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Another Asteroid Close Call
james was one of a number of people that submitted the news that
the earth has had another near miss, this time with an asteroid. This particular one is thought to be about 300 meters in length, meaning that if it had struck the earth, it would have destroyed an area of say...South Africa. Not to mention the fall out. But
we don't need
a
better system
for watching the stars. Nope. Obviously not.
Let's start training a team of deep-core drillers to send up to the next asteroid that hurtles along.
...watch for the bloody asteroids/comets.
The stars shouldn't be coming to visit, unless you live in Hollywood, and for most of us, not even then.
I was talking, not thinking. -D. Franz
DUCK!
Money for nothing, pix for free
We lost our chance to launch Bruce Willis and a plucky band of blue-collar heroes on twin space shuttles, set to the rock stylings of Aerosmith? Really, the only thing I'm concerned about is that we missed a chance to shoot him into space. And that other guy with the really bad teeth. I s'pose you can't have it all.
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
Make up your mind!
I am sorry to say it but, I beleive that a direct hit it what is needed to force our governments to take action. Hopefully it will be not too big and in an unpopulated area, but statistically we are bound to get wacked at somepoint.
If an asteroid hits your part of the town, then DUCK AND COVER...
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
If mankind were in danger of an asteroid what could we do? Many movies have tackled this entertaining plot. Hoever could nukes deflect or destroy one? Is there another technology that could save all of the human race? If anyone has background in this area or knows anything this is a good place to start writing about it.
Huh, I was under the impression that "fall out" is the radioactive dust left after a nuclear explosion. This would produce a lot of dust, but it wouldn't be dangerously radioactive.
How do you calculate the damage? Do you use high school physics F=mdv/dt? Do you use university level physics? Anyone who knows how to calculate please show off.
Taco Bell has announced that if an asteroid strikes a platform floating off the coast of South Africa, free chalupas to any living survivors.
Here's a list of PHAs (Potentially Hazardous Asteroids) and a simulation of the orbit of this particular asteriod.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
all the time we hear about near misses.. "an asteroid half the size of out moon is floating around pluto, if it had hit the earth all life would of been wiped out, possibly what caused the destruction of the dinosaurs BLAH BLAH BLAH"
these stories always get attention so someone can get funding of some kind somewhere.
According to experts, the recent discovery and close approach of 2001 YB5 suggests that something nasty could creep up on us at any time.
Still talking about asteroids? =)
Love it - this article was posted a couple after an article titled "The End Not As Near As We Thought"
So which is it?
Until we can do something about an asteroid that is going to hit us, there is really no point in spending a fortune (that can be spent on useful projects) on watching out for them.
Well that sure is a nasty case of hemmeroids if ever I did see one. You should seek a medical opinion.
Does this mean I missed my chance to be on the beach with Tea Leoni??
Damn.....now this is why we need an more advanced early warning system.
"Curiouser and Curiouser...." -Alice
didn't ya'll hear??
...I don't wanna miss a thing...
get xited
Anyone seen any discussions of this?
How about the small Redmond company? Maybe we could arrange a meeting between the MPAA, the RIAA, all the corrupt politicians etc. at MS HQ at the time of impact?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Cheney: So let me get this straight... it would devastate an area about the size of South Africa?
Smart Guy: Well, yeah, but with the trajectory and mass of the earth kicked up from the crater, which we can figure out with simple ballistics-
Cheney: Aha! Ballistics, a good buzzword to attach to this new terrorist threat. Ooh, and it works nicely with the ABM program...
Smart Guy: Actually the missiles would have to point AWAY from the earth for that to--
Cheney: Guards!
that thang's huuuge!
The court was tired of recounts, and demonstrated how to take care of it.
OMG, we got hit by an asteroid!!!
Oh, wait...did you mean a near *hit*?
We are certainly in no position to prevent an impact with a large comet, meteor or asteroid. What we've learned from space observation in the last several decades is space is a very dangerous place.
Three million years ago, the Sun left one of the main arms of the galaxy. Scientists have found evidence of 27 distinct extinctions on the planet, all of them when we were in the arm. That means there have been more, many more, in the 4 billion year history of the planet. Currently, we are in a fairly quiet place, a little above the arm but not quite out of the galaxy.
25 million years from now, the orbit of our local group of stars will return back into the spiral arm. When we return back to the arm, where the star density is far higher than it is out in the boonies away from the arm, the odds of the earth not having a major impact event is nill. In fact, the odds of not having a major impact event between now and when we will be back in harms way is almost as small.
In the mean time, since it is likely that none of you will live to see the next impact event, don't worry about it. When it happens, enjoy the event from your spectacular view from Heaven itself, if that's where you end up. On the other hand, if you're stoking the fires of Hell, you'll be too busy to worry about it. I suggest, then, that you spend your time working to get into heaven and to avoiding hell. That's the only thing that you can control, through faith and good works.
But where do we want it too hit? Redmond is too obvious. Washington DC is out, cause I live near there. Hartsfield Airport maybe? Never changing planes in Atlanta again has its attractions... New Holland, Michigan?
Best Slashdot Co
We don't need a better system for watching the stars for these types of objects, but we should be figuring out how to redirect them to Redmond or the RIAA ... or the Scientolgists hideout perhaps. I don't know, just an idea, it is Monday after all ... right?
:wq
Can't those damn kids drive in their own lane dagnabbit !!!!
Damn! There went another asteroid we could have exploited for natural resources, thus making a space-based economy viable. This would contribute to the benefit of mankind by improving the standard of living and also making it more likely we can do something about future potential planet-killers.
The president, laughing vacantly, stated "I have seen this marvelacular system in action. I have even used the system myself to protect earth from these Goddless asteroids. The frugality of this system is amazing. Ordinary American people like you and me will be able to blow up these menaces for only a quarter. Just spin the doohickey until your ship faces an asteroid and push the fire button, it's that simple. I'm asking congress for 500 billion to deploy these machines in malls and bars across America imm... immadee umm... right now. The brilliant scientists who developed this system have named it Asteroids."
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
..is tell us when we're all going to die.
We only get about a months notice of such close passes anyway and there is no way we're going to be able to get a 'Bruce Willis and mates' crew up into orbit in 30 days. A proper asteroid defence system is likely to be at least a decade away, as it is likely to require a number of hefty nukes to persuade an oncoming 300m+ asteroid that it doesn't have right of way.
Besides, I'd feel distinctly nervous about having a space based system loaded with a several very big nukes right above our heads; just imagine what could happen if a very small object hit the system and destroyed it, knocking the bits back into earths gravity......whilst I know you wouldn't get a nuclear explosion, what chances fallout in a similar manner to a "dirty" sub-nuclear weapon ?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
That's right. I'm not a big fan of dumping large amounts of dollars into lookin' around for asteroids.
Why? It's simple. I don't want to divert money allocated to other basic research projects... projects that can significantly help this effort. If we increase funding for basic science research, we'll have two longer term positives:
1. Basic science money can have immediate benefits today.
- There are lots of critical problems on earth now, above and beyond asteroid impacts. Many of these problems need research dollars now.
- Asking for a billion now to watch for something that may or may not happen any time soon isn't going to please a lot of people, especially where there are more immediate issues on the table.
2. The money dedicated to basic research can effectively accomplish the goal of watching for and (hopefully) averting a long-term disaster.
- Money spent on science research today can help build more effective, lower cost, and more technically able solutions to the problem.
Spend a dumb billion today, or a smarter million tomorrow. That's the choice.
I always understood that nuking an asteroid was a little pointless. I mean, instead of one big chunk of rock coming towards you really fast, you instead have several.
I seem to recall a book on the subject at some point (Arthur C. Clarke probably), which suggested a great big rocket engine. 'Land' on asteroid and start firing, and eventually you'll alter it's course enough so it doesn't impact.
Or somesuch.
Bruce Willis is no where to be found!!!!!
Anyone check Planet Hollywood, maybe he's with Arrrrnold.....
Waiting for your mother.
if it was a near miss it would have hit, wouldn't it?
I would call it a near hit... if it missed
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
If I read the article correctly, "there is no danger of collision with it." When did 'close call' and 'no danger' come to have the same meaning?
The amount of money required to identify asteroids that might hit Earth isn't that great. And IF one is identified as posing a potential hazard, it gives us the opportunity to think about how we could do something.
Anything else is like sticking your head in the sand, and hoping it will go away.
aaaannnnd coooover!
Johnny! What do you do when you see that flash?
DUCK AND COVER!
Where's Cecil the Air-Raid Turtle when you need him?
The same morons who think that an anti ballistic missile weapon is a waste of time now want us to intercept asteroids.
The technology being developed for the missile defense program will make asteroid interception a concept closer to reality. If missile defense is built, it will neutralize the danger of long-range ballistic missiles being manufactured in North Korea, the Middle East & South Asia.
Or you can "do something worthwhile" like subsidize pregnant 15 years old junkies and drunken bumbs.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
THIS IS NOT A NEAR MISS! If it was a NEAR MISS, none of us would be slashdotting right now. This would be a NEAR HIT. (Heh listen to George Carlin's speal on Euphanisms (sp?))
but hey - I'll settle for boring twat.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
True, but as soon as you increase the surface area (which would happen if you managed to break it into smaller chunks), then more of the asteroid is going to burn up in the atmosphere. Break it down small enough, and no impact, just a great night for watching shooting stars.
I always understood that nuking an asteroid was a little pointless. I mean, instead of one big chunk of rock coming towards you really fast, you instead have several.
:)
Find a tile floor. Drop 500 marbles, all at once. Now try dropping a bowling ball.
Obviously, you're not a golfer.
Now wait a minute. I remember about the time "Deep Impact" came out in the theaters, scientists assured us that the chances of a large asteroid hitting the earth were extremely remote. And now large asteroids are barely missing us? Have these assumptions been called into question?
Yep:
Hammer of God
Arthur C. Clarke 1993
An expanded version of his short story that appeared in (I think) Time magazine
Sure, the monitoring system would be pointless in terms of saving ourselves, but where it would be most useful would be in extending the anarchy before the impact. Say from 30days to a full year.
A full year of being able to use the pickup line "Look, the earths about to end, there's no reason not to go out with me?"
I mean that reason alone is worth building the system, not to mention the alcohol and drug orgy that would errupt! oh god, it's like some beautiful dreamworld.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
isaac asimov wrote a neat book called a choice of catastrophes. it basically talks about the different ways humanity could be destroyed. he addresses being hit by an asteroid or other objects from space. while it is statistically possible it is highly unlikely. he concluded that we will most likely destroy ourselves with disease, famine, and war. this would be caused by overpopulation.
-- john
Asteroids are more like crunch berries. Set off a nuke and it just compresses into a denser crunch berry.
Oh wait, he's still too scared to fly never mind get on some hacked-up spaceship!
Could somebody explain this to a non english guy like me?
I know what a duck is, but I miss the funny part.
the earth to cause chaos. People often forget that if anything nudges our moon out of orbit we've had it too.
No moon = no tide = a stagnating sea, massive change to coastal ecosystems and other nasty changes.
We sure don't, considering they found it one month ago, and it hasn't even passed by yet. Maybe you should read the article, buddy.
Oh yeah, and it wouldn't destory something the size of Africa, maybe something more like England, France, Spain, Portugal and Germany (and all those in between) put together though.
What?
Very true, as the man once said: "Golf, the perfect way to spoil a decent walk".
The 500 marbles is a good analogy, since we do have this 'cushion' of an atmosphere. Unfortunately from what I recall, a nuclear explosion would at best split it into a few large - ish pieces. Possibly less damage each, but assuming that they all still hit you could lose several cites.
i think more than heaving a sigh of relief and getting on with it this really ought to disturb people in general.
i cannot imagine that with all our advances we could not predict this earlier and even then we are still unable to do ANYTHING about it. it really shows how defenceless we are.
i wonder whether should really be a more GLOBAL thrust towards attacking problems like this. maybe all the countries should really pool in their scientific minds and also financial resources for the more pressing things [like this?] . there have been some efforts in this regard but maybe its just not enough. hopefully this should take home the message harder.
the real problem i see is the Usual One(tm). "we dont need to fund crazy ideas in space etc etc...when people are starving" . true , very true but if we dont get enough knowledge about the various phenomena and conditions and variables in space we really are one vulnerable race. the subtle thing though is we just cant say "watch for asteroids" end of story - _no_ . space programs and in general science have a wonderfully intricate way of contributing to each other symbiotically --> SIDE BENEFITS . ok let me make my point clear: look at the space program , its given us tons of materials hard and strong which have found their way into commercial products. so we just cant lay our finger on the Best Thing To Do (tm) . we have to move forward inch-by-inch and hopefully collective knowledge from one effort will help the other and vice versa and in the end we will be top....
hope i made sense. sorry if it was long
vv
> ..is tell us when we're all going to die.
That was my first thought as well, but surely we could benefit from evacuating areas that would be affected? Blowing up such a threat isn't the only solution and a lot of people would be better off if they could be moved away from areas that would be directly affected by an impact, despite the obvious destruction and mayhem that would ensue.
Note that much of the asteroid would burn in the atmosphere.. so what would hit earth would be substantionally smaller...
And the article clearly states that it would cause devastation in 150km radius... (ok they mention 800km severe devstation.. but that is meant more like 800km effect radius.. journalist exagarration)
I'd be rather hit by asteroid than die of cancer... and probably i'm not alone:P
Any meteor, asteroid or comet that sets its cold, icy eyes on our beloved Earth needs to be pimpsmacked by one of Russia's 58-Megaton nukes; the most powerful ever built.
One was detonated at Novaya Zemlya on October 30th 1961.
It was hypothesized that if one placed enough of these nukes in one spot, and detonated them simultaneously, one could knock the Earth of its axis.
It should make short work of a measely asteroid.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
No doubt, Bin Laden is responsible for the asteroid.
Nasa knows about 47 1km asteroids in near-earth orbits, any of which could make bickering about the RIAA rather short-lived. Their website claims that the best reason to study NEO's, as we don't have an active defense, is to "allow us to store food and supplies and to evacuate regions near ground zero." This is not the sort of confidence that inspires politicians to open their wallet, nor should it.
India and Pakistan are on the brink of bringing the world into a nuclear holocost. Our supplies of oil are depleting while our energy usage goes up. Ebola has broken out in another african village, and Aids rates worldwide are up to 1 in 100 with some areas reaching 1 in 3. Until such a time as there is something realistic we can do about near earth asteroids, that money is better focused on more pressing forms of armageddon.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
"Close call"? What are the actual odds of impact? No major country wipeouts by asteroids happened in the last few thousand years. What are the odds of Earth being destroyed by an asteroid in the next few decades? With every other third world country developing weapons of mass destruction, right now, we have bigger threats to worry about and spend money on.
Saw that on discovery too, by the way.
Wrong. We will have a means some day, in the meantime, it's important to start the funding process, then the building of the observatories, so we can start cataloging the asteroids which are candidates to wipe us out.
Doing nothing with the assumption we can never do anything is against all evidence of progress in our history...
Being an astronomer I probably shouldn't say this, because a pile of cash would rain down on me if somebody decided we needed to monitor the skies 24/7, but what the heck:
The risk isn't that high. Really.
We should rather spend our time ending wars. You may say, we can never end wars. Actually, all the nobel peace prize winners I've talked to think we can, so! ;-)
But on the other hand, I'd really like to monitor the skies 24/7, but such a system should not be designed with one application in mind, it should be designed with the goal of enabling all kinds of projects. For example, I'd like to see a global, dense network of Liquid Mirror Telescopes. That could be used to look for NEOs too.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
It was a near hit.
If the asteroid had smashed into South Africa, you then could have said:
Wow, it nearly missed.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
The information about any possible future collisions is/will never be shared publicly. No agency in it's right mind would tell a large mass of people that they are at ground zero for a collision, just imagine the scene that would occur. OTOH a agency looking for more funding will tell you how much you need that agency.
From Nasa's FAQs About NEO Impacts:
How much warning will we have?
With at least half of even the larger NEOs remaining undiscovered, the most likely warning today would be zero -- the first indication of a collision would be the flash of light and the shaking of the ground as it hit. In contrast, if the current surveys actually discover a NEO on a collision course, we would expect many decades of warning. Any NEO that is going to hit the Earth will swing near our planet many times before it hits, and it should be discovered by comprehensive sky searches. This is the purpose of the Spaceguard Survey. In almost all cases, we will either have a long lead time or none at all.
Any meteor, asteroid or comet that sets its cold, icy eyes on our beloved Earth needs to be pimpsmacked by one of these.
Russia's 100-Megaton nukes; the most powerful ever built.
One was detonated half-yield at Novaya Zemlya on October 30th 1961.
It was hypothesized that if one placed enough of these nukes in one spot, and detonated them simultaneously, one could knock the Earth of its axis.
It should make short work of a measely asteroid.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
> But we don't need a better system for watching the stars.
Don't be impatient, HDTV is almost here.
I think the BIG thing that a lot of people are missing is that even a much smaller impact could be mistaken for as the detonation of a nuclear device or missile warhead. Think about what would happen if one of these impacted on the US or Russia. The one that hit Tungusca was before the atomic age. If it happened again it could be seen as either a terrorist incident (hopefully that would be the first assumption by NORAD) or a first strike by one of the nuclear countries.
Does it matter what the asteroid is made of? I.e., would it make a diff for Star Wars or impact if the thing was iron, or whatnot?
Ice balls would tend to melt and blow up into a many little pieces just nicely
Rocky asteroids also tend to shatter into lots of pieces, but are a bit tougher.
Metallic asteroids tend to stay solid, and are a bit of a pain.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You mean to tell me that the people who couldn't figure out where the russian space station was going to crash into the earth, which was a CONTROLLED decent of an object of known mass, will be able to calculate where a giant rock that they don't know the shape or exact mass of, will land, when it's 30 days away?
I'm not trying to be a troll, but it does cite a past real world situation.
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
...not as near as we thought. We were hoping for better, but we were only given 10 hours to bodge an asteroid launcher from part we found in the junkyard. What did you expect?
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
Three million miles away, twelve times the distance to the moon. If that is close, then I have a deed to a NY bridge to sell you.
You niss the point here. It is true that if you set the nuke off at the surface of the asteroid or inside it, then you only get more objects.
The concept of ysing nukes is to set them off at a distance, so the presure wawe and the radiation pushes the asteroid instead of blowing it up. The presure wawe vould push at the same time as the vaporisation of the surface layers of the asteroid would act as a rocket engine and add further thrust.
Yours Yaseran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Now, see that raises an interesting point.
Anarchy scares the controlling players of any political power structure, so who's to say that those in charge would share sky-watch information with the populace if they had it?
NASA, back during the Reagan years, had this really low profile military mirror version of itself; A whole second program complete with it's own shuttles which made space runs to plant military satellites in orbit. There's a lot of very expensive & very powerful junk up there which uses classified technologies far in advance of what John Q. Private Sector is allowed to sell in his hard drives. I'd be pretty surprised if there wasn't already enough hardware up there to do decent asteroid surveillance. --In fact, while it might seem like a long shot, I don't think it's that long a shot. . . I'd be willing to gamble that the American government knows a whole lot more about what's going on in Earth's vicinity than they talk about.
Of course, the way things seem to be run on this planet, I'd also be willing to gamble that even with the right hardware and regular reports, wishful thinking is far more pleasing to the mind, and far more distracting. Probably something along the lines of; "Yech! I don't want to worry about this asteroid stuff. I'm sure I'll be okay. I just need to make a pile of luxury resources for my wife and kids before the planet becomes a toxic waste land. This asteroid stuff only happens to poor people. Or at least, I'm sure it's possible to arrange it so it works out that way. .
-Fantastic Lad
Reminds me of George Carlin:
Near miss? It's not a near miss - it's a near HIT!
If it had hit the earth, it would have nearly missed...
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
A near miss - it almost missed us, but then actually didn't. What a relief!
We don't need a better system for watching for space debris. We SAW THE ASTEROID. If we really want to 'solve' this problem then we need a way to blast the things.
We cant watch them just fine now.
A whole second program complete with it's own shuttles which made space runs to plant military satellites in orbit. There's a lot of very expensive & very powerful junk up there which uses classified technologies far in advance of what John Q. Private Sector is allowed to sell in his hard drives.
It would have to be pretty damn advanced if they were able to conceal shuttle re-entry... as in, beyond what's even theoretically possible according to the laws of physics as we understand them,
Just 4 and ½ hours earlier on /. "Science: The End Not As Near As We Thought"
the news that the earth has had another near miss, this time with an asteroid.
A near miss is a hit! A near hit is a miss.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
And even taking into account the big burn needed to reach the asteroid's velocity, the math works anyway. I don't know about geosynchronous orbit, but there are a number of near earth asteroids that take less delta V to match orbits with than the moon does. The good launch windows are far less frequent, of course, but that's an obstacle to "flag and footprint" missions, not robot surveys or long-term human mining operations.
It would have to be pretty damn advanced if they were able to conceal shuttle re-entry...
Are you serious? How old are you? Nobody was hiding the military aspect of NASA during the 80's.
I said 'low profile', as in, page five coverage in newspapers as opposed to Time Magazine dedicating issues to the public side of NASA.
Go visit a library sometime. I never make up what I say. --Although, you DID just demonstrate one of the amazing things about conspiracy theory; that truth can be obscured far more easily than people realize. People are conditioned to not believe anything unless CNN tells them it's okay to believe.
--A good, unscheduled demonstration, actually. Thank you!
-Fantastic Lad
There are many groups out there now watching the skys for us. The largest is a government project called LINEAR based at Lincoln Labs. They find more than half of the new NEO (Near earth orbit) asteroids each year that are found. They have a telescope down in New Mexico and have the largest CCD (2560x1960 res) in the market. From their webpage, you can see they have found at least 727 NEO's. So there are a LOT of asteroids comming near us. But in space, near is still very far away. So unpack those bunkers and return to real life, we're still safe for a while. Also, the rate of finding new NEO's is decreasing, so that means that we've (humans) found most of the asteroids that can endanger us.
A hit would focus our minds on other things Bin Laden - wouldn't ya say?
- Penguin Kicka
Congratulations. The thread you've started has reconstructed the entire plot line of "Space Cowboys", "Armageddon", and "Deep Impact." I hope your happy. Don't expect a Christmas card.
When I was a child, watching falling stars with my dad, I voiced a concern that one might hit me. He put one of those "happy birthday" paper party hats on my head, and called it an asteroid detection system.
Confused, I asked him how it worked. He said, "When the hat is crushed by an asteroid, there's an imminent danger!"
Imagine if terrorists get a hold of the asteroid
Is it just me or don't you think we should consider this things as a near hit and not a near miss.
A near miss would be a hit, wouldn't it?
You need to define "large" and "barely missing", to even understand what those assumptions are saying.
First, we're doing pretty well at tracking the really large earth-grazing asteroids now - for rocks at least a kilometer in diameter (picture the "little guy" that hit at the end of Deep Impact) we're tracking an estimated ~90% instead of 10% of them now, and the big improvement has come in the last five years or so.
For the stuff smaller than a kilometer (which don't threaten civilization, but can still be large enough to make much of New York City a memory), I don't know that we're doing much tracking at all. So what's your definition of "large"? Thanks to the heavy ocean cover and relatively sparse city covering of the land, odds are we'll get hit in a nice relatively non-fatal location before a city-buster earns its name. And we'll get hundreds or thousands of near misses before then. What's your definition of "barely missing"? I've heard it to refer to anything passing inside the moon's orbit, which is a target with 3,600 times the cross section of Earth. That's a near miss on a cosmic scale, not on a human one.
It's hard to set odds on something like this, but the most informed I've seen would give us about even odds of having a populated area smashed up (damage as much as a trillion dollars) sometime in the next millenium. Not such bad odds that we want to start putting up an "asteroid defense shield", but bad enough that some other valuable activities (pointing more telescopes at the sky, cataloguing asteroids, improving launch vehicle technology) become more valuable for this secondary reason.
I see this a lot, and it always bothers me. If it was a near miss, doesn't that mean it was a hit?
Whew, it nearly missed us.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
So we need better near space sensors so we can
countdown the days till it impacts, is that it?
We can't do squat about it anyway except
possibly make a bunch of radioactive asteroids
out of one large. (If the people in charge can get
that right in time...)
Calculating the impact site will be much easier for any asteroid (which is coming in a more or less straight line from outer space), than for any object which follows a "controlled" descent in the atmosphere, where "controlled" means that the velocity is bound within a pre-stated minimum and maximum.
The actual path is very hard to predict for an object at the mercy of atmosphere. A big enough asteroid will not even notice.
Nice theory.
Problem is that all the kinetic energy still ends up in our system. One big piece is bad. Split that one big piece into several smaller pieces, and it's even worse. But take things to an arbitrary limit, where you pulverize the entire asteroid down to dust.
Now all that dust impacts the atmosphere, heats to incandescence, and vaporizes. Do *you* want to be in the hemisphere where *that* happens? Imagine New York City under the glare of 70 trillion E-Z-Bake Ovens.
If the asteroid's big enough to have a significant negative impact on human civilization, breaking it up/pulverizing it will not help us. It must be diverted so that it doesn't intersect Earth at all.
'Hefty Nukes'????
Yogic Flying my friend! A month is plenty time for us to get out our mats and simply wish the asteroid away with our bubbling happiness and baggy trousers.
Well, I feel better now. I'm an AC so mark me down to -1 if you feel like it.
Find a rifle, shoot yourself in the foot. Then find a shotgun and do the same. Which was worse?
We will have decades or no time at all, so says NASA.
Jeremy
I found this funny. Yes a Asteroid has pass close to earth.. But how many have past that close or closer in the past 5000 years withour us to see as we didn't had the technology for it?
I don't believe this news is new, it's just something that we see that we where not able to see. The danger is not bigger it had always had been the same (exept maybe if some stellar happen...).
"Tui Nati vulnerati."
This actually leads into something I've been thinking about reading these posts... If we use a pentium computer to figure trajectories, then launch missiles to change it's path, wouldn't it suck if we knocked into a trajectory that actually did intersect ours?
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
Hemos, try worrying more about the far likelier possibility of dying in a car crash than some sci-fi fantasy about asteroids. This is just fear mongering by underemployed astronomers looking for more funding under the guise of "asteroid monitoring".
I'm sure this idea isn't terribly new.... But I think humanity needs a swift kick in the pants... a large impact to say... take out a country or two would at least unite our race against a new cause. Otherwise we might end up killing ourselves off out of bordeom :)
...I saw this and was reminded of this lunatics page (relax - I found it via this weeks NTK) I don't usually go for such gumpf, but this 'prophecy' says that a comet will hit the earth sometime before april of this YEAR. (To be specific, off the Eastern seaboard of the US.)
This is a pretty specific prophecy, that kinda relates to this, however, if nothing happens, (I figure I can wait a few months before buying a house!) I'll hang my head in shame, and promise to never be lead in by such bunkum again....
Just spreading the word....
Find a rifle, shoot yourself in the foot. Then find a shotgun and do the same. Which was worse?
This argument isn't a valid comparison; a modern rifle stands a good chance of killing you no matter where it hits because of hydrostatic shock effect, whereas a shotgun will just blow your foot off, and you'll live - providing blood loss is stopped fast enough!
But back to the breaking up asteroid comments - if you can break up an asteroid into a lot of small pellets each of these pellets is likely to either burn up on entry to the earths atmosphere and in addition is unlikely to cause a massive crater like the big single one would do. In addition other effects of a large single strike can involve:
a) throwing up masses of debris into the earths atmosphere
b) setting up a pressure wave in the earths central core - this is not good. (Hydrostatic shock effect on a big scale)
c) triggering off volcanic eruptions both near to the impact and on the opposite side of the world to the impact.
None of these effects would be generated by the smaller shotgun pellet asteroids.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Is this "Science" story also "amazing mostly because a guy just starting work on his Master's is managing major press".
Or can I just skip this one ?
*CRASH!* "Hey look! They nearly missed!"
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
But it's sort of in the nature of these things that "near misses" will be very common compared to actual hits. Let's look at the numbers:
If we divide these numbers, we find that an object will be this close to earth on the average something a bit more than 2 million times as often as it actually hits the earth.
So, if an asteroid this size hits earth on the average once every 500000 years, then we should expect that one comes this close to earth on the average 4 times a year.
Offcourse I'm simplifying a lot here, and offcourse this is statistics, we migth just as well be hit one month from now. All I'm saying is that it's not very surprising that something comes "this close" fairly often.
Perhaps we do, but does anyone honestly think we could do anything about an asteroid at this point in time. Hollywood movies make it out to be a doable engineering feat to crack an asteroid in two or blow it up in space, but at this point in time, can we really do anything about an asteroid that is predicted to hit the earth in the next 10-15 years?
Perhaps when we have space-based laser, nuclear, or particle beam weapons then we will have a chance. But then again, we have that continual tug of war between 'guns & butter'. Do we invest in education and social security or do we invest in armaments for taking out asteroid threats? As we have seen - there is no free lunch. If you are going to spend a couple hundred billion on a space based system like this, then there WILL BE less for social security and welfare checks - either that or insanely high taxes.
It comes down to priorities. Is the family starving down the street more important than defending against a future possible asteroid hit? At some point, choices will have to be made.
Ok, but you've still got that same mass coming in at, what, 20-30km/s? Even if there isn't a clean "monolithic" strike, wouldn't the energies involved still rather, well, nasty?
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
You also have to consider the fact that nuclear explosions in space behave differently than nuclear explosions in the Earth's atmosphere. A nuclear device is primarily a source of soft x-rays. Since the atmosphere is relatively opaque to soft x-rays, the energy is converted to thermal energy and visible light by absorption and re-emission. This produces the flash, blast wave and thermal pulse. In space, you get a burst of soft x-rays and little else. The nuclear device would have to be very close to the asteroid, so that the soft x-rays were absorbed by the surface of the asteroid and converted into thermal energy.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
...the earth has had another near miss...
;-)
no, the earth had another near collision. a near miss is what happens when two objects collide, but they almost missed.
all the time we hear about near misses
If it's not a near miss, you'll be dead! You won't be here to hear about it!
I think the general public would love to see a movie about this. Just think, an asteroid about to hit the earth and wipe out masses of people. That would be cool.
Only a system running Windows XP with Minesweeper installed and configured could save us! All hail Bill Gates, Savior of Humanity!!
/duck
-- anthony
Homer: What's everyone so worked up about? So there's a comet -- big deal. It'll burn up in our atmosphere and what's ever left will be no bigger than a chihuahua's head.
Bart: Wow, Dad, maybe you're right.
Homer: Of course I'm right. If I'm not, may we all be horribly crushed from above somehow.
...
Marge: Look! It's breaking up!
Moe: Let's go burn down the observatory so this will never happen again!
Lisa: I can't believe that extra-thick layer of pollution that I've actually picketed against burned up the comet.
Bart: But what's really amazing, is that this is _exactly_ what Dad said would happen.
Lisa: Yeah, Dad was right.
Homer: I know, kids. I'm scared too!
I read one of the links about the cut in funding ( http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/ar ecibo_cuts_011220.html ). It says that Arecibo observatory uses radio telescopes. Are these similar to what the SETI organization uses? Could a screen saver app be developed and deployed which would allow volunteers to use pure computing power to detail these NEOs more quickly?
-info
Broadcasting LIVE from a Bonus Room Over the Gara
100 megaton would be about 7.3 on richter scale.
:) Nice one. It has some kind of indefinite circularity to it, doesn't it.
First intuition: large longitudinal component.
Enough of these nukes in one spot
I'd feel distinctly nervous about having a space based system loaded with a several very big nukes right above our heads;
Doesn't have to be in earth orbit, for fast deliver it might be best to have it in moon orbit, or leading or trailing the earth in solar orbit.
Anyway, if we had a decent sky survey system, we wouldn't have them just haning around, they'd be off deflecting the rocks we know will hit the Earth in a few hundred years.
Life on our beloved and only planet has survived many impacts of big (let's say caliber >= 1km) and small size. The big bangs sometimes caused a fallout winter for a few human generations, occasionally, if ground zero contained it, including radioactive material, causing more mutations in the fauna and flora for some time. But that was about it. Life went on.
Today, however, a special kind of landmines endangers the continuity of any, let's say vertebrates, after the next big impact. Our nuclear facilities all over the planet are only safe as long as their cooling systems are working. The statics of these facilities are set to withstand the strongest 'natural' earthquakes.
Unfortunately an impact of an asteroid of decent size causes much stronger quakes. Depending on its energy, incoming angle, hit area etc. this will cause from just a few to complete worldwide nuclear meltdowns.
Any solution how to defuse this minefield should get you at least a Nobel prize.
Very true, as the man once said: "Golf, the perfect way to spoil a decent walk".
Actually, it's this: "Golf is a good walk spoiled," which is much more succinct, and captures Twain's whimsy a bit better. Remember, "brevity is the soul of wit."
If you're going to quote Twain, it's worth getting it right. Twain also said, "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
Belloc
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
Ummm no.
One big piece is bad, a bijillion smaller peices is better. The reason is that while the kinetic energy of the asteroid does not change, the surface area available for the atmosphere to work on does. A million smaller pieces have much more surface area so the characteristic size of the asteroid shrinks at least a hundredfold (cube root of a million). This is important because you want the atmosphere to vaporize the meteor before it actually hits something because even a small mass making it to the surface can do a lot of damage.
Breaking the asteroid up into smaller piece means that you get a lot heat generated in the atmosphere, but little real damage because you lack a ballistic impact. Its just a little warmer over the atmospheric entry site until diffusion spreads that heat over enough of the planet that it becomes background noise. You get a local temperature spike not serious damage. This is good.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
A proper asteroid defence system is likely to be at least a decade away, as it is likely to require a number of hefty nukes to persuade an oncoming 300m+ asteroid that it doesn't have right of way.
Actually, I've always thought that if you detect the object far enough out, you don't need nukes to save the earth. All you need is a conventional warhead with enough power to deflect the object. Even a small change (1-2 degrees) over enough distance would cause it to miss the earth.
For example, if I remember my trig correctly, suppose a bullet was headed straight for your heart from 3 miles away (neglect gravity). Things look bad for you. But now suppose at 3 miles away, something deflected the bullet just 1 degree. Now the bullet will miss your heart by about 18". Not a lot, but enough to probably save your life.
But this comes back to the issue of the farther out you see it coming, the less force is required to deflect it.
We are certainly in no position to prevent an impact with a large comet, meteor or asteroid.
Sure we are, if we can see it coming from far enough away.
The greater the advance warning of an asteroid's orbit passing through Earth, the smaller the perturbation to the asteroid's course needed to prevent its orbit from passing through Earth. Hitting even something as big as a planet is quite a fluke - it doesn't take much to prevent it.
With a small enough perturbation required, and a big enough collection of fusion bombs under the surface of one side of the rock, you could certainly nudge it into a slightly different orbit that would miss the Earth.
If you're feeling more environmentally friendly and have more money, you could also send a very large ion-engine tug out to perform orbital correction. More time means both a smaller needed change and more time for the tug to make the correction - smaller tug in both cases.
Fusion bombs to kick up rocks (causing the rest of the asteroid to move by reaction) are probably the most practical course, though.
The prerequisite for either of these approaches is knowing the asteroid is going to strike many months (ideally several years) in advance. Without a very thorough cataloging of near-earth objects, this won't happen.
Let's burn the observatory so this can never happen again!
Problem is that all the kinetic energy still ends up in our system. One big piece is bad. Split that one big piece into several smaller pieces, and it's even worse. But take things to an arbitrary limit, where you pulverize the entire asteroid down to dust.
Now all that dust impacts the atmosphere, heats to incandescence, and vaporizes. Do *you* want to be in the hemisphere where *that* happens? Imagine New York City under the glare of 70 trillion E-Z-Bake Ovens.
If you fragment the asteroid when it's far enough away from Earth (months earlier in its orbit), and give the fragments enough energy that they're not going to just drift back together, then most of the fragments would likely miss Earth.
The key is fragmenting it when it's far enough away, so that the fragments have time to spread.
What does the rocket engine use for fuel? Reaction mass?
I think the idea is to set off a thermonuclear device at or near the surface of the asteroid. The nuke creates a car-sized chunk of matter at millions of degrees, which then radiates heat in all directions. There is no atmosphere, so the only shock wave will be from the matter that made up your nuke in the first place -- no more than a ton or two. I'm assuming a customized device designed for maximum effect; actual weapons are much smaller (basketball-sized and a fraction of a ton in mass).
The asteroid absorbs a fraction of the radiated energy, which is enough to vaporize material from the asteroid. This hot vaporized chunk of matter exerts pressure in all directions; some presses against the asteroid, changing its course, and others shoot off into space, conserving momentum and making Mr. Newton happy.
all of south africa?? i'm cool with that.
If you had looked at the page, over on the right side you'd have seen a link to the story "Asteroid impact centre site selected". So the British government has already decided where the middle of the next impact site should be -- Leicester. Well, I'm glad that's decided.
With your sample figures that works out to a bit over 1700 misses that close between hits. If we see one of these per decade, that is 17000 years on average between bullseyes.
A whole second program complete with it's own shuttles which made space runs to plant military satellites in orbit. There's a lot of very expensive & very powerful junk up there which uses classified technologies far in advance of what John Q. Private Sector is allowed to sell in his hard drives.
Err, no? Pure paranoia...It would be impossible to conceal a re-entry from the major powers, or even from the academic portions of deep space tracking network, and being an academic I can tell you exactly how long that sort of secret would last...
On the other hand you are (sort of) right, when we were putting together the Hubble the guys working on spy satellites for the US Military were sitting down the other end of the table from the NASA guys, but weren't allowed to tell the astronomers that the "two big solar panels" design was a really bad idea. They'd stopped using them for spy satellites several years back.
Why? Because they found that large panels made for an unstable platform, the panels flexed due to impulse from the solar wind, and the "seeing" was therefore degraded.
Ho hum...
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
All they need to do is send out a laptop running Windows XP with wireless networking to the asteroid and within the first boot it's bound to blow and cause a mass meltdown. If that fails and it actually boots properly then we can always hack into it from the net and run Office XP as a self-detonation.
For each incoming ton of asteroid-dust, you're going to end up with the rough equivalent of about 200 tons of TNT released as thermal energy in the upper atmosphere.
For smaller asteroids, this is, as you say, not a big deal. But then those smaller ones aren't exactly civilization-enders anyway.
But for a dinosaur-killer? You're talking about several trillion tons. That's a lot kilotons of TNT equivalent, all going off in one localized portion of the atmosphere, all at once.
That will be a more than a "local temperature spike." It will flash-ignite entire forests, melt glaciers, and bake cities like they were in a kiln. Everything under it, for reasonable values of "under", will be appropriately crispy, dead, or on fire, or perhaps all three at once.
I reiterate: you want to worry about nudging them enough to steer them off-course, not about pulverizing them. If you start early enough, the nudge takes less energy than the hammer-blow anyway. It's starting early enough that's tricky.
*insert standard joke about lists of standard jokes including this one*
*insert standard joke about redundancy*
*get modded as 'redundant'*
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
... you idiots. God doesn't `give' you good works, that's something you do of your own free will.
Of course you accursed heretics don't believe in free will, so the point is moot.
"You say you have faith. Well, I show you my faith by my works" (James 2) It is true that works without faith does no good, but also faith without works doesn't do you any good either. Not doing good works is a sin, and you will be condemned by it.
Besides, if you're not Catholic you have no right even to think about heaven. It is not your place to have, and you deserve hell in the first place.
The point is that I can now justify my fear of custard.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Judging by the pock-marked surface of the moon, I'd say it's done a pretty good job of keeping us safe from asteroids so far.
I'm a 2000 man.
The asteroid was 130 earth diameters away.
If this is average distance os "near miss", then chance of hit is 1:2*130*130), alias 1:33800. that is 0.003%.
Now, what IS realy dangerous, is the orbit duration. Since 18*365.24 =~ 5*1321, we will meet again nearly at the same spot in January 2020.
If we want no worse chance of hit than 1%, we have to better hurry and develop the technology to divert an asteroid within 6,084 years.
Now, Does not that sound scary?
Petrus.
Gloria in excelsis deo et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
Seriously though from the artical this appears to be far more devestating than a couple of areoplanes
I guess we're damn lucky it missed, because we wouldn't be reading this right now perhaps. Maybe they should post stories about COMING asteroids instead of ones that already nearly missed or hit us. Sounds like a good idea to me...
Shayne
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
I don't get it. All that I am seeing is 500 marbles bouncing off the tile floor here at work... and my cube mates look at me funny as I am lifting the bowling ball over my head to see if it is going to do the same... sure, the marbles are going to get crushed into a million pieces as the bowling ball bounces as well. Some simulation you are implying here.
No, there's a huge difference between the existing nuclear powers and India and Pakistan.
The existing nuclear powers have extensive C3I systems in place. (C3I = command, control, communications and intelligence.) We know, from having suicidal soldiers with access to nukes and from transportation accidents to take the threat posed by own people seriously. E.g., do you know how many nuclear weapons are known to be missing, and the circumstances around their loss?
That's why our nukes (except for the Soviet "doomsday" system) have so many safeguards built into them. A pod requires at least two people to vote to launch... and both people have to vote to launch. A missile launch requires two pods to vote to launch, but it will stay in the silo if a third votes to veto. (A 3-1 vote will launch). Missiles can require multiple votes. Warhead PALS can require access codes, permanently disabling the warhead if the incorrect code is entered.
India and Pakistan, in contrast, haven't developed the same level of C3I. I'm sure that there's been a lot of under-the-table technology transfer to both countries, but there's still a lot more concern about a rogue agent getting ahold of the weapons and subsequently using them.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Ah, but the atmosphere can quickly radiate much of that energy back into space, without the cover of kicked-up dust that an asteroid impact would cause. If there is any damage, it would be greatly reduced.
Another close call?? are we getting close calls weekly? monthly? how come nobody lets us know about these things coming towards us? Only time i hear about them is when they just miss us. If one is gonna hit us I'd like to know to take proper action. Go get laid...
[alk]
Let's make a quick visit to an alternative earth. During the Gulf War, satellites observed a brilliant flash over the Pacific Ocean (iirc) due to a small impact event that resulted in a high-altitude air burst.
In this alternative earth the object had a slightly different orbit, so it impacted near US troops. It was also slightly larger, large enough to create a small crater, but nothing like "Meteor Crater" in Arizona.
In this alternative earth, in the confusion of a conventional war the US (and the rest of the world) concluded that Iraq used a nuclear weapon against US forces. The US (and other nuclear powers), fearing that other weapons of mass destruction were being prepared for use, acted to knock out these weapons first. The death toll was in the high millions, but it was considered a bargain since it saved billions. Or so they thought, when they thought a biological weapon attack would soon follow.
Now let's fast forward to Sept. 11th. Imagine a small impact over a North American or European city in immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, an impact initially indistinguishable from a nuclear detonation.
THAT is why even small impacts matter. History is full of large-scale human events being triggered by "one-in-a-million" chance events.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Hmm. I guess we should deorbit all those expensive weather satellites too. We can't really change the course of approaching hurricanes, so there's no reason to know about them.
Even without Bruce Willis, a month's notice of a km-class asteroid collision might save a billion lives, if the time were used wisely:
o Distribute and cache potable water, water purification, food, and antibiotics.
o Move people away from the coasts
o Prepare to move people from projected ground zero.
What would _you_ do if you had a month to get ready?
Why? To know of impending doom and still be able to do NOTHING about it?
A really big asteroid is also going to spread little bits all over the place (ok, "little" might translate to car sized chunks of rock that will land with enough force to destroy a city), but the main concern is the really big chunks. Those chunks have so much inertia that you can almost ignore that the atmosphere is there.
Think of it as the difference between standing on a tall building and holding a handful of rice over a 1 meter diameter target on the street and dropping it and doing the same thing with a cannonball. If the cannonball is right over the target when you drop it, chances are it will be on top of the target when it lands (or embedded in the target, or under it). Some of the rice might land on the target as well, but probably not very much of it.
Now, obviously the aerodynamic forces acting on the asteroid are going to be proportional to the speed it is travelling. But, a spherical asteroid 300 meters in diamater is going to have a lot more mass relative to its surface area than, say, a 20 cm cannonball of similar density. If you do not understand why this is, think of the surface area of a 1 meter cube. It will be 6 square meters, and the volume will be 1 cubic meter. For a 10 meter cube, the surface area will be 600 square meters and the volume will be 1000 cubic meters. For a 100 meter cube, the surface area will be 60,000 square meters and the volume will be 1,000,000 cubic meters. Etcetera, etcetera.
In other words, we should be able to figure out where it will land with a margin of error which is a reasonable fraction of the huge circle of destruction which will surround it.
The article said that if we had a way to move these it wouldn't have worked because the asteroid was only discovered a month ago. We would need years of notice so that we would have time to push these thing off of a collision course. Depending on the propulsion technology used we would need at least a few months and that's with the best that we can think up and may work now. This discounts future technology that doesn't even have a basis in Science Fiction much less Science.
> But we don't need a better system for watching the stars.
Nope... here's why:
If we're not off the planet in any significant way by the time the next Apex-Life-Form-Ender hits our little place in the sun... well then, I guess we weren't half as smart as we thought we were; time to start over.
Every religion of any significant age talks of apocalypse (and think Perl Apocalypse, not Apocalypse Now). Why do you think that is? Because it's a quaint mystic thing the belivers can hang on to? Fuck No! They're talked about because *they* *happen*. Durrr...
Just remember, we'll eventually either be looked on as the Neanderthal side of the evolutionary fork from which the observer is on the other side of... or, our bones will be dug up by something completely different that took 100 million years to evolve (and it would be humorious to see if they make scary "movies" featuring run away humans brought back to life from the depths of history).
The best we can really hope for is to start twiddeling our genes, speeding up the otherwise slow, stupid, stumbling process that is natural selection and start *engineering* our successors with the best bits of DNA from *everything* in the current ecosphere (and some crafty bits of DNA code that have yet to be written). If we do it quick enough, perhaps they won't look upon as Neanderthals, but Gods. That would be nice.
Large Astroids, Black Holes and Super Novas happen; get over it, stop thinking linerally and work around the problem (for which there is no effective solution).
So let's buy some anti-missile missiles.
.. it seems to me like we're recording these 'near misses' quite a bit lately. i'm sure it has a lot to do with the low cost of computing power and high availability of observation equipment, but with so many eyes looking now it stands to reason that we're just noticing what's been there all along.
yeah, there are belts of space debris that we pass through at certain times which increase the likelihood of an encounter with some extraterrestrial projectile, but with 3 or more 'close calls' in the last year it would seem that this is pretty commonplace on a universal timeline.
then, every 20,000 years or so we have an encounter in which an object actually penetrates the atmosphere and hurtles toward earth. and even then, there's a 70-some-odd% chance that whatever it is will slam into an ocean. logic would then dictate that we're looking at a chance of one of these things making land about every 60,000 years (though i've heard estimates that put it up around 100-150,000).
go back to your must-see prime time tv lineup.. this is only a drill.
Couldn't we just give Sauron the one ring?
...
Then, he could sweep the asteroid away in one fell swoop like he did Elendil.
Of course, there is inevitable enslavement of the earth that would follow
I'm sure you're being humorous, but no, a "near miss" is the proper term. If you said something like "nearly missed," that would be a hit. But a "near miss" is simply a miss that swung by near enough to notice. Besides, it sounds better than "close miss."
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
of course you know that the conservation of angular momentume means that the biger the astroied is, and the faster is comes the harder it is for it to hit.
(yes I know that in all the movies you have to push the astriod away from earth to prevent a collision, but in the real world what you would do,is add to the astriod's momentume to make shure it misses!)
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
Why does Slashdot think an asteroid defense system is cool, yet a missle defense system is a waste of time/money? Which seems more likely to happen to you? The last time Earth was struck by a significant meteorite was when the dinosuars ruled the Earth. Nuclear missles exist today that might one day be fired upon us. Hopefully not, but more likely than a asteroid hitting the Earth. One more point, you can take the knowledge that you learn from the missle defense system and apply it to shooting down potentially hazardous asteroids.
I know it's not a perfect analogy, but it's not comletely wrong. You have to imagine not a normal shotgun, but one that fires buckshot at rifle velocities. Breaking up an asteroid isn't going to slow it down.
The effects aren't the same, but they are both very very bad. First of all, how many nuclear blasts would it take to break up a large asteroid into small enough pieces that they would burn up? Is it even possible? And if so, how many millions of tons of irradiated rock would be dumped into that atmosphere when it hit?
It's most likely not even possible to break up a large asteroid into pieces small enough that they would burn up. Say you have a 300m x 300m x 300m asteroid (squared to save me from getting a calculator). Hit it hard enough to break it into 30m x 30m x 30m pieces and you've got 1000 asteroids hitting a much wider area than the single impact would have.
If a 100 metre asteroid were to crash into earth, and hit a country with nuclear capability, it would appear at first to be a high yield nuclear attack. Minutes/hours later, it would easily be confirmed for what it really is, but during those crucial seconds where the country in question thinks they're under nuclear attack, might panic and respond by launching their own attack, especially if they're currently having hostilities with another country at the time.
Now, once they launch an attack, what will the rest of the nations of the world do? By the time everyone figures out exactly what happened, half a dozen nations might be actively involved in a nuclear war. Of course, this seems a bit paranoid, but this is the world we live in.
Its very possible that a 100 meter asteroid could sneak up on us and hit with little or no warning. At least if we have a few days warning, we can evacuate ground zero and all affected nations will know what is REALLY happening and won't panic and create more problems in the process.
Should we invest trillions of $$$ in defensive measures against this type of threat? Not now. We aren't even sure exactly what the threat would be. A rocky asteroid would present a different threat, and therefore a different solution compared to one comprised primarily of metal. We would require a different approach to deflecting them. And if we only discover them a month before impact, there is nothing we could do anyways, unless its a VERY small asteroid, and even then, the most we could probably do is adjust the location of ground zero, and not miss the earth entirely. Any solution will require the cumulative effects of time to work properly.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I am a big fan of the asteroid science being produced by Aracebo and the VLA and am saddened that these programs are being reduced. However, both programs focus on radar imaging of near earth asteroids (and the results have been spectacular too), not discovery. New astroids are almost exclusively identified by visual or IR techniques. So identification of earth crossing asteroids should continue uneffected.
It is a sad fact that basic space science must go begging while we pump untold billions into the space station. The space station is a political experiment, nothing more.
Hello:
According to The World Factbook, the total area of South Africa is 1,219,912 sq km. The article at the BBC website said that if the 300 m asteroid would've hit London, France and England would have been destroyed. According to the World Factbook, the total area of the UK is 244,820 sq km and France is 547,030 sq km. Adding these two numbers together results in 791,850 sq km. This is a far cry from the total area of South Africa.
I can't say for sure what was meant, but I assume the 'wavefront' of the electromagnetic radiation release is what is being mentioned here. If i remember correctly, a nuclear explosion primarily releases an initial burst of various high energy particles which react with the surrounding matter to hand their energy off to reach the heat etc. stage. If these particles simply smack into the asteroid, the heat will happen on it, but more importantly the momentum of the radiation should be imparted to it.
A traditional flash-to-gas explosive system would probably be particularly useless in space as there is no atmosphere to carry a compression wave, as you pointed out.
-josh
...then we could all go meet our respective god(s)/godesse(s)/unicorn(s)/nothingnesses...
I wouldn't have a big problem with that. It would solve a lot of problems and we could find out, once and for all, who was fscking right.
Of course, once regular passenger shuttle missions have been established....
*BOOM*
"Look! They nearly missed!"
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
I think the people saying there's nothing we can do about asteroid impacts are overlooking the simplest possible solution:
Offsite Backup...
But I forgot that manned space exploration and colonization is a waste of taxpayer money better spent on welfare, war, and wingnuts.
Ignoring gravity, the chance that an asteroid will be on a collision course with an asteroid gets increasingly unlikely as the solar system gets older, and it's already older than anything on earth. Getting back to the gravity issue, assuming that your average asteroid will only have a very small percentage of earth's mass, how likely is it that an asteroid approaching us from any direction would collide with us instead of "slingshotting" around us?
kind of have to disagree with your analogy. It's more like fire 500 rounds into a tile floor, or fire a cannonball. Remember these things are travelling 10 - 70 k per second. At these speeds you can shoot a candle through a cinderblock.
Redirect it to another planet - like Mars. I saw "Mars Attacks" - we better pre-empt. If they figure out how to muffle Slim Whitman, we're toast!
Besides, it would be cool to watch.
Correct. Standard policy dictates that a pound of cure is politically preferable to an ounce of prevention.
Exhibit A: incident of 9/11/2001.
Q.E.D.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
We wouldn't be sending any people out there. We'd be sending nukes. Lots of them, hopefully.
Could we lob enough thermonuclear devices at it in thirty days to nudge its orbit? We've still got plenty of warheads ,the problem is launch vehicles. How many powerful rockets (something along the power of the Delta II that launched NEAR would be about right, I suppose, though probably built more to the big dumb booster model) could we build in a month if nearly the entire planet's industrial output was devoted to that end?
I don't know. But I think we'd be trying really really hard.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Chomsky Transcript: The New War Against Terror (1/3)
The New War Against Terror
Noam Chomsky October 18, 2001 - Transcribed from audio recorded at
The Technology & Culture Forum at MIT
Everyone knows it's the TV people who run the world [crowd laugher].
I just got orders that I'm supposed to be here, not there. Well
the last talk I gave at this forum was on a light pleasant topic.
It was about how humans are an endangered species and given the
nature of their institutions they are likely to destroy themselves
in a fairly short time. So this time there is a little relief and
we have a pleasant topic instead, the new war on terror. Unfortunately,
the world keeps coming up with things that make it more and more
horrible as we proceed.
Assume 2 Conditions for this Talk
I'm going to assume 2 conditions for this talk.
The first one is just what I assume to be recognition of fact. That
is that the events of September 11 were a horrendous atrocity
probably the most devastating instant human toll of any crime in
history, outside of war.
The second assumption has to do with the goals. I'm assuming that
our goal is that we are interested in reducing the likelihood of
such crimes whether they are against us or against someone else.
If you don't accept those two assumptions, then what I say will
not be addressed to you. If we do accept them, then a number of
questions arise, closely related ones, which merit a good deal of
thought.
The 5 Questions
One question, and by far the most important one is what is happening
right now? Implicit in that is what can we do about it? The 2nd
has to do with the very common assumption that what happened on
September 11 is a historic event, one which will change history.
I tend to agree with that. I think it's true. It was a historic
event and the question we should be asking is exactly why? The 3rd
question has to do with the title, The War Against Terrorism.
Exactly what is it? And there is a related question, namely what
is terrorism? The 4th question which is narrower but important has
to do with the origins of the crimes of September 11th. And the
5th question that I want to talk a little about is what policy
options there are in fighting this war against terrorism and dealing
with the situations that led to it.
I'll say a few things about each. Glad to go beyond in discussion
and don't hesitate to bring up other questions. These are ones that
come to my mind as prominent but you may easily and plausibly have
other choices.
1. What's Happening Right Now?
Starvation of 3 to 4 Million People
Well let's start with right now. I'll talk about the situation in
Afghanistan. I'll just keep to uncontroversial sources like the
New York Times [crowd laughter]. According to the New York Times
there are 7 to 8 million people in Afghanistan on the verge of
starvation. That was true actually before September 11th. They were
surviving on international aid. On September 16th, the Times
reported, I'm quoting it, that the United States demanded from
Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the
food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population. As
far as I could determine there was no reaction in the United States
or for that matter in Europe. I was on national radio all over
Europe the next day.
There was no reaction in the United States or in Europe to my
knowledge to the demand to impose massive starvation on millions
of people. The threat of military strikes right after September..around
that time forced the removal of international aid workers that
crippled the assistance programs.
Actually, I am quoting again from the New York Times. Refugees
reaching Pakistan after arduous journeys from AF are describing
scenes of desperation and fear at home as the threat of American
led military attacks turns their long running misery into a potential
catastrophe. The country was on a lifeline and we just cut the
line. Quoting an evacuated aid worker, in the New York Times
Magazine.
The World Food Program, the UN program, which is the main one by
far, were able to resume after 3 weeks in early October, they began
to resume at a lower level, resume food shipments. They don't have
international aid workers within, so the distribution system is
hampered. That was suspended as soon as the bombing began. They
then resumed but at a lower pace while aid agencies leveled scathing
condemnations of US airdrops, condemning them as propaganda tools
which are probably doing more harm than good. That happens to be
quoting the London Financial Times but it is easy to continue.
After the first week of bombing, the New York Times reported on a
back page inside a column on something else, that by the arithmetic
of the United Nations there will soon be 7.5 million Afghans in
acute need of even a loaf of bread and there are only a few weeks
left before the harsh winter will make deliveries to many areas
totally impossible, continuing to quote, but with bombs falling
the delivery rate is down to = of what is needed. Casual comment.
Which tells us that Western civilization is anticipating the
slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something
like that. On the same day, the leader of Western civilization
dismissed with contempt, once again, offers of negotiation for
delivery of the alleged target, Osama bin Laden, and a request for
some evidence to substantiate the demand for total capitulation.
It was dismissed. On the same day the Special Rapporteur of the UN
in charge of food pleaded with the United States to stop the bombing
to try to save millions of victims. As far as I'm aware that was
unreported. That was Monday. Yesterday the major aid agencies OXFAM
and Christian Aid and others joined in that plea. You can't find
a report in the New York Times. There was a line in the Boston
Globe, hidden in a story about another topic, Kashmir.
Silent Genocide
Well we could easily go on.but all of that.first of all indicates
to us what's happening. Looks like what's happening is some sort
of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the
elite culture, the culture that we are part of. It indicates that
whatever, what will happen we don't know, but plans are being made
and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to
the death of several million people in the next couple of weeks.very
casually with no comment, no particular thought about it, that's
just kind of normal, here and in a good part of Europe. Not in the
rest of the world. In fact not even in much of Europe. So if you
read the Irish press or the press in Scotlandthat close, reactions
are very different. Well that's what's happening now. What's
happening now is very much under our control. We can do a lot to
affect what's happening. And that's roughly it.
2. Why was it a Historic Event?
National Territory Attacked
Alright let's turn to the slightly more abstract question, forgetting
for the moment that we are in the midst of apparently trying to
murder 3 or 4 million people, not Taliban of course, their victims.
Let's go backturn to the question of the historic event that took
place on September 11th. As I said, I think that's correct. It was
a historic event. Not unfortunately because of its scale, unpleasant
to think about, but in terms of the scale it's not that unusual.
I did say it's the worstprobably the worst instant human toll of
any crime. And that may be true. But there are terrorist crimes
with effects a bit more drawn out that are more extreme, unfortunately.
Nevertheless, it's a historic event because there was a change.
The change was the direction in which the guns were pointed. That's
new. Radically new. So, take US history.
The last time that the national territory of the United States was
under attack, or for that matter, even threatened was when the
British burned down Washington in 1814. There have been manyit was
common to bring up Pearl Harbor but that's not a good analogy. The
Japanese, what ever you think about it, the Japanese bombed military
bases in 2 US colonies not the national territory; colonies which
had been taken from their inhabitants in not a very pretty way.
This is the national territory that's been attacked on a large
scale, you can find a few fringe examples but this is unique.
During these close to 200 years, we, the United States expelled or
mostly exterminated the indigenous population, that's many millions
of people, conquered half of Mexico, carried out depredations all
over the region, Caribbean and Central America, sometimes beyond,
conquered Hawaii and the Philippines, killing several hundred
thousand Filipinos in the process.
Since the Second World War, it has extended its reach around the
world in ways I don't have to describe. But it was always killing
someone else, the fighting was somewhere else, it was others who
were getting slaughtered. Not here. Not the national territory.
Europe
In the case of Europe, the change is even more dramatic because
its history is even more horrendous than ours. We are an offshoot
of Europe, basically.
For hundreds of years, Europe has been casually slaughtering people
all over the world. That's how they conquered the world, not by
handing out candy to babies. During this period, Europe did suffer
murderous wars, but that was European killers murdering one another.
The main sport of Europe for hundreds of years was slaughtering
one another. The only reason that it came to an end in 1945, was.it
had nothing to do with Democracy or not making war with each other
and other fashionable notions. It had to do with the fact that
everyone understood that the next time they play the game it was
going to be the end for the world. Because the Europeans, including
us, had developed such massive weapons of destruction that that
game just had to be over. And it goes back hundreds of years. In
the 17th century, about probably 40% of the entire population of
Germany was wiped out in one war.
But during this whole bloody murderous period, it was Europeans
slaughtering each other, and Europeans slaughtering people elsewhere.
The Congo didn't attack Belgium, India didn't attack England,
Algeria didn't attack France.
It's uniform. There are again small exceptions, but pretty small
in scale, certainly invisible in the scale of what Europe and us
were doing to the rest of the world. This is the first change. The
first time that the guns have been pointed the other way. And in
my opinion that's probably why you see such different reactions on
the two sides of the Irish Sea which I have noticed, incidentally,
in many interviews on both sides, national radio on both sides.
The world looks very different depending on whether you are holding
the leash or whether you are being whipped by it for hundreds of
years, very different. So I think the shock and surprise in Europe
and its offshoots, like here, is very understandable. It is a
historic event but regrettably not in scale, in something else and
a reason why the rest of the worldmost of the rest of the world
looks at it quite differently. Not lacking sympathy for the victims
of the atrocity or being horrified by them, that's almost uniform,
but viewing it from a different perspective.
Something we might want to understand.
3. What is the War Against Terrorism?
Well, let's go to the third question, 'What is the war against
terrorism?' and a side question, 'What's terrorism?'. The war
against terrorism has been described in high places as a struggle
against a plague, a cancer which is spread by barbarians, by
"depraved opponents of civilization itself." That's a feeling that
I share. The words I'm quoting, however, happen to be from 20 years
ago. Those arethat's President Reagan and his Secretary of State.
The Reagan administration came into office 20 years ago declaring
that the war against international terrorism would be the core of
our foreign policy.describing it in terms of the kind I just
mentioned and others. And it was the core of our foreign policy.
The Reagan administration responded to this plague spread by depraved
opponents of civilization itself by creating an extraordinary
international terrorist network, totally unprecedented in scale,
which carried out massive atrocities all over the world, primarily.well,
partly nearby, but not only there. I won't run through the record,
you're all educated people, so I'm sure you learned about it in
High School. [crowd laughter]
Reagan-US War Against Nicaragua
But I'll just mention one case which is totally uncontroversial,
so we might as well not argue about it, by no means the most extreme
but uncontroversial. It's uncontroversial because of the judgments
of the highest international authorities the International Court
of Justice, the World Court, and the UN Security Council. So this
one is uncontroversial, at least among people who have some minimal
concern for international law, human rights, justice and other
things like that. And now I'll leave you an exercise. You can
estimate the size of that category by simply asking how often this
uncontroversial case has been mentioned in the commentary of the
last month. And it's a particularly relevant one, not only because
it is uncontroversial, but because it does offer a precedent as to
how a law abiding state would respond todid respond in fact to
international terrorism, which is uncontroversial. And was even
more extreme than the events of September 11th. I'm talking about
the Reagan-US war against Nicaragua which left tens of thousands
of people dead, the country ruined, perhaps beyond recovery.
Nicaragua's Response
Nicaragua did respond. They didn't respond by setting off bombs in
Washington. They responded by taking it to the World Court, presenting
a case, they had no problem putting together evidence. The World
Court accepted their case, ruled in their favor, condemned what
they called the "unlawful use of force," which is another word for
international terrorism, by the United States, ordered the United
States to terminate the crime and to pay massive reparations. The
United States, of course, dismissed the court judgment with total
contempt and announced that it would not accept the jurisdiction
of the court henceforth. Then Nicaragua went to the UN Security
Council which considered a resolution calling on all states to
observe international law. No one was mentioned but everyone
understood. The United States vetoed the resolution. It now stands
as the only state on record which has both been condemned by the
World Court for international terrorism and has vetoed a Security
Council resolution calling on states to observe international law.
Nicaragua then went to the General Assembly where there is technically
no veto but a negative US vote amounts to a veto. It passed a
similar resolution with only the United States, Israel, and El
Salvador opposed. The following year again, this time the United
States could only rally Israel to the cause, so 2 votes opposed to
observing international law. At that point, Nicaragua couldn't do
anything lawful. It tried all the measures. They don't work in a
world that is ruled by force.
This case is uncontroversial but it's by no means the most extreme.
We gain a lot of insight into our own culture and society and what's
happening now by asking 'how much we know about all this? How much
we talk about it? How much you learn about it in school? How much
it's all over the front pages?' And this is only the beginning.
The United States responded to the World Court and the Security
Council by immediately escalating the war very quickly, that was
a bipartisan decision incidentally. The terms of the war were also
changed. For the first time there were official orders givenofficial
orders to the terrorist army to attack what are called "soft
targets," meaning undefended civilian targets, and to keep away
from the Nicaraguan army. They were able to do that because the
United States had total control of the air over Nicaragua and the
mercenary army was supplied with advanced communication equipment,
it wasn't a guerilla army in the normal sense and could get
instructions about the disposition of the Nicaraguan army forces
so they could attack agricultural collectives, health clinics, and
so onsoft targets with impunity. Those were the official orders.
What was the Reaction Here?
What was the reaction? It was known. There was a reaction to it.
The policy was regarded as sensible by left liberal opinion. So
Michael Kinsley who represents the left in mainstream discussion,
wrote an article in which he said that we shouldn't be too quick
to criticize this policy as Human Rights Watch had just done. He
said a "sensible policy" must "meet the test of cost benefit
analysis" -- that is, I'm quoting now, that is the analysis of "the
amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood
that democracy will emerge at the other end." Democracy as the US
understands the term, which is graphically illustrated in the
surrounding countries. Notice that it is axiomatic that the United
States, US elites, have the right to conduct the analysis and to
pursue the project if it passes their tests. And it did pass their
tests. It worked. When Nicaragua finally succumbed to superpower
assault, commentators openly and cheerfully lauded the success of
the methods that were adopted and described them accurately. So
I'll quote Time Magazine just to pick one. They lauded the success
of the methods adopted: "to wreck the economy and prosecute a long
and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the
unwanted government themselves,"
with a cost to us that is "minimal," and leaving the victims "with
wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations, and ruined farms," and
thus providing the US candidate with a "winning issue": "ending
the impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua." The New York Times
had a headline saying "Americans United in Joy" at this outcome.
Terrorism Works - Terrorism is not the Weapon of the Weak
That is the culture in which we live and it reveals several facts.
One is the fact that terrorism works. It doesn't fail. It works.
Violence usually works. That's world history. Secondly, it's a very
serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism
is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it's
primarily a weapon of the strong, overwhelmingly, in fact. It is
held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control
the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn't count as terror.
Now that's close to universal. I can't think of a historical
exception, even the worst mass murderers view the world that way.
So pick the Nazis. They weren't carrying out terror in occupied
Europe. They were protecting the local population from the terrorisms
of the partisans. And like other resistance movements, there was
terrorism. The Nazis were carrying out counter terror. Furthermore,
the United States essentially agreed with that. After the war, the
US army did extensive studies of Nazi counter terror operations in
Europe. First I should say that the US picked them up and began
carrying them out itself, often against the same targets, the former
resistance. But the military also studied the Nazi methods published
interesting studies, sometimes critical of them because they were
inefficiently carried out, so a critical analysis, you didn't do
this right, you did that right, but those methods with the advice
of Wermacht officers who were brought over here became the manuals
of counter insurgency, of counter terror, of low intensity conflict,
as it is called, and are the manuals, and are the procedures that
are being used. So it's not just that the Nazis did it. It's that
it was regarded as the right thing to do by the leaders of western
civilization, that is us, who then proceeded to do it themselves.
Terrorism is not the weapon of the weak. It is the weapon of those
who are against 'us' whoever 'us' happens to be. And if you can
find a historical exception to that, I'd be interested in seeing
it.
Nature of our Culture - How We Regard Terrorism
Well, an interesting indication of the nature of our culture, our
high culture, is the way in which all of this is regarded. One way
it's regarded is just suppressing it. So almost nobody has ever
heard of it. And the power of American propaganda and doctrine is
so strong that even among the victims it's barely known. I mean,
when you talk about this to people in Argentina, you have to remind
them. Oh, yeah, that happened, we forgot about it. It's deeply
suppressed. The sheer consequences of the monopoly of violence can
be very powerful in ideological and other terms.
The Idea that Nicaragua Might Have The Right To Defend Itself
Well, one illuminating aspect of our own attitude toward terrorism
is the reaction to the idea that Nicaragua might have the right to
defend itself.
Actually I went through this in some detail with database searches
and that sort of thing. The idea that Nicaragua might have the
right to defend itself was considered outrageous. There is virtually
nothing in mainstream commentary indicating that Nicaragua might
have that right. And that fact was exploited by the Reagan
administration and its propaganda in an interesting way. Those of
you who were around in that time will remember that they periodically
floated rumors that the Nicaraguans were getting MIG jets, jets
from Russia. At that point the hawks and the doves split. The hawks
said, 'ok, let's bomb 'em.' The doves said, `wait a minute, let's
see if the rumors are true. And if the rumors are true, then let's
bomb them.
Because they are a threat to the United States.' Why, incidentally
were they getting MIGs? Well they tried to get jet planes from
European countries but the United States put pressure on its allies
so that it wouldn't send them means of defense because they wanted
them to turn to the Russians. That's good for propaganda purposes.
Then they become a threat to us. Remember, they were just 2 days
march from Harlingen, Texas. We actually declared a national
emergency in 1985 to protect the country from the threat of Nicaragua.
And it stayed in force. So it was much better for them to get arms
from the Russians. Why would they want jet planes? Well, for the
reasons I already mentioned. The United States had total control
over their airspace, and was using that to provide instructions to
the terrorist army to enable them to attack soft targets without
running into the army that might defend them. Everyone knew that
that was the reason.
They are not going to use their jet planes for anything else. But
the idea that Nicaragua should be permitted to defend its airspace
against a superpower attack that is directing terrorist forces to
attack undefended civilian targets, that was considered in the
United States as outrageous and uniformly so. Exceptions are so
slight, you know I can practically list them. I don't suggest that
you take my word for this. Have a look. That includes our own
senators, incidentally.
Honduras - The Appointment of John Negroponte as Ambassador to the
United Nations
Another illustration of how we regard terrorism is happening right
now. The US has just appointed an ambassador to the United Nations
to lead the war against terrorism a couple weeks ago. Who is he?
Well, his name is John Negroponte. He was the US ambassador in the
fiefdom, which is what it is, of Honduras in the early 1980's.
There was a little fuss made about the fact that he must have been
aware, as he certainly was, of the large-scale murders and other
atrocities that were being carried out by the security forces in
Honduras that we were supporting. But that's a small part of it.
As proconsul of Honduras, as he was called there, he was the local
supervisor for the terrorist war based in Honduras, for which his
government was condemned by the world court and then the Security
Council in a vetoed resolution. And he was just appointed as the
UN Ambassador to lead the war against terror. Another small experiment
you can do is check and see what the reaction was to this. Well,
I will tell you what you are going to find, but find it for yourself.
Now that tells us a lot about the war against terrorism and a lot
about ourselves.
After the United States took over the country again under the
conditions that were so graphically described by the press, the
country was pretty much destroyed in the 1980's, but it has totally
collapsed since in every respect just about. Economically it has
declined sharply since the US take over, democratically and in
every other respect. It's now the second poorest country in the
Hemisphere. I should say.I'm not going to talk about it, but I
mentioned that I picked up Nicaragua because it is an uncontroversial
case. If you look at the other states in the region, the state
terror was far more extreme and it again traces back to Washington
and that's by no means all.
Chomsky Transcript: The New War Against Terror (2/3)
US & UK Backed South African Attacks
It was happening elsewhere in the world too, take say Africa. During
the Reagan years alone, South African attacks, backed by the United
States and Britain, US/UK-backed South African attacks against the
neighboring countries killed about a million and a half people and
left 60 billion dollars in damage and countries destroyed. And if
we go around the world, we can add more examples.
Now that was the first war against terror of which I've given a
small sample. Are we supposed to pay attention to that? Or kind of
think that that might be relevant? After all it's not exactly
ancient history. Well, evidently not as you can tell by looking at
the current discussion of the war on terror which has been the
leading topic for the last month.
Haiti, Guatemala, and Nicaragua
I mentioned that Nicaragua has now become the 2nd poorest country
in the hemisphere. What's the poorest country? Well that's of course
Haiti which also happens to be the victim of most US intervention
in the 20th century by a long shot. We left it totally devastated.
It's the poorest country.
Nicaragua is second ranked in degree of US intervention in the 20th
century.
It is the 2nd poorest. Actually, it is vying with Guatemala. They
interchange every year or two as to who's the second poorest. And
they also vie as to who is the leading target of US military
intervention. We're supposed to think that all of this is some sort
of accident. That is has nothing to do with anything that happened
in history. Maybe.
Colombia and Turkey
The worst human rights violator in the 1990's is Colombia, by a
long shot.
It's also, by far, the leading recipient of US military aid in the
1990's maintaining the terror and human rights violations. In 1999,
Colombia replaced Turkey as the leading recipient of US arms
worldwide, that is excluding Israel and Egypt which are a separate
category. And that tells us a lot more about the war on terror
right now, in fact.
Why was Turkey getting such a huge flow of US arms? Well if you
take a look at the flow of US arms to Turkey, Turkey always got a
lot of US arms. It's strategically placed, a member of NATO, and
so on. But the arms flow to Turkey went up very sharply in 1984.
It didn't have anything to do with the cold war. I mean Russian
was collapsing. And it stayed high from 1984 to 1999 when it reduced
and it was replaced in the lead by Colombia. What happened from
1984 to 1999? Well, in 1984, [Turkey] launched a major terrorist
war against Kurds in southeastern Turkey. And that's when US aid
went up, military aid. And this was not pistols. This was jet
planes, tanks, military training, and so on. And it stayed high as
the atrocities escalated through the 1990's. Aid followed it. The
peak year was 1997. In 1997, US military aid to Turkey was more
than in the entire period 1950 to 1983, that is the cold war period,
which is an indication of how much the cold war has affected policy.
And the results were awesome. This led to 2-3 million refugees.
Some of the worst ethnic cleansing of the late 1990's. Tens of
thousands of people killed, 3500 towns and villages destroyed, way
more than Kosovo, even under NATO bombs. And the United States was
providing 80% of the arms, increasing as the atrocities increased,
peaking in 1997. It declined in 1999 because, once again, terror
worked as it usually does when carried out by its major agents,
mainly the powerful. So by 1999, Turkish terror, called of course
counter-terror, but as I said, that's universal, it worked. Therefore
Turkey was replaced by Colombia which had not yet succeeded in its
terrorist war. And therefore had to move into first place as
recipient of US arms.
Self Congratulation on the Part of Western Intellectuals
Well, what makes this all particularly striking is that all of this
was taking place right in the midst of a huge flood of self-congratulation
on the part of Western intellectuals which probably has no counterpart
in history. I mean you all remember it. It was just a couple years
ago. Massive self-adulation about how for the first time in history
we are so magnificent; that we are standing up for principles and
values; dedicated to ending inhumanity everywhere in the new era
of this-and-that, and so-on-and-so-forth. And we certainly can't
tolerate atrocities right near the borders of NATO. That was repeated
over and over. Only within the borders of NATO where we can not
only can tolerate much worse atrocities but contribute to them.
Another insight into Western civilization and our own, is how often
was this brought up? Try to look. I won't repeat it. But it's
instructive. It's a pretty impressive feat for a propaganda system
to carry this off in a free society. It's pretty amazing. I don't
think you could do this in a totalitarian state.
Turkey is Very Grateful
And Turkey is very grateful. Just a few days ago, Prime Minister
Ecevit announced that Turkey would join the coalition against
terror, very enthusiastically, even more so than others. In fact,
he said they would contribute troops which others have not willing
to do. And he explained why.
He said, We owe a debt of gratitude to the United States because
the United States was the only country that was willing to contribute
so massively to our own, in his words "counter-terrorist" war, that
is to our own massive ethnic cleansing and atrocities and terror.
Other countries helped a little, but they stayed back. The United
States, on the other hand, contributed enthusiastically and decisively
and was able to do so because of the silence, servility might be
the right word, of the educated classes who could easily find out
about it. It's a free country after all. You can read human rights
reports. You can read all sorts of stuff. But we chose to contribute
to the atrocities and Turkey is very happy, they owe us a debt of
gratitude for that and therefore will contribute troops just as
during the war in Serbia. Turkey was very much praised for using
its F-16's which we supplied it to bomb Serbia exactly as it had
been doing with the same planes against its own population up until
the time when it finally succeeded in crushing internal terror as
they called it. And as usual, as always, resistance does include
terror. Its true of the American Revolution. That's true of every
case I know. Just as its true that those who have a monopoly of
violence talk about themselves as carrying out counter terror.
The Coalition - Including Algeria, Russia, China, Indonesia
Now that's pretty impressive and that has to do with the coalition
that is now being organized to fight the war against terror. And
it's very interesting to see how that coalition is being described.
So have a look at this morning's Christian Science Monitor. That's
a good newspaper. One of the best international newspapers, with
real coverage of the world. The lead story, the front-page story,
is about how the United States, you know people used to dislike
the United States but now they are beginning to respect it, and
they are very happy about the way that the US is leading the war
against terror. And the prime example, well in fact the only serious
example, the others are a joke, is Algeria. Turns out that Algeria
is very enthusiastic about the US war against terror. The person
who wrote the article is an expert on Africa. He must know that
Algeria is one of the most vicious terrorist states in the world
and has been carrying out horrendous terror against its own population
in the past couple of years, in fact. For a while, this was under
wraps. But it was finally exposed in France by defectors from the
Algerian army. It's all over the place there and in England and so
on. But here, we're very proud because one of the worst terrorist
states in the world is now enthusiastically welcoming the US war
on terror and in fact is cheering on the United States to lead the
war. That shows how popular we are getting.
And if you look at the coalition that is being formed against terror
it tells you a lot more. A leading member of the coalition is Russia
which is delighted to have the United States support its murderous
terrorist war in Chechnya instead of occasionally criticizing it
in the background. China is joining enthusiastically. It's delighted
to have support for the atrocities it's carrying out in western
China against, what it called, Muslim secessionists. Turkey, as I
mentioned, is very happy with the war against terror. They are
experts. Algeria, Indonesia delighted to have even more US support
for atrocities it is carrying out in Ache and elsewhere. Now we
can run through the list, the list of the states that have joined
the coalition against terror is quite impressive. They have a
characteristic in common.
They are certainly among the leading terrorist states in the world.
And they happen to be led by the world champion.
What is Terrorism?
Well that brings us back to the question, what is terrorism? I have
been assuming we understand it. Well, what is it? Well, there happen
to be some easy answers to this. There is an official definition.
You can find it in the US code or in US army manuals. A brief
statement of it taken from a US army manual, is fair enough, is
that terror is the calculated use of violence or the threat of
violence to attain political or religious ideological goals through
intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear. That's terrorism. That's
a fair enough definition. I think it is reasonable to accept that.
The problem is that it can't be accepted because if you accept
that, all the wrong consequences follow. For example, all the
consequences I have just been reviewing. Now there is a major effort
right now at the UN to try to develop a comprehensive treaty on
terrorism. When Kofi Annan got the Nobel prize the other day, you
will notice he was reported as saying that we should stop wasting
time on this and really get down to it.
But there's a problem. If you use the official definition of
terrorism in the comprehensive treaty you are going to get completely
the wrong results.
So that can't be done. In fact, it is even worse than that. If you
take a look at the definition of Low Intensity Warfare which is
official US policy you find that it is a very close paraphrase of
what I just read. In fact, Low Intensity Conflict is just another
name for terrorism. That's why all countries, as far as I know,
call whatever horrendous acts they are carrying out, counter
terrorism. We happen to call it Counter Insurgency or Low Intensity
Conflict. So that's a serious problem. You can't use the actual
definitions. You've got to carefully find a definition that doesn't
have all the wrong consequences.
Why did the United States and Israel Vote Against a Major Resolution
Condemning Terrorism?
There are some other problems. Some of them came up in December
1987, at the peak of the first war on terrorism, that's when the
furor over the plague was peaking. The United Nations General
Assembly passed a very strong resolution against terrorism, condemning
the plague in the strongest terms, calling on every state to fight
against it in every possible way. It passed unanimously. One country,
Honduras abstained. Two votes against; the usual two, United States
and Israel. Why should the United States and Israel vote against
a major resolution condemning terrorism in the strongest terms, in
fact pretty much the terms that the Reagan administration was using?
Well, there is a reason. There is one paragraph in that long
resolution which says that nothing in this resolution infringes on
the rights of people struggling against racist and colonialist
regimes or foreign military occupation to continue with their
resistance with the assistance of others, other states, states
outside in their just cause. Well, the United States and Israel
can't accept that. The main reason that they couldn't at the time
was because of South Africa. South Africa was an ally, officially
called an ally. There was a terrorist force in South Africa. It
was called the African National Congress. They were a terrorist
force officially. South Africa in contrast was an ally and we
certainly couldn't support actions by a terrorist group struggling
against a racist regime. That would be impossible.
And of course there is another one. Namely the Israeli occupied
territories, now going into its 35th year. Supported primarily by
the United States in blocking a diplomatic settlement for 30 years
now, still is. And you can't have that. There is another one at
the time. Israel was occupying Southern Lebanon and was being
combated by what the US calls a terrorist force, Hizbullah, which
in fact succeeded in driving Israel out of Lebanon. And we can't
allow anyone to struggle against a military occupation when it is
one that we support so therefore the US and Israel had to vote
against the major UN resolution on terrorism. And I mentioned before
that a US vote againstis essentially a veto. Which is only half
the story. It also vetoes it from history. So none of this was ever
reported and none of it appeared in the annals of terrorism. If
you look at the scholarly work on terrorism and so on, nothing that
I just mentioned appears. The reason is that it has got the wrong
people holding the guns. You have to carefully hone the definitions
and the scholarship and so on so that you come out with the right
conclusions; otherwise it is not respectable scholarship and
honorable journalism. Well, these are some of problems that are
hampering the effort to develop a comprehensive treaty against
terrorism. Maybe we should have an academic conference or something
to try to see if we can figure out a way of defining terrorism so
that it comes out with just the right answers, not the wrong answers.
That won't be easy.
4. What are the Origins of the September 11 Crime?
Well, let's drop that and turn to the 4th question, What are the
origins of the September 11 crimes? Here we have to make a distinction
between 2 categories which shouldn't be run together. One is the
actual agents of the crime, the other is kind of a reservoir of at
least sympathy, sometimes support that they appeal to even among
people who very much oppose the criminals and the actions. And
those are 2 different things.
Category 1: The Likely Perpetrators
Well, with regard to the perpetrators, in a certain sense we are
not really clear. The United States either is unable or unwilling
to provide any evidence, any meaningful evidence. There was a sort
of a play a week or two ago when Tony Blair was set up to try to
present it. I don't exactly know what the purpose of this was.
Maybe so that the US could look as though it's holding back on some
secret evidence that it can't reveal or that Tony Blair could strike
proper Churchillian poses or something or other. Whatever the PR
[public relations] reasons were, he gave a presentation which was
in serious circles considered so absurd that it was barely even
mentioned. So the Wall Street Journal, for example, one of the more
serious papers had a small story on page 12, I think, in which they
pointed out that there was not much evidence and then they quoted
some high US official as saying that it didn't matter whether there
was any evidence because they were going to do it anyway. So why
bother with the evidence? The more ideological press, like the New
York Times and others, they had big front-page headlines. But the
Wall Street Journal reaction was reasonable and if you look at the
so-called evidence you can see why. But let's assume that it's
true. It is astonishing to me how weak the evidence was. I sort of
thought you could do better than that without any intelligence
service [audience laughter]. In fact, remember this was after weeks
of the most intensive investigation in history of all the intelligence
services of the western world working overtime trying to put
something together. And it was a prima facie, it was a very strong
case even before you had anything. And it ended up about where it
started, with a prima facie case. So let's assume that it is true.
So let's assume that, it looked obvious the first day, still does,
that the actual perpetrators come from the radical Islamic, here
called, fundamentalist networks of which the bin Laden network is
undoubtedly a significant part. Whether they were involved or not
nobody knows. It doesn't really matter much.
Where did they come from?
That's the background, those networks. Well, where do they come
from? We know all about that. Nobody knows about that better than
the CIA because it helped organize them and it nurtured them for
a long time. They were brought together in the 1980's actually by
the CIA and its associates elsewhere:
Pakistan, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China was involved,
they may have been involved a little bit earlier, maybe by 1978.
The idea was to try to harass the Russians, the common enemy.
According to President Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, the US got involved in mid 1979. Do you remember, just
to put the dates right, that Russia invaded Afghanistan in December
1979. Ok. According to Brzezinski, the US support for the mujahedin
fighting against the government began 6 months earlier. He is very
proud of that. He says we drew the Russians into, in his words, an
Afghan trap, by supporting the mujahedin, getting them to invade,
getting them into the trap. Now then we could develop this terrific
mercenary army.
Not a small one, maybe 100,000 men or so bringing together the best
killers they could find, who were radical Islamist fanatics from
around North Africa, Saudi Arabia.anywhere they could find them.
They were often called the Afghanis but many of them, like bin
Laden, were not Afghans. They were brought by the CIA and its
friends from elsewhere. Whether Brzezinski is telling the truth or
not, I don't know. He may have been bragging, he is apparently very
proud of it, knowing the consequences incidentally. But maybe it's
true. We'll know someday if the documents are ever released.
Anyway, that's his perception. By January 1980 it is not even in
doubt that the US was organizing the Afghanis and this massive
military force to try to cause the Russians maximal trouble. It
was a legitimate thing for the Afghans to fight the Russian invasion.
But the US intervention was not helping the Afghans. In fact, it
helped destroy the country and much more.
The Afghanis, so called, had their own...it did force the Russians
to withdrew, finally. Although many analysts believe that it probably
delayed their withdrawal because they were trying to get out of
it. Anyway, whatever, they did withdraw.
Meanwhile, the terrorist forces that the CIA was organizing, arming,
and training were pursuing their own agenda, right away. It was no
secret. One of the first acts was in 1981 when they assassinated
the President of Egypt, who was one of the most enthusiastic of
their creators. In 1983, one suicide bomber, who may or may not
have been connected, it's pretty shadowy, nobody knows. But one
suicide bomber drove the US army-military out of Lebanon.
And it continued. They have their own agenda. The US was happy to
mobilize them to fight its cause but meanwhile they are doing their
own thing. They were clear very about it. After 1989, when the
Russians had withdrawn, they simply turned elsewhere. Since then
they have been fighting in Chechnya, Western China, Bosnia, Kashmir,
South East Asia, North Africa, all over the place.
The Are Telling Us What They Think
They are telling us just what they think. The United States wants
to silence the one free television channel in the Arab world because
it's broadcasting a whole range of things from Powell over to Osama
bin Laden. So the US is now joining the repressive regimes of the
Arab world that try to shut it up.
But if you listen to it, if you listen to what bin Laden says, it's
worth it. There is plenty of interviews. And there are plenty of
interviews by leading Western reporters, if you don't want to listen
to his own voice, Robert Fisk and others. And what he has been
saying is pretty consistent for a long time. He's not the only one
but maybe he is the most eloquent. It's not only consistent over
a long time, it is consistent with their actions.
So there is every reason to take it seriously. Their prime enemy
is what they call the corrupt and oppressive authoritarian brutal
regimes of the Arab world and when the say that they get quite a
resonance in the region.
They also want to defend and they want to replace them by properly
Islamist governments. That's where they lose the people of the
region. But up till then, they are with them. From their point of
view, even Saudi Arabia, the most extreme fundamentalist state in
the world, I suppose, short of the Taliban, which is an offshoot,
even that's not Islamist enough for them. Ok, at that point, they
get very little support, but up until that point they get plenty
of support. Also they want to defend Muslims elsewhere. They hate
the Russians like poison, but as soon as the Russians pulled out
of Afghanistan, they stopped carrying out terrorist acts in Russia
as they had been doing with CIA backing before that within Russia,
not just in Afghanistan. They did move over to Chechnya. But there
they are defending Muslims against a Russian invasion. Same with
all the other places I mentioned. From their point of view, they
are defending the Muslims against the infidels. And they are very
clear about it and that is what they have been doing.
Why did they turn against the United States?
Now why did they turn against the United States? Well that had to
do with what they call the US invasion of Saudi Arabia. In 1990,
the US established permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia which
from their point of view is comparable to a Russian invasion of
Afghanistan except that Saudi Arabia is way more important. That's
the home of the holiest sites of Islam. And that is when their
activities turned against the Unites States. If you recall, in 1993
they tried to blow up the World Trade Center. Got part of the way,
but not the whole way and that was only part of it. The plans were
to blow up the UN building, the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, the
FBI building. I think there were others on the list. Well, they
sort of got part way, but not all the way. One person who is jailed
for that, finally, among the people who were jailed, was a Egyptian
cleric who had been brought into the United States over the objections
of the Immigration Service, thanks to the intervention of the CIA
which wanted to help out their friend. A couple years later he was
blowing up the World Trade Center. And this has been going on all
over. I'm not going to run through the list but it's, if you want
to understand it, it's consistent. It's a consistent picture. It's
described in words. It's revealed in practice for 20 years. There
is no reason not to take it seriously. That's the first category,
the likely perpetrators.
Category 2: What about the reservoir of support?
What about the reservoir of support? Well, it's not hard to find
out what that is. One of the good things that has happened since
September 11 is that some of the press and some of the discussion
has begun to open up to some of these things. The best one to my
knowledge is the Wall Street Journal which right away began to run,
within a couple of days, serious reports, searching serious reports,
on the reasons why the people of the region, even though they hate
bin Laden and despise everything he is doing, nevertheless support
him in many ways and even regard him as the conscience of Islam,
as one said. Now the Wall Street Journal and others, they are not
surveying public opinion. They are surveying the opinion of their
friends: bankers, professionals, international lawyers, businessmen
tied to the United States, people who they interview in McDonalds
restaurant, which is an elegant restaurant there, wearing fancy
American clothes. That's the people they are interviewing because
they want to find out what their attitudes are. And their attitudes
are very explicit and very clear and in many ways consonant with
the message of bin Laden and others. They are very angry at the
United States because of its support of authoritarian and brutal
regimes; its intervention to block any move towards democracy; its
intervention to stop economic development; its policies of devastating
the civilian societies of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein;
and they remember, even if we prefer not to, that the United States
and Britain supported Saddam Hussein right through his worst
atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds, bin Laden brings
that up constantly, and they know it even if we don't want to.
And of course their support for the Israeli military occupation
which is harsh and brutal. It is now in its 35th year. The US has
been providing the overwhelming economic, military, and diplomatic
support for it, and still does. And they know that and they don't
like it. Especially when that is paired with US policy towards
Iraq, towards the Iraqi civilian society which is getting destroyed.
Ok, those are the reasons roughly. And when bin Laden gives those
reasons, people recognize it and support it.
Now that's not the way people here like to think about it, at least
educated liberal opinion. They like the following line which has
been all over the press, mostly from left liberals, incidentally.
I have not done a real study but I think right wing opinion has
generally been more honest. But if you look at say at the New York
Times at the first op-ed they ran by Ronald Steel, serious left
liberal intellectual. He asks Why do they hate us? This is the same
day, I think, that the Wall Street Journal was running the survey
on why they hate us. So he says "They hate us because we champion
a new world order of capitalism, individualism, secularism, and
democracy that should be the norm everywhere." That's why they hate
us. The same day the Wall Street Journal is surveying the opinions
of bankers, professionals, international lawyers and saying `look,
we hate you because you are blocking democracy, you are preventing
economic development, you are supporting brutal regimes, terrorist
regimes and you are doing these horrible things in the region.' A
couple days later, Anthony Lewis, way out on the left, explained
that the terrorist seek only "apocalyptic nihilism," nothing more
and nothing we do matters. The only consequence of our actions, he
says, that could be harmful is that it makes it harder for Arabs
to join in the coalition's anti-terrorism effort. But beyond that,
everything we do is irrelevant.
Well, you know, that's got the advantage of being sort of comforting.
It makes you feel good about yourself, and how wonderful you are.
It enables us to evade the consequences of our actions. It has a
couple of defects. One is it is at total variance with everything
we know. And another defect is that it is a perfect way to ensure
that you escalate the cycle of violence. If you want to live with
your head buried in the sand and pretend they hate us because
they're opposed to globalization, that's why they killed Sadat 20
years ago, and fought the Russians, tried to blow up the World
Trade Center in 1993. And these are all people who are in the midst
of corporate globalization but if you want to believe that,
yehcomforting. And it is a great way to make sure that violence
escalates. That's tribal violence. You did something to me, I'll
do something worse to you. I don't care what the reasons are. We
just keep going that way. And that's a way to do it. Pretty much
straight, left-liberal opinion.
The freaking sun is going to expand into a Red Giant and gobble up the inner planets in a few hundred million years. A "Super Volcano" (see Yellow Stone park) is also due to explode over the next few hundred thousand years and wipe out civilization on this planet. So what. Learn to live with the hazards of our Solar System.
Asteroid Defenses are too expensive.
I reckon we should look into ways to move the planet. A jump to the left...
Here is a reason for funding these observations: future generations may require them. Recall that this is a long term problem, that the earth and its inhabitiants will still be vulnerable to an impact long after this discussion is closed. If we are lucky enough not be squished personally, how do we know that our successors will not be?
We owe it to this planet to learn as much as we can about any long-term threat and protect against it.
It would be nice if the existing generations could leave behind a greater legacy than unmanaged pollution, exponentially growing populations, and inheritly selfish political systems. Astronomical data which could potentinally save the species on this planet would be a nice gift to our children.
Load two shotguns, one with solid shot, one with buck shot .... :)
Robert Anton Wilson
A conventional warhead is dramatically less practical than a nuclear weapon simply because you have to ship all the oxygen for the reaction along with it. Nuclear gives you far better power for the pound, especially since they work just fine in a vacuum.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Crap drifts past the Earth all the time. You want to get worried when an object ~100 m in size (large enough to cause significant regional destruction on land, or widespread coastal destruction if it lands in an ocean, which is likely) passes within the Earth-Moon distance (384000 km). This was only about 600000 km at closest approach.
max
Chomsky Transcript: The New War Against Terror (3/3)
5. What are the Policy Options?
What are the policy options? Well, there are a number. A narrow
policy option from the beginning was to follow the advice of really
far out radicals like the Pope [audience laughter]. The Vatican
immediately said look it's a horrible terrorist crime. In the case
of crime, you try to find the perpetrators, you bring them to
justice, you try them. You don't kill innocent civilians. Like if
somebody robs my house and I think the guy who did it is probably
in the neighborhood across the street, I don't go out with an
assault rifle and kill everyone in that neighborhood. That's not
the way you deal with crime, whether it's a small crime like this
one or really massive one like the US terrorist war against Nicaragua,
even worse ones and others in between. And there are plenty of
precedents for that. In fact, I mentioned a precedent, Nicaragua,
a lawful, a law abiding state, that's why presumably we had to
destroy it, which followed the right principles. Now of course, it
didn't get anywhere because it was running up against a power that
wouldn't allow lawful procedures to be followed. But if the United
States tried to pursue them, nobody would stop them. In fact,
everyone would applaud. And there are plenty of other precedents.IRA
Bombs in London When the IRA set off bombs in London, which is
pretty serious business, Britain could have, apart from the fact
that it was unfeasible, let's put that aside, one possible response
would have been to destroy Boston which is the source of most of
the financing. And of course to wipe out West Belfast.
Well, you know, quite apart from the feasibility, it would have
been criminal idiocy. The way to deal with it was pretty much what
they did. You know, find the perpetrators; bring them to trial;
and look for the reasons.
Because these things don't come out of nowhere. They come from
something.
Whether it is a crime in the streets or a monstrous terrorist crime
or anything else. There's reasons. And usually if you look at the
reasons, some of them are legitimate and ought to be addressed,
independently of the crime, they ought to be addressed because they
are legitimate. And that's the way to deal with it. There are many
such examples.
But there are problems with that. One problem is that the United
States does not recognize the jurisdiction of international
institutions. So it can't go to them. It has rejected the jurisdiction
of the World Court. It has refused to ratify the International
Criminal Court. It is powerful enough to set up a new court if it
wants so that wouldn't stop anything. But there is a problem with
any kind of a court, mainly you need evidence. You go to any kind
of court, you need some kind of evidence. Not Tony Blair talking
about it on television. And that's very hard. It may be impossible
to find.
Leaderless Resistance
You know, it could be that the people who did it, killed themselves.
Nobody knows this better than the CIA. These are decentralized,
nonhierarchic networks. They follow a principle that is called
Leaderless Resistance.
That's the principle that has been developed by the Christian Right
terrorists in the United States. It's called Leaderless Resistance.
You have small groups that do things. They don't talk to anybody
else. There is a kind of general background of assumptions and then
you do it. Actually people in the anti war movement are very familiar
with it. We used to call it affinity groups. If you assume correctly
that whatever group you are in is being penetrated by the FBI, when
something serious is happening, you don't do it in a meeting. You
do it with some people you know and trust, an affinity group and
then it doesn't get penetrated. That's one of the reasons why the
FBI has never been able to figure out what's going on in any of
the popular movements. And other intelligence agencies are the
same. They can't.
That's leaderless resistance or affinity groups, and decentralized
networks are extremely hard to penetrate. And it's quite possible
that they just don't know. When Osama bin Laden claims he wasn't
involved, that's entirely possible. In fact, it's pretty hard to
imagine how a guy in a cave in Afghanistan, who doesn't even have
a radio or a telephone could have planned a highly sophisticated
operation like that. Chances are it's part of the background. You
know, like other leaderless resistance terrorist groups.
Which means it's going to be extremely difficult to find evidence.
Establishing Credibility
And the US doesn't want to present evidence because it wants to be
able to do it, to act without evidence. That's a crucial part of
the reaction. You will notice that the US did not ask for Security
Council authorization which they probably could have gotten this
time, not for pretty reasons, but because the other permanent
members of the Security Council are also terrorist states. They
are happy to join a coalition against what they call terror, namely
in support of their own terror. Like Russia wasn't going to veto,
they love it. So the US probably could have gotten Security Council
authorization but it didn't want it. And it didn't want it because
it follows a long-standing principle which is not George Bush, it
was explicit in the Clinton administration, articulated and goes
back much further and that is that we have the right to act
unilaterally. We don't want international authorization because we
act unilaterally and therefore we don't want it. We don't care
about evidence. We don't care about negotiation. We don't care
about treaties. We are the strongest guy around;
the toughest thug on the block. We do what we want. Authorization
is a bad thing and therefore must be avoided. There is even a name
for it in the technical literature. It's called establishing
credibility. You have to establish credibility. That's an important
factor in many policies. It was the official reason given for the
war in the Balkans and the most plausible reason.
You want to know what credibility means, ask your favorite Mafia
Don. He'll explain to you what credibility means. And it's the same
in international affairs, except it's talked about in universities
using big words, and that sort of thing. But it's basically the
same principle. And it makes sense.
And it usually works. The main historian who has written about this
in the last couple years is Charles Tilly with a book called
Coercion, Capital, and European States. He points out that violence
has been the leading principle of Europe for hundreds of years and
the reason is because it works. You know, it's very reasonable. It
almost always works. When you have an overwhelming predominance of
violence and a culture of violence behind it.
So therefore it makes sense to follow it. Well, those are all
problems in pursuing lawful paths. And if you did try to follow
them you'd really open some very dangerous doors. Like the US is
demanding that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. And they are
responding in a way which is regarded as totally absurd and outlandish
in the west, namely they are saying, Ok, but first give us some
evidence. In the west, that is considered ludicrous. It's a sign
of their criminality. How can they ask for evidence? I mean if
somebody asked us to hand someone over, we'd do it tomorrow. We
wouldn't ask for any evidence. [crowd laughter].
Haiti
In fact it is easy to prove that. We don't have to make up cases.
So for example, for the last several years, Haiti has been requesting
the United States to extradite Emmanuel Constant. He is a major
killer. He is one of the leading figures in the slaughter of maybe
4000 or 5000 people in the years in the mid 1990's, under the
military junta, which incidentally was being, not so tacitly,
supported by the Bush and the Clinton administrations contrary to
illusions. Anyway he is a leading killer. They have plenty of
evidence. No problem about evidence. He has already been brought
to trial and sentenced in Haiti and they are asking the United
States to turn him over. Well, I mean do your own research. See
how much discussion there has been of that. Actually Haiti renewed
the request a couple of weeks ago. It wasn't even mentioned. Why
should we turn over a convicted killer who was largely responsible
for killing 4000 or 5000 people a couple of years ago.
In fact, if we do turn him over, who knows what he would say. Maybe
he'll say that he was being funded and helped by the CIA, which is
probably true.
We don't want to open that door. And he is not he only one.
Costa Rica
For the last about 15 years, Costa Rica which is the democratic
prize, has been trying to get the United States to hand over a John
Hull, a US land owner in Costa Rica, who they charge with terrorist
crimes. He was using his land, they claim with good evidence as a
base for the US war against Nicaragua, which is not a controversial
conclusion, remember. There is the World Court and Security Council
behind it. So they have been trying to get the United States to
hand him over. Hear about that one? No.
They did actually confiscate the land of another American landholder,
John Hamilton. Paid compensation, offered compensation. The US
refused. Turned his land over into a national park because his land
was also being used as a base for the US attack against Nicaragua.
Costa Rica was punished for that one. They were punished by
withholding aid. We don't accept that kind of insubordination from
allies. And we can go on. If you open the door to questions about
extradition it leads in very unpleasant directions. So that can't
be done.
Reactions in Afghanistan
Well, what about the reactions in Afghanistan. The initial proposal,
the initial rhetoric was for a massive assault which would kill
many people visibly and also an attack on other countries in the
region. Well the Bush administration wisely backed off from that.
They were being told by every foreign leader, NATO, everyone else,
every specialist, I suppose, their own intelligence agencies that
that would be the stupidest thing they could possibly do. It would
simply be like opening recruiting offices for bin Laden all over
the region. That's exactly what he wants. And it would be extremely
harmful to their own interests. So they backed off that one. And
they are turning to what I described earlier which is a kind of
silent genocide. It's a. well, I already said what I think about
it. I don't think anything more has to be said. You can figure it
out if you do the arithmetic.
A sensible proposal which is kind of on the verge of being considered,
but it has been sensible all along, and it is being raised, called
for by expatriate Afghans and allegedly tribal leaders internally,
is for a UN initiative, which would keep the Russians and Americans
out of it, totally.
These are the 2 countries that have practically wiped the country
out in the last 20 years. They should be out of it. They should
provide massive reparations. But that's their only role. A UN
initiative to bring together elements within Afghanistan that would
try to construct something from the wreckage. It's conceivable that
that could work, with plenty of support and no interference. If
the US insists on running it, we might as well quit. We have a
historical record on that one.
You will notice that the name of this operation.remember that at
first it was going to be a Crusade but they backed off that because
PR (public relations) agents told them that that wouldn't work
[audience laughter]. And then it was going to be Infinite Justice,
but the PR agents said, wait a minute, you are sounding like you
are divinity. So that wouldn't work. And then it was changed to
enduring freedom. We know what that means. But nobody has yet
pointed out, fortunately, that there is an ambiguity there. To
endure means to suffer. [audience laughter]. And a there are plenty
of people around the world who have endured what we call freedom.
Again, fortunately we have a very well-behaved educated class so
nobody has yet pointed out this ambiguity. But if its done there
will be another problem to deal with. But if we can back off enough
so that some more or less independent agency, maybe the UN, maybe
credible NGO's (non governmental organizations) can take the lead
in trying to reconstruct something from the wreckage, with plenty
of assistance and we owe it to them. Them maybe something would
come out. Beyond that, there are other problems.
An Easy Way To Reduce The Level Of Terror
We certainly want to reduce the level of terror, certainly not
escalate it.
There is one easy way to do that and therefore it is never discussed.
Namely stop participating in it. That would automatically reduce
the level of terror enormously. But that you can't discuss. Well
we ought to make it possible to discuss it. So that's one easy way
to reduce the level of terror.
Beyond that, we should rethink the kinds of policies, and Afghanistan
is not the only one, in which we organize and train terrorist
armies. That has effects. We're seeing some of these effects now.
September 11th is one.
Rethink it.
Rethink the policies that are creating a reservoir of support.
Exactly what the bankers, lawyers and so on are saying in places
like Saudi Arabia. On the streets it's much more bitter, as you
can imagine. That's possible. You know, those policies aren't graven
in stone.
And further more there are opportunities. It's hard to find many
rays of light in the last couple of weeks but one of them is that
there is an increased openness. Lots of issues are open for
discussion, even in elite circles, certainly among the general
public, that were not a couple of weeks ago. That's dramatically
the case. I mean, if a newspaper like USA Today can run a very good
article, a serious article, on life in the Gaza Stripthere has been
a change. The things I mentioned in the Wall Street Journalthat's
change. And among the general public, I think there is much more
openness and willingness to think about things that were under the
rug and so on.
These are opportunities and they should be used, at least by people
who accept the goal of trying to reduce the level of violence and
terror, including potential threats that are extremely severe and
could make even September 11th pale into insignificance. Thanks.
Noam Chomsky, the guy that is talking in those transcripts is a US and Israeli citizen. Not only that, he is Jewish. Also, Computer Science students should also know Chomsky for his Chomsky Normal Form, for formal grammars. The guy is very respectable, and a good source for an intelligent, accurate, and truthful account of all things to do with 9-11. If you want to learn more, just run a google search for "Noam Chomsky". His articles, transcripts, etc are all over the web. You can even find MP3s of his speeches on GNUtella.
Stop listening to the lies fed to the masses through TV. The only way to get an accurate take on current events is to actively research things through several non-biased, respectable sources.
Well, if one of these asteroids ever does actually hit the earth, at least it's one less asteroid we have to look for. :)
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
Obviously, for such a generally pro-evolution bunch, /. has no respect for natrual selection and natural population control it they can't stand the thought of an asteroid or meteor taking out a large chunk of this little rock we call home.
The dust would have to be moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light in order to achieve a toaster oven effect on the ground.
Of course, there's the possibility of a nuclear winter type effect...
3 boring twat with typical /. boring twat comment
Hmmmm... with the luck I've been having lately, even a BORING twat sounds good right about now!
should be on trying to destroy a test asteroid. Why wait till we have one shot at it and everything to lose?
Every movie in the genre agrees: you must wait until the last minute to do it. Anything else just isn't dramatic enough :)
What is your Slash Rating?
Just a guess, but after the nuke blows, it ain't no vacuum.
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Just out of curiosity, who do you think expects that you can "wash away blood with blood"?
The reason you spill blood in response to blood is to prevent further blood from being spilled. Nothing "washes away" blood except time.
In fact, you've inspired a new .sig quote for me. Thanks. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.