realistically though, I doubt that there would be enough warning time to mount a feasible mission involving explosives as an asteroid deterrent. And unless NASA has been up to some new tricks, I rather think our space tug fleet is a touch small (read nonexistant).

Kierthos

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Erasmus Darwin]

The solution isn't to try to blow it up, because those pieces are all still moving in the same direction

If I remember my high-school physics correctly, blowing something up (i.e. only internal forces) causes the center of mass to continue in the same direction. Which means the average of all the pieces of the asteroid will still "hit" the Earth, even though each individual piece winds up going around.

Also, since you're in space, you've got the whole inertia thing working in your favor. As long as you impart some seperating force to the asteroid, each piece should continue drifting away from the central mass, as long as your asteroid isn't big enough to have its own gravitational force. And the further from Earth that you denote the asteroid, the more time you've got for the pieces to drift apart.

However, IANAAstroPhysicist and ICBW.

...and an off-topic note: How many people out there were able to predict that the first post they'd see upon entering the thread was an unfunny reference to either Armageddon or Deep Impact, modded up as funny?

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[SimplyCosmic]

Bombs don't destroy things, they merely take larger things and turn them many smaller things.

Damnit, man, that's the only way to handle those space rocks ... didn't you ever play Asteroids as a kid?

Now, taking out those flying saucers that appear out of nowhere, well, that's another matter entirely!

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Smitty825]

a large enough bomb (or more then one bomb)could be used to turn the asteroid into small enough chunks of rubble that they will burn up in the atmosphere The only problem with this is that those little chunks would burn up in our athmosphere, creating tons of heat that would be passed around the athmosphere. Granted, if the asteriod was small enough, it wouldn't be a big deal, but a huge asteriod would certainly heat the Earth's athmosphere up significantly...

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Mike1024]

Hey,

The solution isn't to try to blow it up, because those pieces are all still moving in the same direction

The moon is being hit by asteroids quite a lot, hence the craters. There aren't many big craters on the earth. But there aren't. This is because the earth has an atmosphere, and friction with the atmosphere burns up smaller rocks.

If I had to come up with a plan to save the world, it would work in several main stages. First, I'd launch one third of all availiable tactical nuclear missiles, aiming them anywhere on the asteroid. I would set them to detonate at a on impact, target time 0200 hours. Shortly after detonation, I would launch all remaining tactical nuclear missiles into any chasms/craters/gulleys both preexisting and newly created on the asteroid, set to simeltaniously detonate at a certain time, let's say 0500 hours. Once they had all landed, I would fire our entire arsnel of Strategic nuclear missiles on a C-shaped trajectory, so they all strike one side of the asteroid. I would aim for half of the missiles to land on the asteroid before detonation and half to detonate in mid-air. Anyway, the strategic nuclear missiles all hit one side of the asteroid and all detonate at 0500 hours, at the same time as the embedded tactical nuclear missiles already scattered liberally over the asteroid. Hopefully, the massive explosion of all the strategic nuclear missiles would alter the course enough for it to bypass earth, and if not the tactical nuclear missiles would reduce it to many smaller objects which would have a much larger surface area to mass ratio, so any that come towards the earth would be burned up by the earth's atmospere.

AYMBATGIANAGABISAFMIGABAPAIRABOAO (As you may be able to guess, I am not a government advisor, but I've seen a few movies, I know bit about physics and I read a book on asteroids once).

Michael Tandy

...another comment from Michael Tandy.

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Fishstick]

>astrologically speaking - very, very, unlikely

Why, does it depend on the asteroid's 'sign'?

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[jayhawk88]

That movie was so unrealistic it wasn't funny.

Not only for the reasons you mentioned, but also the idea that even if they could have blown the asteroid in two, that it would have been enough to divert it from hitting the earth. That asteroid was what, a few thousand miles away when the blew it? The scenes of them watching the asteroid approach the "point of no return" were hilarious. If it's already that close, no force in the world is going to save you.

Oh well, enough about this: it's time for a new Slashdot poll. Which Summer of 98 asteroid/comet movie babe would win in a fight: Tea Leoni or Liv Tyler?

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[titus-g]

Dammit! we should do that right now...

I'm scared I could be killed by an asteroid right now, apperently it's 640 times more likely than winning the (UK) lottery.

WTF is Bruce up to?

Arghh a bus!!!

[Signal 11 reset by peer]

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Signal 11]

Well, that may be true, except each of those pieces will continue to be attracted towards earth, and if they don't reach escape velocity as they pass, they'll go into orbit around us, having been caught in the gravity well surrounding earth - or worse, deorbit after a short while. Predicting where such pieces would fall would be a futile endeavor. :(

Even if that scenario didn't come true, if the asteroid was big enough to damage earth (1km or larger in diameter), unless the bomb was placed in the center of the asteroid, most of the asteroid would remain in one piece - only the surface would be blasted away. An atomic bomb going off in space with nothing to push against will make a lovely fireworks display but do zero useful work. At best, AT BEST, a missle-based delivery system would be able to impart only 50% of its available power as it would explode in an omnidirectional fashion.

--

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[British]

You played a lot of Missle Command as a kid, didn't you? You have every strategy down pat.

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Signal 11]

Ah, my old friend jburkholder, well, it just happens my spellchecker corrected that particular word. Nothing to see here, move along people...

--

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[SEWilco]

Breaking big asteroid into little asteroids merely alters an asteroid that would have thrown the Atlantic over all of Europe into many little asteroids, each of which can demolish Paris, London, Berlin, Geneva... you don't understand the energies involved.

In order to be burned up in the atmosphere you have to reduce it to pieces smaller than an automobile, preferably smaller than a dictionary.

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Chakotay]

But then you'd have all those Chinese falling back to earth...

)O(
Never underestimate the power of stupidity

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[SEWilco]

Great. you just superheated the upper atmosphere. All die. Oh, the embarrassment.

I'm sorry, he just rubbed me the wrong way and he was awfully small about it.

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[not2quik]

Sorry buddy, but you OBVIOUSLY didn't read any of the report rendered by the NEO (you know the subject of this story).

According to their predictions / calculations, any near Earth object smaller than 50 meters in diameter is burnt up in the Earth's atmosphere (reference page 20 of the report).

And I don't know about you, but I have NEVER seen a car that was 50 meters long...

Nice idea, but next time get your **FACTS** straight before you start undermining someone else's theories...thanks...

- J

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[iamplasma]

Yeah, though it is somewhat better IMHO than an extremely long-lasting winter, that kills everything. At least the heat will dissipate (relatively) fast, and humanity can survive.

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Fishstick]

>Ah, my old friend jburkholder,

Same to you.

>well, it just happens my spellchecker corrected that particular word.

uh, yeah, right

>Nothing to see here, move along people...

pretty much true of anything you post, ain't it?

YES!!

[B00yah]

What better defense against asteroids than a telescope!!!!


öööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööö

Re:YES!!

[Bouncings]

Well, to politicans it's "a rock" and the tellescope looks like a bong.

Besides, a tellescope tells you when a rock is going to crash into the earth. It shows the Windows bias in government. It's made like Norten CrashGaurd which tells you when you're computer is going to crash and crashes it ahead of time.

Re:YES!!

[Sonicboom]

What a better way to open the public funds for space funding than with fear!

(otherwise, why the hell would anyone want to give money to build another "stupid telescope").

*sigh*

Re:YES!!

[Sonicboom]

Time to buy a "Speak & Spell"(tm).

It's "telescope" NOT "tellescope".

(figues - another anonymous coward)

YOUR WELCOME!

Oh well.

[F0rlorn]

The Report is written for politicians...

There goes the usefulness of that report.

Re:Oh well.

[NaughtyEddie]

for politicans, not by politicians.

You can explain nuclear physics in baby talk if you have the time spare.

What a relief....

[Derwen]

.....it'll save all that depressing 2020 bother.
- Derwen

On asteroids

[Signal 11]

Having just finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's book Hammer of God (a book I heartily recommend), I've spent alittle time thinking about this too. The question isn't if the asteroid will hit, it is when, and this report will without question bear that out.

What we need is, in addition to being able to detect them, is outposts on other planets. It is necessary for the survival of our species and if we could just get our act together long enough to stop squabbling over things like money and national debt, we could help ensure that the human race won't be snuffed out like the dinosaurs before us.

We ought to put NASA under the DoD and give it a similar budget - afterall, this IS about defense - it is defense against mother nature.

--

Re:On asteroids

[Signal 11]

Hard to believe you're the net product of millions of years of evolution...

--

Re:On asteroids

[ArchieBunker]

Humans are an insignificant speck in the universe, on the cosmic scale it doesn't matter if one planet gets wiped out by an asteroid. And yes someday there will be an end to the human race.

Re:On asteroids

[supabeast!]

"We ought to put NASA under the DoD and give it a similar budget - afterall, this IS about defense - it is defense against mother nature."

Given all the money we blow on missile defense systems that don't work (And by the time they do, we could have just applied all of that money/effort to world peace/unilateral nuclear disarmament.), and the extremely low chance of ever needing them, you are quite correct. If nothing else, asteroids would be far easier to blast out of space than missiles, given that most of the ones we really need to worry about are pretty damned big (Relatively, anyway.).

Re:On asteroids

[Typingsux]

Fool. Defending against nature is like defending against life. Death is a part of life; even the death of entire civilizations. Defending ourselves against the nature will only make our death even more unpleasant. Mother Nature is a bitch. Why don't you stand in the middle of a street somewhere and not get out of the way of a bus. The law of inertia is a bastard, and mother nature is a bitch!

Re:On asteroids

[titus-g]

and as you sit blissfuly reading this comment on screens...

Remeber Pompeii

Re:On asteroids

[Signal 11]

Bet you won't get moderated up on this one...

Pay up.

--

Re:On asteroids

[COAngler]

Given all the money we blow on missile defense systems that don't work (And by the time they do, we could have just applied all of that money/effort to world peace/unilateral nuclear disarmament.)

Question: How do you apply money to world peace? Is there a World Peace Section at the goddamn Texaco StarMart? Let me guess: right next to the hot dogs.

And maybe it's the cop in me talking, but unilateral disarmament my ass. Dealing with the former soviet union is like dealing with sixteen armed, possible mental cases with no languages in common. It's a time for persistence and superhuman patience, but only an idiot would deal with them without some way of escalating if they escalate.

Re:On asteroids

[Signal 11]

Dealing with the former soviet union is like dealing with sixteen armed, possible mental cases with no languages in common.

We're lucky then - only one of them can read the panel attached to the side of the nuke that says "This Side Up".

...only an idiot would deal with them without some way of escalating if they escalate.

Right now nobody's escalating anything. All that money is going to waste - we could be building out our infrastructure and securing our place in the global economy - enriching the lives of the citizens this government is dedicated to. But what are we doing? Building bombs! We need books not bombs! As demonstrated in WWII, we have ample industrial infrastructure to match and counter any buildup of any enemy globally. We don't need those troops standing by right now. Train them, send them to college, and then keep them on file incase some 3rd world country does something stupid and we need them.. but for god's sake, don't pay billions for maintaining alot more force than we need.

--

Re:On asteroids

[nublord]

Right now nobody's escalating anything
How about exploding US embassies in foreign countries.

As demonstrated in WWII, we have ample industrial infrastructure to match and counter any buildup of any enemy globally.
This is not 1940 - this 2000. Warfare has changed.

Train them, send them to college, and then keep them on file incase some 3rd world country does something stupid and we need them.
One must train for combat situations constantly, not occasionally, if you want to reduce the number of our casualties. And besides, if you had a 4 or 5 year degree with a job bringing in $80k or more would you want to run off to some third world shithole and fight for $24k a year? I didn't think so.

Re:On asteroids

[Signal 11]

How about exploding US embassies in foreign countries.

Hey now, we have the ability to blow up embassies too - just ask the chinese!

This is not 1940 - this 2000. Warfare has changed.

Thank god economics hasn't! Despite all the advances, if you have a postage stamp-sized country, you ain't gonna have more GNP than us, nor will you have more people than us. What are they gonna do? Organize all the little 3rd world countries and ship them over to us in wooden boats??

One must train for combat situations constantly, not occasionally, if you want to reduce the number of our casualties.

There is a point of diminishing returns...

--

Re:On asteroids

[ahodgson]

>What are they gonna do?
>Organize all the little 3rd world countries and
>ship them over to us in wooden boats??

No, they'll invade the source of 50% of the world's oil and directly threaten our economies. Oh, wait, they tried that. Thankfully, we hadn't disarmed. But maybe next time.

Re:On asteroids

[Signal 11]

No, they'll invade the source of 50% of the world's oil and directly threaten our economies. Oh, wait, they tried that.

I welcome that move. I can't wait until our economy is laid to waste by high oil prices. It would serve the fat pigs in this country well to finally shuffle off a 150 year old technology and modernize. Yeah, so it'd be painful, yeah, it'd trigger a massive global depression, but hey.. that's the price you pay, literally, eh?

--

Re:On asteroids

[supabeast!]

"How do you apply money to world peace?"

Education. Show the entire world the value of the kind of tranquility and tolerance (Not that we don't need to improve on the latter.) we enjoy in the USA. Especially tolerance. Imagine how much better things would be if we could convince all of the Muslims/Jews/Christians in Europe/Africa/Asia/The Middle East to stop fighting over their different interpretations of the same God.

Not to mention teaching people all over the world to stop following mindlessly. One of the biggest problems all around is when a bunch of idiots elect a corrupt moron, who then pisses of the military, who stage a coup with the power the generals get from all the morons who follow them, creating a military dictatorship.... and so on. This happens over and over again all over the world, from Cuba to Iraq to Indonesia to half the countries in Africa. Better educated people will make better decisions and stop electing lunatics.

"...only an idiot would deal with them without some way of escalating if they escalate."

Escalating doesn't do any good. All it does is waste money for both sides. The United states built up a 3 trillion dollar national debt because Ronald Reagan was convinced that America needed to be able to wipe out the entire surface of the earth several times over just because the CCCP could. In the end it was just a pissing contest, because there was never any plan to use any of those weapons, which are now just a source of dangerous toxic waste. When the Soviets kept up with us in turn, it essentially bankrupt and destabilized the whole nation, causing it to collapse into numerous smaller states and a horribly managed big one.

"War - What is it good for? Absolutely NOTHING!"
Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Re:On asteroids

[Loki Trickster]

> How about exploding US embassies in foreign countries? How about the US guiding missles into foreign embassies in foreign countries (sorry 'bout that China)? The US is as good at escalating wars as anyone else...in fact, we're much better at it because we've got the funds and the economic interests to keep it going. -Loki

Re:On asteroids

[supabeast!]

"How about exploding US embassies in foreign countries"

Ever wonder why people blow them up? Because they are poorly educated, and follow charasmatic leaders like sheep. Show them that the goal of America isn't to wipe out all other cultures and this wouldn't happen.

"...if you had a 4 or 5 year degree with a job bringing in $80k or more would you want to run off to some third world shithole and fight for $24k a year? I didn't think so."

So what exactly are you advocating here? That we purposely underfund some schools so that the quality of education is poor, and those people turn to the military to live? Sounds like you think we should be exploiting people who grow up poor as cannon fodder. Wouldn't it make more sense to just work toward a better world where people don't have to "run off to some third world shithole and fight for $24k a year??"

Re:On asteroids

[jallen02]

If mother nature created us (using the term mother nature loosely here) and we are capable of stopping a process from occuring then is that not a natural progression of nature?... No worse than you heating your house oh wait dont do that its a process of nautre you cant stop from being cold... *grumble*

Jeremy

Re:On asteroids

[Ageless]

All the money is going to waste until the bombs start raining down on your kids, then you're asking "Why weren't we prepared???"

Re:On asteroids

[Kynes]

fsck the funny moderation... will people stop giving this little karma whore more airtime please.
please!

a karma whore is worth quite a bit less than anyone's $0.02

Re:On asteroids

[BillyOblivion]

Ever wonder why people blow them up? Because they are poorly educated, and follow charasmatic leaders like sheep.

Sounds like America to me.

Yep, we need more funding to study this

[bluGill]

Translation: We want to keep out jobs, so please pay us, regaurdless of the how important this really is in the scheme of things.

I'm not nessicarly saying this isn't worthy of study, but I am saying that it sure seems like a lot of things need more study.

Re:Yep, we need more funding to study this

[arnie_apesacrappin]

Ahh, but here comes the big problem from the old debate days. When weighing disadvantages (usually things like genocide, nuclear war, loss of human rights, etc.) we come to a problem. How do I weigh something that has a high probability of happening to a small percent of the population (like 5% of american deaths will be caused by cancer this year [this was made up, IANAStatistician]) with a definite time frame vs something with a very small probability of happening to the entire population with an indefinite time frame (a large asteriod will kill the entire population some day)? It is a very touchy issue that can be argued in favor of either side. It comes down to we need to make the best statistical analysis (based on reports like these) that we can, and try to distribute money as fairly as possible.

And on the lighter side, I think Deep Impact taught us the best lesson: if we would have just waited for the whole thing to show up near Earth, we could have blown up the entire thing, instead of just one of the pieces we created earlier. I guess the people in Deep Impact didn't see Armageddon. If they had, they would have known to drill to 800ft, not just 100m.

Re:Yep, we need more funding to study this

[arnie_apesacrappin]

Well, in Armageddon, they had to drill to 800 ft. In Deep Impact, they drilled to 100m, which is about 328ft. I was just saying, that if the Deep Impact people had drilled to 800 ft. (244m) as the Armageddon people did, they would have blown up the asteroid (following movie logic).

Re:Yep, we need more funding to study this

[rtscts]

an asteroid coming within 25,000m of us hasn't missed - 25k is plenty within our atmosphere.

perhaps you meant 25,000 kilometers?

Re:Yep, we need more funding to study this

[Tyrannosaurus]

Sounds like a Project Management class final exam.

First, determine probable dangers. Second, figure out the worst possible scenario that could occur from each threat. Finally, figure out how much it would cost to mitigate that threat.

Once you have this data, look for ratios such as: low cost to mitigate vs. high risk or high cost to mitigate vs. very high risk (a.k.a. the end of life on earth as we know it). And if you've got some money left over, start hitting the low cost to mitigate vs. moderate/low risk.

I would think that the threat to end all life on this third rock from the sun (well, except for no-see-ums - those little guys that getcha!) would warrant a pretty high expenditure on mitigation, regardless of the probability.

Of course, we could always just use the money to build a faster internet for downloading pr0n instead...

---

How thorough could it be?

[Anonymous Coward]

How thorough could it be? The report doesn't mention Bruce Willis at all.

Alternate site

[LordStrange]

SpaceRef Also has this story but with the actual paper attached in HTML.

Re:Alternate site

[mikael_j]

Thank you, from all of us who don't have .pdf viewing software installed.

Mikael Jacobson

Rampant Paranoia

[zpengo]

Funny, we seem to have gotten by for several thousands of years without any problems...

Hollywood releases a few movies, now suddenly everyone is freaked out about asteroids destroying the earth.

Maybe they're just making way for a bypass. You've got to build bypasses.

Re:Rampant Paranoia

[KjetilK]

Hollywood releases a few movies, now suddenly everyone is freaked out about asteroids destroying the earth.

Yep. Funny, isn't it? Anyway, what we could have built for the money Hollywood made from those movies....?

Re:Rampant Paranoia

[Alioth]

I don't think this is the case. I remember hearing about the asteroid threat a couple of years before the Hollywood movies. I distinctly remember one article pointing out that if you actually work out the probabilities, you are more likely to be killed by an asteroid [0] than in a plane crash. Perhaps we should be spending less money on air safety and more on meteor tracking?

However, the articles were never in the popular press. They were always in the specialist press. Your statement would have been more accurate if you had said "Hollywood releases a few movies, and now the popular press is freaked out about asteroids destroying the earth"

[0] Of course, the odds of the humanity-destroying asteroid are small, but if you multiply that by all the people it would kill, that's where you get that asteroid-vs-plane crash statistic.

Re:Rampant Paranoia

[JohnnyCannuk]

As long as they doi quietly...no poetry...please, no Vogon poetry...

Re:Rampant Paranoia

[KjetilK]

I distinctly remember one article pointing out that if you actually work out the probabilities, you are more likely to be killed by an asteroid [0] than in a plane crash.

Yep, Clark R. Chapman is pushing that. The reference is: C.R. Chapman & D. Morrison, 1994, Nature 367, 33-40. He has also testified that before congress.

He also lectured about that on a skeptics conference in Germany a few years ago. Our (Norwegian Skeptics Society) guy there (who is a historian of religion) wrote in his trip report that he had never felt so safe on the plane home before.... :-) Anyway, you should read it and make up your mind.

Re:Rampant Paranoia

[Masem]

IIRC, there was also a memo issued at that time by NASA that wanted Hollywood to provide funding for an asteriod search program, given that they had helped to create the paranoia regarding asteroids.

Expectedly, nothing came out that.

Re:Rampant Paranoia

[Black Parrot]

> I don't think this is the case. I remember hearing about the asteroid threat a couple of years before the Hollywood movies.

Agreed. The movies are the result, not the cause.

> However, the articles were never in the popular press. They were always in the specialist press.

I think they trickled all the way down to Scientific American, which IMO hovers just above the popular press.

--

Re:Rampant Paranoia

[Mr Windows]

I distinctly remember one article pointing out that if you actually work out the probabilities, you are more likely to be killed by an asteroid than in a plane crash

How about a car accident? Significantly more likely than either. Not quite as sf, or as cool a way to die. Still hurts, though. Perhaps we should spend the money on the more immediate threat?

Telescope?

[.sig]

Well, if we build a better hi-res telescope to look for asteroids, how much of the sky would it be able to cover? Even if we put it out in space, it's still take forever to scan the entire sky. (Maybe if we had a few hundred of these super-scopes...)
(BTW, any chance we can get a link to a non-acrobat version of this report? That viewer is just a pain sometimes...)

Re:Telescope?

[Electric Angst]

Exactly! No single telescope is going to be able to cover such an extremly large area.
What they ought to do is give everyone a telescope and an hour of free time a week. Then we'd be secure.
Let's all get ready for distributed-armageddon watch!

--

Re:Telescope?

[.sig]

Sonds like a better use for my spare cycles than Seti-At-Home. (I'd rather not make contact with an asteroid than make contact with aliens who obviously don't want to talk to us... =p

Re:Telescope?

[KjetilK]

It is rather unlikely that it will be far out of the plane of the solar system, so you will only need to scan a small part of the sky. It is a big job anyway.

Heh

[Smitty825]

Heh...what are we going to do once we find an Asteriod that's coming to crash into earth in the next 3 to 4 years? I don't think that we have the technology to either divert the asteriod or destroy it...

Asteroid Risk.

[BigBlockMopar]

Yeah, and I have Firestone Radial ATX tires on my truck, too.

Oh well.

Children's astronomy book?

[blazer1024]

Okay, I just skimmed over the thing, didn't really feel like reading it, but what I see when I look at all the pretty pictures, is a children's book on astronomy.

Seriously, that's kind of what it looks like. A book geared towards 8-10 year olds. Oh, right, they said it was targeted at politicians, I should've known it was gonna look like that.

Misinterpreting the title

[Denor]

Was I the only one who read "Science: UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report" and thought "I bet it said 'We didn't think it was a very good movie, either'"?

I need to get out more.

Re:Misinterpreting the title

[titus-g]

true :P

*sigh*

[vectus]

By the time that they discover the astroid, and decide whether or not it will be dangerous to us, and then decide how to deal with it, we'll be screwed. In a project like this, there will be too much red tape to deal with for the researchers to properly address each threat. If this were to be created, it would face the brunt of every round of tax cuts. Do you think John Q. Public would rather 'waste' money protecting his ass from meteors, or have an extra $20 a year to blow on pr0n? And because of these tax cuts, they will have no money to deal with the threats. It is happened to SETI, and it will happen to this.

I had asteroids once...

[Anonymous Coward]

the proctologist gave me some cream to clear them up...

This is not goatse.cx

Confidence Builder

[thelen]

Found a lovely quote on CNN from Britain's Science Minister Lord Sainsbury, the person responsible for forming the committee on near earth asteroids:

"We put a lot of money into astrology and I think it's sensible to put just a little bit in to making certain that we know if there is a danger of an object hitting our very fragile planet," Lord Sainsbury said.

Hmm, if I was born a Cancer when the moon and Saturn were aligned in metaconjunction (or whatever), will I get hit by an asteroid?

Re:Confidence Builder

[Tackhead]

"We put a lot of money into astrology and I think it's sensible to put just a little bit in to making certain that we know if there is a danger of an object hitting our very fragile planet", said Lord Sainsbury

> if I was born a Cancer when the moon and Saturn were aligned in metaconjunction
> (or whatever), will I get hit by an asteroid?

That's Sainsbury's point - that there are more people interested (and voting with their dollars) for astrology over astronomy - and that this fact does not speak well to our sense of priorities as a species, nor does it bode well for our long-term survival prospects.

Frankly, if humanity gets wiped out by an errant rock because its citizens are more interested in "looking for signs in the stars" than actually looking at the stars, then it probably deserves to be wiped out.

(It's a sad commentary on society how pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo beats real science in the world of the mundanes. Fer chrissakes, the real universe is goddamn fascinating. Stars made of diamond. Atomic nuclei the size of cities and the mass of suns, rotating hundreds of times per second. Just for starters. The gods of the astrologers are weaklings, limited by mundane imaginations. But astronomy has opened my mind up to things I could never have imagined.)

On the appeal of science vs. mysticism: "Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder", an essay by Richard Dawkins.

The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program. Must we follow in their footsteps?

Re:Confidence Builder

[titus-g]

Ummm well yes.

but only after you meet a tall dark stranger who knows all the CL options to ls.

On a wednesday.

And your sex life is going to improve, other people are going to be involved!!!

Anyway shouldn't trust a Sainsbury, the food is nice, as is the packaging, but damn who can afford it? (UK only?)

Re:Confidence Builder

[Derwen]

Anyway shouldn't trust a Sainsbury, the food is nice, as is the packaging, but damn who can afford it? (UK only?)

I'm afraid that they're more global than that. They own Star Markets and Shaws Supermarkets, very big in Massachusetts and number two in New England overall. See the FTC's concerns(?)

BTW Sainsbury's are an odd company environmentally. Very bad relatively-speaking (they're a supermarket: centralised distribution, food miles, lots of packaging, ....) but standing out amidst supermarkets (pressurising growers to reduce fertilizer use, codes on wild-harvested ingredients, sustainable timber policy,...).
A paradox? Or do they just know their customers well?

Re:Confidence Builder

[Nexus Seven]

Why do you trust CNN to have got the quote right?

The number of factual errors I have seen reported as news on CNN makes me think this is probably a mis-quote.

better than nothing.

[twitter]

OK, so it's Europe. They've only recomended what they can do. You need a Von Braun in America to get anything real done. They did a good job of telling us why it's important.

You mean 90 years...

[Derwen]

A quick google search for information on the asteroid which detonated over Tunguska in Siberia in June 1908 will pull up several sites, including this one (picked at random).

The problem with statistically possible events is that they do occur, and in unpredictable ways, too. The 1908 impact happened in the most emote and sparsely-populated region on the planet. As we probably won't be so lucky next time (whether it is in 1 or 10,000 years time) it is fortunate that some people recognize the problem.
- Derwen

Re:You mean 90 years...

[Derwen]

It was a miniature black hole, not some friggin' asteroid.

It was a stone meteorite, a conclusion reached in 1993 by three well-respected researchers and consistantly reaffirmed. OK?

Re:You mean 90 years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tunguska caused by an asteroid? Pleeeeeaaase - everyone knows it was Tesla's Death Ray...

Tesla and Tunguska....

It is not certain if Tesla ever used the death ray, or indeed if he even succeeded in building one. But the following is the often-related story of what happened one night in 1908 when Tesla tested the foreboding weapon.

At the time, Robert Peary was making his second attempt to reach the North Pole. Cryptically, Tesla had notified the expedition that he would be trying to contact them somehow. They were to report to him the details of anything unusual they might witness on the open tundra. On the evening of June 30, accompanied by his associate George Scherff atop Wardenclyffe tower, Tesla aimed his death ray across the Atlantic towards the arctic, to a spot which he calculated was west of the Peary expedition.

Tesla switched on the device. At first, it was hard to tell if it was even working. Its extremity emitted a dim light that was barely visible. Then an owl flew from its perch on the tower's pinnacle, soaring into the path of the beam. The bird disintegrated instantly.

That concluded the test. Tesla watched the newspapers and sent telegrams to Peary in hopes of confirming the death ray's effectiveness. Nothing turned up. Tesla was ready to admit failure when news came of a strange event in Siberia.

On June 30, a massive explosion had devastated Tunguska, a remote area in the Siberian wilderness. Five hundred thousand square acres of land had been instantly destroyed. Equivalent to ten to fifteen megatons of TNT, the Tunguska incident is the most powerful explosion to have occurred in human history -- not even subsequent thermonuclear detonations have surpassed it. The explosion was audible from 620 miles away. Scientists believe it was caused by either a meteorite or a fragment of a comet, although no obvious impact site or mineral remnants of such an object were ever found.

Nikola Tesla had a different explanation. It was plain that his death ray had overshot its intended target and destroyed Tunguska. He was thankful beyond measure that the explosion had - miraculously - killed no one. Tesla dismantled the death ray at once, deeming it too dangerous to remain in existence.

Re:You mean 90 years...

[Ella the Cat]

Gordelpus!

- First and Last Men Olaf Stapledon 1930

Network of LMTs

[KjetilK]

Well, building a largish dedicated telescope is one thing, but I would rather start researching a possibility that would be much more useful, namely building a network of Liquid Mirror Telescopes. A liquid mirror telescope has a mirror of mercury that is rotating, forming a near-perfect paraboloid as it rotates. Obviously, you can't tilt the telescope, so you can't track objects like conventional telescopes, and you can't look wherever you like, you can only look straight up. The field is also pretty small, but if you put a lot of LMTs on different longitudes and latitudes, you will be able to scan most of the sky. And since LMTs come at the prize of 1/100 of the cost of a similar size of a conventional telescope, you can build a lot of them. So, say we start mass manufacturing (several hundred) 8 meter LMTs and place them all over the place.

This should be done by international agreements, and the data should be put in public domain. It would not only be useful in looking for NEOs, but all kinds of monitoring projects, e.g. Gravitional Lens monitoring (which is my research area), Gamma Ray Burst follow-ups, the list is long. Of course, short exposure times is a problem with LMTs too (90 secs), but that can be fixed by combining nights.

There are substancial technical problems connected with a global network of LMTs, first, we don't know how the mercury will behave (turbulence in the atmosphere is a problem, now you might get turbulence in the mirror as well... :-) And, you won't see adaptive optics like you see on e.g. VLT on an LMT). Another problem is the huge amount of data produced, and how to treat it and give every potential user access to it. These are problems that must be overcome, but I believe that it should be possible to do, and definitively more worthwhile than building dedicated instruments for NEO search.

Re:Network of LMTs

[SheldonYoung]

Of course, the biggest disadvantage is that mercury is highly toxic.

The second biggest advantage is that even though you have 100 times more telescopes, you have 100 times more devices to monitor. Instead, build a single telescope that can watch 100 times more sky.

Re:Network of LMTs

[jd]

Build one in space. Inertia doesn't require gravity. Then, you could build a liquid mirror telescope as large as you liked. A few kilometers in diameter would be entirely feasable. (Remember, mirrors don't need to be thick. It wouldn't take that much mercury to form a reflective surface over a huge area.)

Mind you, at a couple of Km, you'd be able to monitor the asteroid threat for every solar system in a 100 light-year radius.

(Alerting them might be a bit of a problem, though... :)

Another advantage of being space-borne is that although you couldn't "track", you could at least steer, by stopping, moving and restarting.

Re:Network of LMTs

[AstroJetson]

Uh, what's keeping all the mercury from flying off into space?

Btw, LMTs (on Earth) (*can*) track objects by means of a movable mirror.

Re:Network of LMTs

[jafac]

And you'd *keep* mercury a liquid HOW exactly, in the cold vacuum of space?

On the Skywalker Ranch where the Storm Trooper Posse says:

Re:Network of LMTs

[KjetilK]

Uh, what's keeping all the mercury from flying off into space?

Yeah, I don't think it is feasible. However, having one on the moon would be great.

Btw, LMTs (on Earth) (*can*) track objects by means of a movable mirror.

Yep, that's right, but since the effect of seeing smears the image so when you tilt the mirror, you'll have a Point Spread Function that depends on the pixel position and time. I'm not doing a lot of reductions, but something tells me that would be nasty.... :-)

Of course, you follow an object on the CCD as at moves across the field, but I don't know if that can be refered to as "tracking"... :-)

Re:Network of LMTs

[WolfWithoutAClause]

I read a report about this ages ago. There is some mercury vapour present as it is spun up but an oxide layer soon forms and then the vapour quickly dissipates. The scientists just hang around outside until the mercury vapour level goes down and then they can go in.

Re:Network of LMTs

[jd]

Inertia. Otherwise known (to those who've read your A.C. Clarke) as "Artificial Gravity".

(It's also referred to as "centripedal" or "centrifugal" force, and is what gives rise to the corriolis effect, which is what you're trying to do with the liquid mercury, when spinning it.)

Basically, F=ma (Newton I). Without a force, there is no acceleration. Therefore, the mercury won't move except in a straight line, caused by the container it's in rotating, bent round into a circular path. That forced bent path is what gives rise to the parabolic shape.

So long as the mercury has NO straight-line path, along the direction it's being accelerated, that leads into open space, it'll remain "glued" to the container by the spin.

(That isn't as easy as it sounds. You can't just use a large saucer and hope. You'd need to have a rim that would trap the mercury inside.

Re:Network of LMTs

[jd]

No, in the low -pressure- of space. (I forget if that's a quote from Asimov or AC Clarke, but that isn't important right now. :)

The low pressure of space will practically guarantee that liquids remain liquid. In fact, the biggest problem would be to prevent the mercury evaporating. Molecules move at various velocities, following a Gaussian distribution. In plain english, that means that in any liquid, there are a non-zero number of molecules moving straight up faster than needed to escape the liquid.

But because space is, well, open, none of those molecules are likely to ever come back. So, you'd actually get a net loss, unless you had the mercury in a closed container. Which would then cause a problem, because you could build up sufficient pressure for the mercury to freeze.

What you'd probably end up with is something that looked like a cross between a centrifuge and a pressure cooker.

Re:Network of LMTs

[hyacinthus]

Mercury _metal_ is not very toxic. Mercuric ion, e.g. from the mercuric chloride we splashed around carelessly in high school, is quite toxic, but not nearly as much as some of the organomercury compounds--it was these which were responsible for the Minamata Bay poisonings back in the 60's. But liquid, metallic mercury is quite inert. If you swallowed a few ounces of it, you'd excrete it all out, practically unchanged.

The chief danger is that mercury is slightly volatile at room temperature--it's the cumulative effect, of breathing in mercury vapor over long periods, that presents the real health hazard. That's why mercury spills are so dangerous--the mercury breaks up and beads of it settle in every crevice, where it sits and evaporates. Clean mercury exposed to air develops a thin surface layer which tends to inhibit evaporation, so that helps to mitigate the hazard. For use in the LMT, I wonder if they don't float a very thin layer of oil over the surface--but refraction of the light in the oil would hurt the optical quality of the mirror somewhat. Adequate ventilation would help too.

hyacinthus

Re:Network of LMTs

[stras]

Bzzzt -- sorry, wrong answer. LMTs require a gravitational field (or other axial acceleration).

Now, this does not mean that space-borne LMTs are impractical -- but you do need to provide an axial thruster to supply "gravitational" acceleration. Fortunately, the required accelerations are not high, so you can use things like xenon-ion propulsion systems, which can give months of operation on a load of fuel.

Do a search on NASA's web site for more info on LMTs; you'll find a short study of spaceborne LMT feasability.

Re:Network of LMTs

[AstroJetson]

a) I don't need a physics lesson.

b) What keeps it from flying out the *top* of the mirror? On Earth, gravity holds it down, what holds it 'down' in space? (Hint: there is no gravity)

Now the idea of putting some on the moon has merit. Less gravity = slower spin = less vibration = better images.

However, the best solution, I think is lots and lots of smaller (ie, amateur) telescopes constantly scanning under remote control when not being used for other observations. Sorta like Seti@Home with telescopes instead of computers.

Just do it and get it over with!!!

[XaXXon]

Ya know.. sometimes I wish one of these "impending disasters" would just happen so there wouldn't be any more impending disasters. Y2K.. nothing, had to listen to the media go off about how they saved us from doom by reporting on all the problems (over and over again for a year and a half), or the meteor that was going to hit us 6 months ago (that is actually off by a few million miles (MCI math?)). I'm sick of all the hype and let down. JUST DO IT AND GET IT OVER WITH!

How big is it?

[roystgnr]

Heh...what are we going to do once we find an Asteriod that's coming to crash into earth in the next 3 to 4 years? I don't think that we have the technology to either divert the asteriod or destroy it...

How big an asteroid are you talking about? Yeah, if we discover an upcoming impact with a 10 km asteroid (or an Asteroid the Size of Texas, or God forbid a Comet the Size of a Hollywood Script Writer's Ignorance), then we're screwed. Fortunately, as the report says, those 10 km asteroids only come around every hundred million years or so. We can afford to gamble for a while.

The concern is that we'll be hit by something a couple hundred meters wide: big enough to craterize a city, small enough that we can't survey them with currently allocated resources, yet small enough that they could be pushed aside with an H-bomb if discovered early enough, or their target areas could be evacuated if they were discovered late.

Scientists Propose Telescope in Southern Hemispher

[Cy Guy]

From a BBC Article on the report:

A task force established to assess the threat of so-called Near Earth Objects (Neo's) has concluded that the risk is not science fiction but something that should be taken seriously.

The three-member team called on ministers to seek international partners to build a new £15m telescope dedicated to sweeping the skies for threatening objects.

The three-metre (9.8 feet) survey telescope, based in the Southern Hemisphere, would be designed to detect objects down to a few hundred metres across.

Extintion

[Gen-GNU]

Ok, the report is written for politicians, but (at least in theory) it is written by scientists.
Near the very begining, when talking about asteroids, they discuss how asteroids have been hitting the earth since it was formed. Fine. Then they go on to say that an asteroid is responsible for the extintion of the dinosaurs.
Just curious, but when was that theory proven? Last I checked that was still a theory, in a mix with other theories about the dinosaurs. Yet here it is presented as a fact, with no room for discusstion.
I know the scientists want to keep their job, but this seems rather shoddy to me. Present the facts to the politicians, not your version of them. At least then we have a real reason for blaming them when they make another bone-headed decision.

Re:Extintion

[crackbeer]

It's explained later in the report. A very large impact was discovered in the Yucatan. Its age puts it at about the time the dinosaurs vanished and it's size placed it in the "extinction event" level. It's probably still a theory, but for the most part they consider this to be the one that killed the Flintstones.

Re:Extintion

[Loki Trickster]

> Then they go on to say that an asteroid is responsible for the extintion of the dinosaurs. Just curious, but when was that theory proven? Yes, that theory has been proven within the limits of scientific study. A large crater at the Yucatan that's been dated to the K-T barrier (65 million years ago), along with tsunami evidence from the same time, along with any number of other evidence has shown within a scientific reasonable doubt that a meteor (or comet) caused the extinction of the dinos. If you're wondering about this, read "T-Rex and the Crater of Doom" by Walter Alvarez. It's a remarkably lucid demonstration of how true this actually is. Check your sources before you start accusing scientists of being "shoddy."...especially when you're the one doing the shoddy work. -Loki

Re:Extintion

[geekoid]

Please learn the differance between a theory and a hypothesis.

what about...

[Polo]

what about government mandated planet-side
airbags in case of collision?

The asteroid threat is real...

[meckardt]

although probably not especially urgent.

For reference, I offer the book "Rain of Iron and Ice: The Very Real Threat of Comet and Asteroid Bombardment" by John S. Lewis, Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., January 1995. Lewis gives a very good historic and factual overview of meteor impacts on Earth and elsewhere, and presents some interesting speculation about the actual danger to Earth from falling asteroids and comets.

Fact: meteors do hit Earth. About 1/2 are of asteroidal origin. The remainder are cometary debris. MOST break up in the atmosphere. But those are the small ones. Anything larger than a certain size will reach the ground.

Fact: Based on SpaceWatch observations, there are probably about 2000 objects larger than 1 kilometer in diameter in Near Earth Orbits. These are the civilization killers. NEO bodies larger than 0.1 km in diameter probably number over half a million. These would cause widespread devistation. (Meteor Crater, AZ was formed by an asteroidal piece about 30 meters in diameter!)

The 0.1 Km strikes occure (on average) every 100,000 years. The larger asteroids strike Earth (on average) every 100,000,000 years (with the last one suspected as being 65 million years ago). No, they don't happen very often, but they do happen. We will soon be in a position to do something about it. I, for one, would like to be able to. The first step is knowing about potential threats.

Re:The asteroid threat is real...

[Nocode]

Wouldn't the density and composite make-up of an meteor make as much (or more) of a difference in atmospheric break-up?

Considering how vast the universe is, we cannot possibly know all the elements and compounds that come together billions of miles from us to form who knows what.

After saying that, Ill stand at ground zero and await that 40 ton gold meteor to hit me before Ill stand where the 20 ton diamond is dropping. Bad analogy I know...but statistically speaking, a pile of lunar rock isnt the only thing floating around out there.

Re:The asteroid threat is real...

[jafuser]

I remember reading somewhere that after you figure all of the statistics on how often a large enough meteor hits the earth, and how many people that would kill, that an average of 4,000 people a year are killed by a meteor impact. Of course this average is generated over hundreds of thousands of years, but involves billions of people.

--
EFF Member #11254

25,000 years

[twitter]

We've been here 25,000 years. If you look at page 17 of the report you will see the frequency of significant impacts. 1,000 years for 10 Megatonne , 4,000 years for 100 MT, 16,000 for 1,000 MT and on up the scale. Lying down won't stop this.

Re:25,000 years

[zpengo]

Building telescopes won't stop it either.

Re:25,000 years

[David A. Madore]

Look, even if the time expectancy for all of mankind being destroyed by an asteroid is even as low as 4000 years (and expect it to be pretty much higher than that), it only reduces your life expectancy by about one year. Not negligible, but not terribly high either.

Re:25,000 years

[twitter]

This is something we can do something about and it has other uses. In 1492, you might have been able to lead a comfortable life where you were. Some people can see further. Sooner or later we will run out of easy to use resources. The only way to provide for more people is to strive to gain new resources. Let's support the strivers.

Re:25,000 years

[Derwen]

We've been worrying about it a long time too, see here.

A Steroid Armageddon Report

[SIGFPE]

Yeah...my doctor says steroids can be really dangerous. He says Bruce Willis was on them and look what happened to his hair.
--

Steroids in the sky? What next?

[cybertad]

I for one am astonished at the rampant use of steroids in the Olympic games. I mean, come on, can't anyone get by naturally. And now, we have to worry about steroids falling from the sky and hitting the Earth, taking out our entire civilization. This has gone far enough!

huh?

oh, Asteroids... nevermind.

It's more real than we think

[WillAffleck]

While I was at Burning Man, someone dug up a nice meteorite that hit nearby, which was about the size of an SUV. This is after most of it burned up in the atmosphere.

Again, don't launch nukes or interceptors at Giant Asteroids - this only makes it worse as they fragment and still hit. Think of what happened to Jupiter when that comet fragmented into nine parts - it made it much worse. You're better off pushing it aside with an ion drive - you only have to nudge it a bit at a time so it misses earth.

Ever think what would happen if we pushed a big one so it missed the earth, but hit the moon, causing that to destabilize and impact (return to) earth? If that ever happens, you can forget about civilization ...

Re:Jane, you ignorant slut...

[zpengo]

Yes, that's right. Earthquakes are harmless.

Jupiter ignored the threat

[ch-chuck]

and look what happened to them!! There is also evidence that earth has been hit by cosmic debris (hehe ;) many times.

Destablize the moon?

[meckardt]

That would have to be one big asteroid! Say... about the size of the moon.

Re:Destablize the moon?

[Nexx]

Or one that's moving really fast. Then again, all you need to do is to place the sucker into a decaying elliptical orbit....

--

Re:Destablize the moon?

[linzeal]

A quick calculation from my druggie perspective calculator puts the Real size of that Suv-size asteroid at monkey spoon tango 63!

Alerting them would be out of the question...

[pmancini]

Unless you were alerting them to threats that take more than a century to impact... :-)

Made for politicians

[jayhawk88]

Man they weren't kidding made for politicians. Lots of big colored pictures and PowerPoint-ish graphics. I wonder why it's always necessary to "disguise" important information to people in positions of leadership?

Some Extra Info + Links

[szyzyg]

Here's some extra things to look at....

My Map of all NEOs

BBC coverage of these events

My 'Musical Interpretation' of the report ;-)

Re:Some Extra Info + Links

[Black Parrot]

> My 'Musical Interpretation' of the report ;-)

Music of the Spheres and Various Other Shapes?

--

The Problem with LMTs?

[Guppy]

I'm not sure if LMTs are quite as convenient as they first seem. Although such mirrors would be cheap, the amount of Mercury contain could cause a problem. There is always the possibility of accidental spills (seized bearing, clumsy grad student, etc...). More importantly, though--over time, the mirror would also lose Mercury through evaporation. Right now, there are only a few experimental LMTs, but this could pose a problem both for the astronomers as well as the local environment, if they were to become more commonplace.

Re:The Problem with LMTs?

[KjetilK]

Yep, these are real concerns, and I know that the groups working on LMTs are taking them seriously. One thing I know is that the evaporation doesn't pose significant health risks, that was the first thing they researched. Also, the construction would have to be such that if a spill occurs, you can't spill outside the telescope building.

I haven't done any LMT research myself, but I have had a good time on a couple of occasions making a 30 cm LMT using an old turntable and engine oil. It's really great! :-)

all me baby

[Adolf Grammar]

wow, if only we could all evolve vertical relationships; imagine a world in which innovative front-end technologies ceaselessly synergize turn-key networks; it would be a landslide, a paradigm shift, a breakpoint. Now all I need to do is visualize my bleeding-edge niches and I will be complete...

Re: this reminds me of that simpsons episode......

[deglr6328]

".......afterall, this IS about defense - it is defense against mother nature"

[clipped from the SNPP]

Lisa asks Mr. Burns if his plant has a recycling center. Mr. Burns can't even comprehend what the word recycling means. "Ree-cy-cleeng?" Zoom to Mr. Burns' head, where we dissolve to an opening dictionary. The page begins with the word "Ragamuffin" as we scroll down to a series of other tyrannical, threatening R words. Mr. Burns tells Lisa that he doesn't know what the word means, and calls her a "ragamuffin." Lisa tells him about how recycling helps Mother Nature, to which Mr. Burns starts spitting upon mother nature for the disasters she's given man. Mr. Burns states the opinion, "Surely, you agree we can do without her!" Lisa: "No i don't agree!". Mr. Burns is shocked. Smithers scolds her for questioning Mr. Burns. Burns calls off Smithers, and just tells Lisa to shut up because if he listened to people like her, he wouldn't be worth $200 million today. Lisa, however, read Mr. Burns' "recent" biography, which portrays him as being only
worth $100 million. Mr. Burns looks to Smithers, who hesitantly informs him that he's actually worth considerably less than that. Mr. Burns announces his departure. Skinner says, "Monty Burns, everybody!" and starts applauding.

On Reports:

[haystor]

So they spent money on a report to find out they didn't know enough about the subject, and needed more money?

I could have known not enough for half the cost. I'd throw the report in for free.

to finish the thought add:

[twitter]

...but so are roaches and Signal 11.

Global Impact Calculator

[Alien54]

As always, when this sort of news comes out, this Sky and Telescope Magazine webpage comes in handy. It has plenty of links.

Especially useful and entertaining is this Solar System Impact Calculator, where you if you are lucky, you can help Marvin the Martian get rid of the pesky planet blocking his view of Venus. :) You can check out effects of impacts on other planets as well. Just don't make Marvin mad ...

:)

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Two big problems

[twitter]

First, you need gravity and spinning to make that parabolic shape. I imagine you'd get a bunch of blobs without gravity.

Second, mercury is very dense and you'd never get it up even if you could control it. You would do better to lift something light and shiny like aluminum foil instead.

Re:Two big problems

[jd]

Momentum and inertia are sufficient. Inertia is what gives "centrifugal" force, which is the force that actually gives rise to that parabolic shape.

You'd get blobs in an environment without gravity OR inertia, that is correct. By spinning, you are creating an "artificial gravity", which holds the mercury in place.

As for the second point, yes, I agree entirely. The catch is that aluminium (UK spelling alert!) foil only comes in those narrow sheets from the supermarket.

Propulsion

[Nanookanano]

The only physical influence even in the same magnitude is an application of thrust by nuclear device in any stable direction in right angle to the vector of the asteroid. This is where the number grinding comes in. We would have to generate the mother of all algorithms to find the blasting spots. As to the resultant debris, that is a trivial matter in relation to the major body of the rock.

my thinking about asteroids

[ywwg]

If we haven't seen a biggy for 65,000,000 years, and humans haven't had an asteroid destruction thingy for all the time we've been around, we need not worry. Remember, just because more and more years go by without a siting does not increase the chances of an asteroid hitting tomorrow. This is counter to, say, and earthquake, where pressure builds up over time. It's more like the Big Game, where the chances of anything happening are near zero, and even if something does happen we won't have time to do anything. How many of the "near misses" (or near hits, if you are being accurate) have been detected a couple days before they pass by?

Re:my thinking about asteroids

[Pedrito]

True, it may not happen tomorrow, but if it does, we're all dead. That kinda makes it a bit more important than say, an earthquake, which poses NO danger of wiping out ALL of humanity.

Sure, the chances are quite slim it would happen in my lifetime, but still, I'd like to feel somewhat protected on the off-chance that some 50km wide rock decides to come slamming into my backyard.

Re:my thinking about asteroids

[WolfWithoutAClause]

That's what the dinosaurs said! (The fact that there have been near misses should give you considerable pause for thought.)

Re:my thinking about asteroids

[ywwg]

Ah, but my second point was that there is little or no chance of catching an asteroid in time. As I said, how much notice were we given in the recent near-hits? a few days. I don't think this record will improve to the theoretical 20 years no matter how much money is thrown at the problem.

fundamental problem: space is really really big!

Re:Extinction

[craw]

Here'e some of the evidence, some stronger than others. Dinosaurs died out 65 MA ago. There was also a mass extinction at this time among other life on this planet (especially in the oceans). Walter Alvarez and collegues (Walter is the son of the Nobel Prize winner, Luis) discover a layer (dated at 65 MA) with an abnormally high level of iridium. Later this layer is found elsewhere on this planet.

Soot from burnt biomass is discovered that date back to 65 MA. IIRC, the soot contains buckyballs (fullerenes). Global wildfires are hypothesized. Paleontologist narrow down the time span during which the dinosaurs disappeared. Micropaleontologist studying seafloor microfossils get a better picture of the "recovery" period after the mass ocean extinctions.

Volcanologist propose an alternative theory; Deccan Traps flood basalt is a likely suspect. Volcano theory has problems with the seafloor microfossil data. However, the impact ppl don't have a crater. Some tsunami deposits identified that seem to support the ocean impact hypothesis. Some (all) of the tsunami deposit evidence later refuted.

Chicxulub crater (Yucan) is discovered and is dated to be 65 MA. Material from Chicxulub found elsewhere. Ocean floor deep-sea drilling project finds previous molten fragments deposited off New Jersey in a sediment layer that date back to 65 MA.

A speculative paper is published (it was previously reject 5 times back in 1990). It hypothesizes that tsunamis caused by the impact will significantly and almost instantaneously alter oceanic hydrostatic pressure. Changes in pressure results in the instant destablization of methane hyrdrates and the release of underlying methane. This methane then burns and is part of the soot that was found.

There more evidence, but this post is getting rather long.

Re:Interesting development

[thelen]

umm, I don't think that was Sainsbury's point. I went back to the original article to see if I had misinterpreted the quote. I hadn't. In fact, and this is pretty odd, the page was corrected sometime in the last two hours, replacing "astrology" with "astronomy".

Is causing websites to fix their material part of the Slashdot Effect?

No it won't

[twitter]

put one foot in front of the other, eventually you will be there.

Re:Interesting development

[Tackhead]

> the page was corrected sometime in the last two hours, replacing "astrology" with "astronomy".

Oops. Mea culpa. Of course, never trust a journalist to know the difference between astronomy and astrology ;-)

Another Warning

[MeowMeow Jones]

People seem to think that if we can eliminate the astroid problem, we'll have 5 billion care-free years until the Sun goes nova. But in only 3 billion years our galaxy will collide with Andromeda, and theres a good chance the Solar System won't survive this collision.

I'd just like to ask that everyone out there who plans to transfer their conciousness into indestructable robots to take a moment to think about this, and treat every moment of the 3 billion years they have left preciously.

Re:Another Warning

[Black Parrot]

> But in only 3 billion years our galaxy will collide with Andromeda, and theres a good chance the Solar System won't survive this collision.

No sweat. By that time we'll have rockets that we can launch at oncoming galaxies and blow them out of the way.

Which fact may explain (a) quasars, and (b) the non-detection of highly advanced civilizations.

--

Re:Another Warning

[at_18]

>But in only 3 billion years our galaxy will collide with Andromeda, and theres a good chance the Solar System won't survive this collision.

That's wrong. Our solar system couldn't care less about a galaxy-to-galaxy collision. Your atoms don't care when you clap your hands.

What I wonder is...

[Amon CMB]

If we have enough nukes to blow up this planet who-knows-how-many times, then why can't we blow up an asteroid barely bigger than a state?
- Amon CMB

oh dear.

[twitter]

A uniform and constant acceleration normal to spinning plane will produce a parabolic free surface. It is the balance between the two that makes the shape and it won't happen without either.

These conditions cannot be produced by men yet. Spinning a couterwheighted dish, ala 2001, to make "artificial gravity" will not make the uniform field you desire. Essentially, you'd have a giant gyroscope! You might try to constantly accelerate a dish, but this has vibration and comunications problems. A constantly accelerating platform will quickly pass communications limits. Also note that both of these solutions require large rigid containers for our mercury.

Foil from the super market, bah. I get mine from the hypermarket and it's much bigger than yours.

who's got time for spelling that goofey language, English?

Worst case scenario-

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Ok, first the Near Earth Asteroids are bad if they are heading for earth, but they aren't the worst, because they are mostly predictable. The worst are the extrasolar asteroids/comets that come barrelling in from outside the solar system, from the Oort cloud or beyond.

You might only get a few months warning on those at best (they mostly shine within the orbit of mars), and at worst, they come at you from the sunward direction where our telescopes can't see them. You wake up one day wondering what that wall of fire is. Or maybe we don't wake up at all.

There probably is no reasonable defense against such asteroids. Moving them- there probably is no way that can be done in that short time scale.

Think about it. This is a planet busting disaster and there is no way to save the earth.

Its not particularly likely to happen soon, but it will happen eventually. Even long period comets that come round once a millenia or so. So this time they line with the earth for the first time and...

There is one way for humans to survive however. We need to build space habitats as soon as we possibly can.

Check out:

Artemis

Neofuels

Permanent

Sleep well, don't have nightmares!

No, no, no! After dealing with the asteroids...

[alienmole]

...then, as Michio Kaku suggests, we will have to slowly claw our way up from our current Type 0 civilization, to reach a Type III civilization or beyond. At that point, we should be able to steer our galaxy away from Andromeda, or perhaps merge the two cleanly in order to gain more energy sources to work with.

Protection from asteroids is a crucial first step in all of this. If we don't do that, we're toast, it's just a question of when the toaster's going to pop.

Sheesh, doesn't anyone around here read Greg Bear?

mo' money

[csbruce]

and more funding for research in the field

Not that I necessarily disagree, but they could have just called this "[Standard Recommendation #n-1]... "we recommend increased funding for the work that we happen to do."

We CANNOT blow up the planet

[pmancini]

It is a falacy to think we can blow up the planet, what we can do is blow away the fragile buildings we have built on it many times over.

Nuclear weapons can't be used to stop asteroids

[xtal]

You are right, but for the wrong reasons. People assume that because we have nuclear weapons on ICBMs that we can automatically launch them into space. This isn't the case. In fact, IIRC (I'm in no way an expert, as I'm a citizen of a country with absoulutely no nukes, Canada :), there isn't even a launch vehicle that could even be made READY to launch at an asteroid to make a pathetic attempt at destroying one in time. I believe during the US senate's inquiry into the feasibility of this, a senator thought they could just fire a nuke - and he was told he was flat out wrong.

See, all that ballistic missile technology didn't go into space - that was banned by treaty - it went into missiles that just skim out of the atmosphere. Concidering the difficulty that we have in hitting missiles on earth, under controlled conditions, I can't see how it would be possible to use a jerry-rigged missile launcher to do so at any point in the near future. Americans, don't kid yourselves - you haven't launched anything of any size to beyond geostationary orbit since the 60's, and the scientists on those projects had great difficulty in making it work.

My own take on this is just to hope that (when) we get hit, it's something that causes massive destruction - takes out a country, for example - and wakes people the hell up, if we don't of course think it was "punishment" from "insert-pissed-off-diety here". Then we could work together to use nuclear technology to defend our earth, and/or consider another self-sustaining presence somewhere.

This is, of course, also assuming that nuclear weapons will even _work_ in space. I don't think there has been a successful test, and nobody knows for sure the technolgies that are involved in making one go boom. (Except, of course, the nuclear powers of the world) You don't really think all those computers the US Department of Energy buys - HUGE computers - to model the physics of nuclear exploisions - would be neccessary if it was as simple as everyone seems to think in the general populace.

Re:Nuclear weapons can't be used to stop asteroids

[Hillman]

I'm a citizen of a country with absoulutely no nukes, Canada

Yes, but we have kick-ass CANDU reactors!

Re:Nuclear weapons can't be used to stop asteroids

[Arcanix]

This is, of course, also assuming that nuclear weapons will even _work_ in space.

Last time I checked the laws of physics still apply in space so why wouldn't they work? Nuclear reaction does not require air or gravity...

Re:Nuclear weapons can't be used to stop asteroids

[Decimal]

Concidering the difficulty that we have in hitting missiles on earth, under controlled conditions, I can't see how it would be possible to use a jerry-rigged missile launcher to do so at any point in the near future. Americans, don't kid yourselves - you haven't launched anything of any size to beyond geostationary orbit since the 60's, and the scientists on those projects had great difficulty in making it work.

I don't know about that. We've seem to be very good at smacking things into Mars...

Whitey's on the moon

[swb]

Whitey's on the Moon
by Gil Scott-Heron

A rat done bit my sister Nell
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

At least I have an handy excuse now...

[sherpajohn]

Honey, when are you going to:
lose weight
quit smoking
clean up the house
clean up the yard
take the dog for a walk?

Not tonite dear! I'm gonna eat drink and be merry, we all gonna be cushed by a NEO impact tomorrow!

Seriously, I bet the dinosuars were all just haning out eating up veggies(or each other) making baby dinosuars, or minding their own business when THEIR world ended.

Going on means going far

It's time for "E.L.E at Home"

[alphameter]

:)

THey Already HAVE a 3 meter scope in Australia !!!

[squireson]

They already have a 3 meter scope avaliable in Australia ... it was shutdown the same day that it was to come online . It was shut down by the british government --- the same govt. that funded it initially .
This was detailed in the Discovery show that was on last night ( three minutes to impact ) as well as a number of other convincing arguements on what these odds might mean and what we can do about it .<br>
Among these comments some struck me as particularly important :
<br><br>
The greatest threat is represented not by planet killer's but by that class of asteroid that would more or less cripple a continents economy . The damage created to Japan by a tsunami causing asteroid that struck west of the Hawaiian islands would be greater than 10 years of their GNP .
They would esentially be flattened . These asteroids are estimated to strike earth once every thousand years ( on average -- even though the last may have been 3000 years ago ) .
<br><br>
NASA was commanded by Congress to search out and find earth crossing asteroids and has to this day allotted only $1,000,000 per year to do this .

Your Squire

squireson

Konqueror takes Web browses to new level ( OT ? )

[Forge]

Well, I just clicked on that link in Konqueror and was almost surprised to see the document open within the same browser window.

As far as I know this is the only browser that dose this for a PDF document. It's treated almost like an HTML file. Beautiful work KDE team, Beautiful work.

As for the document. It will take some time to read and digest. Check back here :)

Cost effective solutions instead of panic

[A nonymous Coward]

Rushing into a Manhattan-style project, funded at the DoD level, is a waste. Technology now is not good enough to get real self-sustaining colonies going, nor is it even good enough for practical exploration. What's worse, any planning now will be irrelevant and obsolete when needed.

It's like planning shopping malls and drive-in movies when all you have is steam engines and the immediate goal is getting a transcontinental railroad line. Not only are the malls and movies too far down the line, steam trains can't use them. It's the wrong technology, and no one could imagine the right technology.

On the scale of asteriods striking the earth, fifty or a hundred years is insignificant. Much better to get the launch cost low and the self sustaining technologies going in an intelligent manner rather than rushing forward. Anything rushed now will be obsolete when everything comes together, and it will have been bought at enormous cost better spent elsewhere.

Artemis dreams of going back to the moon permanently, there are manned Mars mission everywhere, and none of them will result in a sustainable self-sufficient colony, and are so primitive that any R&D coming out of them will be obsolete in a few years. It is simply not possible to imagine what tech will be available in fifty or a hundred years. Any planning now will be irrelevant when needed.

--

Re:Cost effective solutions instead of panic

[CodeWright]

How, pray tell, do you expect launch & [moon] landing costs to decrease if there is no market in delivering payloads to that destination?

The technology won't magically improve unless there is a market driving competition & innovation.

People WILL go before the colonies can be immediately self-sustaining.

The American colonies weren't self sustaining for a couple hundred years -- neither are the Antarctic bases at present. Nor will the first moonbase, moon-mine, or moon-city.

Re:If an asteroid ever did threaten the Earth ..

[hyacinthus]

Well, I've got to agree, God's wrath, that's potent stuff to bring down upon oneself. You're right, let get on His side! But how? What if we pick the wrong religion? Every week, we'd just making God madder and madder!

hyacinthus (that last a paraphrase from Homer Simpson, I have to admit)

Re:If an asteroid ever did threaten the Earth ..

[Hillman]

Oh Yeah, and these god-hatting dinosaurs got what they deserved...

Focus on Terraforming Earth!

[murr]

As far as I know, the last really devastating[1] asteroid hit was some 60 million years ago, so I'd suggest that the next one might still be a while off. OTOH, there's a pretty good chance that Earth will become practically uninhabitable for humans witin the next 200-300 years, unless a massive effort is made.

Given the choice between spending $200e9 a year on colonizing space or on preserving Earth's ecosystem, I know where I'd put my money (and there's a good chance the latter would lead to spin-off technology benefiting the former in the long run).

[1] From the POV of the dinosaurs, of course. We mammals did quite well.

Re:Focus on Terraforming Earth!

[John_Prophet]

As far as I know, the last really devastating[1] asteroid hit was some 60 million years ago, so I'd suggest that the next one might still be a while off.

Roll a 6 sided die. What are the odds you'll roll a 6? 1 in 6. Roll that die 800,000,000 more times. On your 800,000,001st try, what are your odds of rolling a 6? Yup. STILL 1 in 6!


-The Reverend

Re:Evolution's next step ?

[geekoid]

Do you think if the dinosaurs could of done something about of, they just would have let it happen?

2020: A NEO approaches earth...

[gauron23]

Humans: You are the one!
Neo: Wow!

Limits of LMTs (and seti@home)

[mailseth]

I am sure most people reading this know of the SETI@home project (setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu). The ovious solution to the "huge amount of data" produced is the same type of distributed computing project as SETI@home operates except funded by the gov. The program would probally be much faster and simpler than the SETI@home screen saver, because it is just looking for gaussians (and not the pulse that the ssaver that is coming out son is examining. Each user could even have his/her own portion of the sky that s/he updates dayly to see if the images change day to day. (kind of like adopt a highway :-) Its a wonder that all those concirned arn't doing this right now.

Re:Limits of LMTs (and seti@home)

[KjetilK]

The ovious solution to the "huge amount of data" produced is the same type of distributed computing project as SETI@home operates except funded by the gov.

Nah, that's the solution to reduce data for a particular purpose. Yes, it is a good idea for purpose.

Now the problem with the huge amount of data is that we're talking that each of the telescopes would produce about a terrabyte a day of raw data, and if you have a few hundred of them. Don't take my word for that number, though it is a few years since I did the math. Anyway, storage and transportation of that data is a bit costly... How much data is Seti@home shipping a day? 20 gigs or something? (I'm just guessing, I stopped processing long ago, they obviously doesn't need my CPU).

Asteroid/meteor composition

[meckardt]

Actually, the composition of meteoric materials is pretty well known. If falls into two primary classes: cometary and asteroidal. The first is primarily ice and dust. The later is of stony material, or of metallic origin. The composition does indeed affect how the meterior will fare once it enters our atmosphere. So does the speed of the entering meteor. The faster the meteor is travelling, the higher the air resistance in the upper atmosphere. Once the air pressure of the reentry exceeds the physical strength of the meteor, it is crushed. Cometary meteors seldom make it to the ground, since they are generally moving at higher velocities, and are made of more fragile materials. Metallic meteors are from the asteroids (generally NEAs), which are moving slower. These often make it to the ground, since their strenth if pretty high.

A better solution.

[Transition Cat]

Dodging.

Seriously, the main problem with asteroid collisions is that they hit the surface of the earth perpendicularly, or at least close to it.

Detection is fine as far as that goes, but we need to take steps at prevention.

If there was some way to tilt the earth (given early detection of an incoming asteroid), in all probability the asteroid would simply pass underneath or just above the surface.

Given that it is much harder to hit the edge of a disk than the face, catastrophe could be averted; many lives would be saved.

A problem of course, is tilting the earth in time.

Another is how? Perhaps massive migration to one end of the world to the other would move enough mass to tilt the earth. Outposts should be maintained in Alaska, Siberia, Australia, and Greenland for just such a contingency.

Perhaps research should also be directed at communicating with The Great Tortise - perhaps He could be persuaded to lean in the event...

.

Oh, Crap! My Karma!

....

Re:A better solution.

[philipm]

I think we just need to tell the chinese government there is a falun gong sect hidden in the area which must be tilted.

Seriously though, how does killing chinese people solve the problem? Shouldn't we be killing indians instead.
And don't even get me started on those native american foreigners living next to my house. All they do is drink whiskey and gamble.

Re:A better solution.

[[TWD]insomnia]

Dodging by propulsing the asteroid out of its direct course with earth could be a more logical solution. If some encampments are placed a good distance of earth, in a circular shape, to shoot big propulsors that attaches on the asteroid, and push away the asteroid.. we could have saved the human race from extinction, at least more logically than tilting the Earth...

What about shooting the biggest warheads on the asteroid? 50 smaller .1km asteroids ought to be much less of a threat than a bigass 1 km one..

The end?

[Cyberspew]

So this is how its going to end???? I thought the sun would go supernova and kill us not his by a big piece of space junk. I think were get rid of it before it becomes too much of a problem.

Re:Konqueror takes Web browses to new level ( OT ?

[digitalbeing]

The only web browser that does this except for the most popular web browser on Earth, IE.

(OT) Re:On asteroids

[orasio]

"One of the biggest problems all around is when a bunch of idiots elect a corrupt moron " ... "creating a military dictatorship.... and so on. " Stop dreaming. Military dictatorships never happen without foreign support. As an example, Pinochet (as in Chiles dictator in the 70s and 80s) was supported by the Kissinger people to help get rid of "communist" Allende, the one that the people had elected. Same thing happened in Brazil, and Argentina, the latter of which supported too the dictatorship in my country, Uruguay. If South America is not good enough... do you remember Saddam Hussein?? Where do you think he got money to get his weapons, once intended to be used against Iran?? I do not think you should come here educate us, better educate your CIA people and make them mind their own bussiness.

Re:(OT) Re:On asteroids

[supabeast!]

"As an example, Pinochet (as in Chiles dictator in the 70s and 80s) was supported by the Kissinger people to help get rid of "communist" Allende..."

I'm not going to argue that point. But don't forget that Pinochet didn't do it alone. He still had the armed forced behind him, just like happens with all military dictators. The idiotic troops trained to protect a country and its government blindly follow their generals in extreme actions. If the government took the time to teach these troops to have some common sense at the same time they were teaching the troops how to murder people, the troops might have forseen the consequences of helping tyrants.

All the money and weapons in the world are no good if you don't have people to use them.

Re:Scientists Propose Telescope in Southern Hemisp

[Ralph Bearpark]

Imagine you have no choice but walk across a ten-lane highway at a regular pace, with no deviations in speed or direction allowed. Are you better doing it with your eyes open, or shut?

Does it really help us to have a 3m survey telescope to look for "threatening objects"? (Except to give us time to say "bye" to the folks.)

Regards, Ralph.

Unnecessary Asteroid Hysteria

[enchiladas_verdes]

I don't understand why everyone is getting all worked up over a wee bit of space rock. There really isn't anything to worry about. I've seen all the episodes and it actually looks like fun. If you haven't heard the story, then listen up: "In the year 1994, from out of space, comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the moon, unleashing cosmic destruction. Man's civilization is cast in ruin. Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old. A world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice. With his companions, Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous sunsword, against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!" For more information, please refer to: http://www.pcisys.net/~sfkent/thundarr.htm Ride, Ookla, RIDE!

Cockroaches! Getting loaded?

[leonbrooks]

Maybe it's time to make room for the next step in evolution?

We have a compost bin, and keep ours healthy and well-fed, just in case we need to ask any favours later... (-:

OTOH, geneticists assure us that our collective genetic load is increasing so fast that we'll die out in a few hundred years anyway, and the cockroaches soon after.

Yay. Whoopie. Joy, joy. Life is hard and then you die... there are actually more practical views of reality, happier ones, which are a much closer fit to observable reality than most of the common ones. Try a few. What have you got to lose?

Duck! No, turtle!

[leonbrooks]

A problem of course, is tilting the earth in time.

Don't worry, the Great A'Tuin will duck, we'll probably only lose a few of the Ramtops, if that... if it happens soon enough, we might see what became of the Crimson Assurance Company.

Automated telescopes

[Animats]

Maybe if we had a few hundred of these super-scopes...

We have a skywatch, operated by the USAF's 21st Space Wing, called GEODSS. GEODSS constantly scans the sky with fully-automated 1-meter computer-controlled telescopes at multiple sites around the world. This system finds satellites, space junk, and anything else that isn't in the catalog of known objects. It's tied to NORAD, in case it detects an ICBM. This system has been operational since the 1980s. With the end of the Cold War, there are fewer hostile satellites to find, so some of the GEODSS sites have been turned over to civilian control and are now working on asteroid detection.

GEODSS is an impressive system. Among other things, it can detect dark objects when they obscure a star. It's even possible to use one of the telescopes with a laser to illuminate a low-orbit satellite so it can be photographed with a second telescope. Anything bigger than a basketball that hangs around Earth orbit for long will be picked up.

The Hawaii GEODSS site is now used for asteroid detection, as the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program. Visit their site to see what they're picking up.

Its about time

[morkoth]

We deserve liberation from our barns and percheries of captivity. This imminent impact will create an evolutionery window of opportunity for us jungle fowl to become, once again the masters of the planet - for 100 years you've been cutting off our peckers - its time to turn the tables...

The actual meaning of the report

[dnnrly]

I hate to say it but something that the labour government has been recommended will actually mean MORE investment in pure academic research (since we can't exactly call it applied at the moment, still not done by proper companies, and can be run alongside or even with current research programs). If things carry on like this, the UK might even develop a credible space effort instead of what people try to call hobbies of university professors. cf. www.salford.ac.uk

Point taken.

[The Queen]

...but if nobody paid attention to what's going on in space, Nell might have bigger things to worry about than a rat bite.
Got any poems about asteroids hitting the projects? (Sorry, couldn't resist. Not trying to be mean, just playing devil's advocate.)

The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk

Re:Point taken.

[swb]

I know, but it's an interesting political point that doesn't get made as often as it should. How can we spend billions on space exploration when we haven't figured out how to fix the problems we have here?

And Nell says that if da big rock hit d'projects, den it gonna hit da condos and da golf courzes too!

Re:Point taken.

[mosch]

You're right, we shouldn't spend any money on scientific research until we cure all the ills of our society, cultural or otherwise. To do otherwise would be pure evil!
----------------------------

Re:What we need to do is get off this rock.

[Xilman]

Once we can colonize (self sufficiently) beyond the solar system mankind will be able survive any one disaster.

If only it were so. A collision between two neutron stars anywhere within a few thousand light years will generate enough gamma rays to wipe out virtually all multi-cellular organisms.

Paul

Re:It's more real than we think (OT)

[seanmeister]

While I was at Burning Man, someone dug up a nice meteorite that hit nearby, which was about the size of an SUV.

Dug it up??? So much for that big Burning Man "leave no trace" policy..

Damn hippie-crites...

Sean

Re: Worst case scenario (needs nanotech solution)

[bradbury]

Unfortunately, WolfWithoutAClause, argues from the perspective of "current" technology but proposes actions that require "future" technology to be done cost effectively.

We have two space habitats now, MIR and the International Space Station. The history of the development of space habitats shows that, using current technology, we produce very high cost habitats that are dependent upon the Earth. O'Neill in his promotion of real space habitats makes it clear that to be built cost effectively, the material for their construction must come from someplace other than the Earth. That requires future technology.

Given current habitat dependence on earth, a civilization destroying asteroid, would presumably doom the crews on the station(s) as well. If the impact is not too large (sufficiently large to vaporize the oceans), then we should expect crews in submerged nuclear submarines to survive. Because they have long life power sources and extensive food stores, they would presumably be able to emerge someplace where even longer term energy resources are available (e.g. the Middle East). This would potentially allow them to construct green houses that could support a small population until the dust clears from the atmosphere. There are possible locations (deep valleys, underground facilities, etc.) that could survive the impact as well. Collectively, these would form the seeds of a new civilization. There are of course problems such as how do you identify locations where there are likely to be preserved the seeds, power sources, light sources, etc. in relative proximity that would allow you to maintain an agricultural base. But I think people could figure this out. It would be interesting to start a project that created a number of protected "humanity shelters" around the world that were widely know about just to be able to know we had a solution to the most probable doomsday scenarios.

Now, with regard to moving extensive numbers of people into space habitats or colonizing other planets with self-sustaining groups. This is going to require nanotechnology to be done cost effectively. If you have self-replicating systems based on nanotechnology (discussed by Josh Hall in this paper), then you can rapidly move people off the planet. You can also dissassemble a planet or two and build in the vicinity of ~100 billion telescopes the diameter of the moon. This array of telescopes would fill most of the inner solar system out to the orbit of Jupiter. At that point we would certainly be able to identify all of the Oort Cloud objects. Nanoprobes would then be launched to these objects using mass drivers. Once they arrive at these objects, they can be disasssembled into useful construction material and reoriented on orbits to deliver that material to useful locations. If objects were found that were on killer trajectories that could not be reformatted/redirected in time by the nanoengineers, then the mass drivers could also be used to deliver high velocity projectiles into the oncoming path of the object to deflect or vaporize it.

So the answer, as it is with most things, is we need molecular nanotechnology and self-replicating engineering systems. The last time I looked at some of the sites suggested, they did not include nanotechnology in their habitat development strategies. Without nanotechnology, the costs are likely to be so high that serious people can only consider them fantasies.

Re: Worst case scenario (needs nanotech solution)

[WolfWithoutAClause]

>Unfortunately, WolfWithoutAClause, argues from
>the perspective of "current" technology but
>proposes actions that require "future"
>technology to be done cost effectively.

No. The basic, current technology, is good enough. The problem and solution is simple economics. Because the price is too high nobody much goes. Nobody much goes so the price is too high. The answer is to increase volume and hence cut costs. The price comes down- more people go, the price comes down... even more go.

The cost of putting something into LEO is about $1300/lb. If the rate of launch was increased by an order of magnitude, the cost of launch is likely to decrease by about an order of magnitude. The reason is that the cost of a rocket is almost independent of the cost of fuel (its a lot less than 1% fuel costs).

Its believed that the true cost of getting to orbit is about the same as the cost of concorde across the atlantic. Do a web search and you should soon find that out. Certainly the fuel usage is comparable.

If you check out the neofuels link they suggest mining the moon for water. That technology is quite within our grasp. Together with the reduced launch costs it would open up the earth, moon and the asteroids. Once we are there; the solar system is ours.

>So the answer, as it is with most things, is we
>need molecular nanotechnology and
>self-replicating engineering systems.

Solution to all known problems.