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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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?

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.

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

[Signal 11]

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

Pay up.

--

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]

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?

--

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.

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.

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

[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.

--

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

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?)

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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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....

--

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 ;-)

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: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: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.

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."

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.

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?

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.

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)

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.

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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.

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.

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!

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.

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!
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