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Stopping Killer Asteroids
Drog writes "Earth has had a few near misses with asteroids recently (although "near hits" would be more accurate). It's just a matter of time, though, before we detect one with our name on it. In this New York Times article, experts discuss the various ways that we might go about saving our planet. Remarkably, nuclear detonations are not a good option, as they would break the asteroid into many pieces and merely increase our odds of being hit. And a detonation some distance away may simply be absorbed by the asteroid with virtually no effect. Instead, say scientists who study asteroid hazards, a gentle sustained push is what's needed (slow and steady wins the race). Some of the approaches have been discussed in science fiction for years--a mass driver, an electromagnetic machine which hurls dirt from the surface, an orbiting parabolic mirror to heat up the surface and create a plume of vaporized material. All of these methods require one thing, however. Time. At least several decades warning."
So what do we do today??
Pray. And give money and support funding to any program that maps the sky for asteroids. Cause if any are on their way (I'd say 30 years or less), well... we're just f*cked.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I thought more pieces would have more surface area. More surface area would produce more friction traveling through the atmosphere. More friction would create more heat and thus be able to burn up asteroids that would otherwise not totally burn in the atmosphere.
Is my science wrong?
I was thinking, many of the options we have are merely theoretical. I'd like NASA to spend a few of my tax dollars actually *testing* out 2 or 3 of these ideas on a real asteroid to see if they really work.
For example, will a near nuclear blast really be absorved by the meteor without it changing its course? How much of a force will it be needed to push an asteroid with rockets or the like?
So let's test now so that when the real thing comes and we launch our savior to space, we don't find out in the last minute that it fails.
On a side note, this shouldn't be a NASA-only effort, I think the European Space Agency and many other countries should ship in as well, as this concerns all of mankind.
I may be alone on this one, but please hear me out.
There are many things that could put an end to life here on Earth as we know it. Some of these would end life for all 6 billion of us, or for just one or two. Life is precious; never take anything for granted, as the next moment of trechery may suddenly take it away.
I urge you all to love, listen, smile, ask questions, donate time, donate money, learn new things, and teach others new and fascinating pieces of knowledge through the beauty of education. If you do these things, you will experience great happiness and will come to realize that preventing "killer asteroids" should be at the very bottom of your To Do list.
Peace.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Although I'm concerned and think we should prepare for this eventuality. It doesn't bother me as much because of the environmental damage already done by Humanity on the Earth. I have dark feeling our greed and putting it off to the last minute will put us in a category below Dinosaurs cause we are intelligent and nearly able to do something about it, yet we'd rather spend our time on other issues and not worry about the big one till it's starting to heat up in the upper atmosphere.
/. when we're all gone. :)
In thinking of this Osama is a small potatos compared to a 1 mile wide rock wiping out most if not all of Humanity. The world will end and the bug that poses for the latest IE vunerability topic image will then run
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Haven't we run this topic completely into the ground? I vote we deal with this when it's actually an issue. This discussion reminds me of a bunch of 13 year old geeks sitting around the RPG table talking about what they're going to do if giant robots with photon torpedos take over the planet.
I don't mean to appear as flame bait.. but.. this topic has been discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
There are some useful scenarios we could be discussing. This is approximately none of them.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
We need to stop wrrying about every possible thing that can destroy this planet, sure we're advance enough to possibly change the out come of certain castrophic events but instead of changing the course of these events, our money will be better spent on trying to find new ways to help our current situations such as global hunger or AIDS or even find ways to reach beyond earth and begin colonising other planets...how long will the earth sustain us anyways...at the speed that we're using our resources and damaging the planet mix that with the population growth and u have a castraphic even that is much more likely to happen then an asteroid collision...
The earth made it this long, but the dinosaurs didn't, and neither did the trilobites, or the megatheria, or the wixwaxia... Extinctions happen, and I'd like to prevent ours if at all possible.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
30 years? 1950 DA is supposed to swing by real close (or hit) in about 878 years, and I'm seriously frightened that we won't be able to get consensus in time to blast (or nudge) it out of it's orbit.
Go to http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/04/04/lost.aste roid/ for more info.
It's a hell of a lot simpler to send a robot probe, or even a manned spacecraft with a small crew, into space than it is to establish sustainable colonies on another world. Colonization is all well and good, but some of the options discussed in the NYTimes article are things we can either do now, or should be able to do within a few generations. Colonization, in addition to the logistic and technical diffulties involved, has social problems. If you want a self-sustaining colony capable of perpetuating the race, you need a large population, and you need it to be economically self-sufficient. That means you can't just send scientists - you need engineers, factory workers, politicians, even telemarketers - all the things that make a modern capitalist economy work. And the only way you get people who *aren't* explorers by nature to colonize is for things to be absolutely miserable for them at home, or truly grand in the New World. No matter how bad things get on Earth, it'll be quite a while before life in a pressure dome on another planet starts to even rival the quality of life one can enjoy on Earth, let alone surpass it. I repeat: You need more than just scientists and explorers for a colony large enough to perpetuate the human race if Earth gets snuffed.
I'm the stranger...posting to
of collisions, because eventually it WILL happen. If it happens, it happens. I probably have a beter chance of winning the lottery than people have of averting or deflecting such such a collision with asteroids. I know this may sound a little whacked, but the best way to improve mankinds chances of survival is interplanetary colonization. That way if earth gets hit you still have your colony on mars.
"You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- 1976." --George W. Bush, to Queen Elizabeth, Wash
The New York Times article is kind of silly. If we ever need to move a large chunk of rock out of the way is a (relatively) short time, there is only one way to do it with current or near-future technology: Project Orion style nuclear explosions.
You park your space ship against the rock, and set off small nuclear explosions against a plate mounted on the other side. The explosions are as small as you want, so the acceleration is as small as you want (to keep the rock from breaking up), but you can hold enough fuel (nuclear bombs) to make it last for quite some time.
The methods suggested in the article might work if far longer time frames are available (millenia). But this is the best bet if you have to move it out of the way a little quicker than that.
Although mass extinction asteroids are quite rare, civilization-enders are somewhat more common, and ones nasty enough to ruin your whole day if they hit the wrong place (10 megatons) may occur as often as once a century (although more recent estimates put the frequency lower). We'd probably have a lot or warning on the mass extinction ones, but it would be nice to know about and be able to deflect or destroy the much smaller ones, too. So we need an improving capability to detect near earth objects, and we need to develop a range of responses for detected threats--slow and steady methods for big asteroids where we have plenty of warning, but also a quick-launch nuclear option for when we spy that 50-meter rock headed for the eastern seaboard.
A nuke would be good to break it into smaller pieces. But there is definately still a threat by these smaller pieces which also need to be destroyed. But whats really challenging is when the little alien saucers start shooting at you.
God spoke to me
main problem with sending nuclear waste and nukes with rockets up to space is that rockets may explode on their way up and then half of the globe would be contaminated.
thats the real reason that we are still storing our nuclear waste on earth when it would be much better to launch it into the orbit. its same thing with weapons. think about the rage among other countries it would provoke if usa sent nukes/waste into the orbit and rocket exploded on its way up and contaminated most of the earth surface...
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Think of how many insane cult and national leaders there have been in the past century alone. Now think of how many more we'll see in the next 100,000 years or so. I'd stick with the natural odds on this one.
Unfortunately, though, if this technology is possible, somebody is going to go ahead and develop it. Given human nature, there is no way to stop the proliferation of tempting new powers.
i can understand your point of view, but:
if a large impact - such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs - happens again, we're beat. No half way about it. However, if we get punished with a dozen impacts 1/12th the size of the original, we may only lose a few countries, maybe upwards of 20 or 30.
only to go back to your example - that devasting n-medium sized, will not cause the sun to be blocked from earth....whereas one huge impact may push enough sh** into the air causing us to croak.
isnt losing the sun the biggest problem that we, as a race, would fear from an impact? or are there other ramifications?
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
Uh Dude, I am NOT talking about nuclear bombs! Thats an entirely differnt thing. Nuclear Rockets are controlled reactions - where the thrust is highly focused and controlled. The exact opposite of a nuclear blast. A nuclear blast would obliterate the asteroid, a nuclear rocket would keep it entact and gently alter its trajectory.
Planet P - Liberationg Through Technology.
www.enthea.org
I just read the article (it's fun, you should all try it sometime), and one of the ideas that's being touted as a good alternative to nuking the asteriod is to basically paint one side of it.
The difference in energy absorbtion/radiation on the two sides of the 'roid could be enough to produce a bit of a push and take it out of harms way.
Now, what they failed to mention in the article, which I think pretty much sends this idea to the dumpster is: what if the asteriod is rotating? That would cancel out any pushing (unless you paint one of the "poles", I suppose, but who says that's the side you "want" to paint?). Or, at the least, it would push it in unpredictable ways, which isn't a good idea.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
And of course, when you do get a self-sufficient colony going somewhere else, they're going to have their own agenda. Sort of like Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, or longer term, Asimov's Foundation.
But... I offer two cliches that are none the less true:
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
All of these methods require one thing, however. Time. At least several decades warning.
Time is balanced with power. We need the power to get whatever solution where it needs to be in time to make a difference. More power yields less time. It also reduces the radius at which you must operate. With more power, you can make a trajectory difference closer to the sun.
Nuclear power in space is the best solution. Asside from proven rocket designs with higher specific impulses than chemical designs, nuclear can be used to power more exotic propulsion technologies. Where else are you going to get your mega watts? The whole effort should be co-ordinated with a push to colinize and exploit extra-terrestrial resources, and that is best accomplished with the portable power nuclear provides. More is better.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I disagree with your assertion that a barrier to colonization is 'social' problems, or capitalist issues, or attitude. If you build a road to Mars, people will walk it. Even if the only people that ever left were living in absolute misery, you would garner an enormous number of people. The idea of shaping a new colony is not one that comes around every day, either.
...
The attitude that "it doesn't benefit us now" is the same attitude that keeps people from buying insurance. One may never need insurance, but you can rest assured that if your house burns down, it is well worth it.
But extending that attitude to the existence of the human race, is obtuse to the point of being offensive. We have one chance, one single point of failure, one instance of probability defining the satisfaction of our continuation as a species. If we fail that dice roll, we all die. Forgive my presumption, but that warrants investigation. This dice does not have enough faces.
Your assumptions about large population, economical self sufficiency, and capitalism are not validated. Your assertion that people will not go is not qualified (it is evident from the colonization of the Americas that people desire to go into the unknown, as refected in the popularity of Star Trek and other similar exploration entertainment). If you don't want to go, that is ok. I assure you that other people may; it is not your place to belittle their opportunities. It may be your will to undermine the will of the continuation of the species through this means, but I suggest giving it more thought first.
You have not demonstrated that colonization is any less viable than the multi-generational solutions proposed by the NY Times, none of which solve the problem that Earth is a single point of failure.
For some reason, I am reminded of telephone sanitation workers
Again, when considering such things, you have to consider actual physics, namely the Law of Conservation of Energy. If a large asteroid were going to cause a 1MT explosion, but you break it into trillions of pieces, and all of them burn up in the atmosphere, 1MT worth of heat will be dissipated into the atmosphere. The only benefit of breaking the asteroid up would be that some or most of the pieces would miss Earth entirely, but that must be weighed against how much easier it is to predict the trajectory of one rock vs how hard it is to predict the trajectory of many small pieces that you might not be able to track with radar (seeing as how there are so many of them, you can't keep track).
This has already been covered on this topic.
Let's stop trying to figure out solutions for possible scenarios, and start building a world that's actually worth saving.
If the world is not worth saving why don't you just kill yourself? Seriously, this is not a troll or flamebait. I really want to know the answer. Why not?
Sports heros are paid millions of dollars a year... each... and most teachers are living hand to mouth.
Why don't you stop comparing apples to oranges? Due to union contracts, some teachers are extremely overpaid compared to others who get screwed. Why don't you fix that problem first? Teachers teach our children that once High School is over, your life is going to suck. Work is going to suck. The only thing you'll have to look forward to after the prom and the homecoming football game is the weekend on the couch with a beer and sports on TV. Nobody teaches children that a job can be fun. You wonder why people choose to give their money to athletes instead of teachers? Please, spare me. This is not a wealth redistribution problem like you imply. It's a social engineering problem, and any solution will take generations to work. If you treat it as some moral injustice you'll just perpetuate the cycle or move the problem elsewhere.
Doctors are taught never to identify with the person behind the disease they're treating.
I fail to see how this is bad. Would the world be a better place if all of our doctors were clinically depressed and in institutions after a few years of service? Due to human nature our society depends on objectivity to survive. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions. Sometimes an individual has to be sacraficed for the good of the many. Sometimes you just can't save sombody. It sucks, but that's life. You have to distance yourself at a personal level from the reality if you want to maintain your sanity and continue to make good decisions.
Racism is rampant, keeping certain people from getting ahead just because of where their family comes from. In Ireland, people are killed over how to worship the same god.
Hard work can solve this problem? I doubt it. We've worked at it hard for centuries. These problems will not go away until people are willing to throw away their culture. Ironically, the same people who are interested in seeing problems like this solved are the same types of people who go out of their way to preserve cultures that are dying. Racial and religious barriers that have been overcome have been overcome at the expense of the culture of both sides. I think it's a great tradeoff, but do you? Does everybody?
In China, female children are thrown in the river because of a phallocentric ideology.
Here's another one where you have to make a choice between forgetting a culture to save lives, or preserving our history. No, you can't do both. Does the answer seem so obvious anymore? How many lives would be lost to get people who are so bound to cultural expectations that they would drown their own child to abandon that culture?
Now that I've been antagonizing you, here's the real point. Even with all those problems, do we still need to give up on stopping big rocks from killing us? Aren't there enough people on this planet such that plenty of people can work on all the problems? Can we a s a society persue multiple goals at the same time? If not, why not tackle the problems we know we can find an answer to (moving big rocks) while we're still coming to terms with the realities of the problems that don't have answers everybody will agree with (see above).
While the probabilities may be small, this is the only event that could result in the extinction of our species. I disagree. There are a number of events that could eliminate the human race, along with pretty much all life on earth: Sun going Nova Supernova Black Hole passing close by The moon's orbit getting interrupted, and crashing into the earth. Virii Earth's core exploding, etc. This brings up another point, are we worried about a large asteroid hitting the moon and fragmenting it or changing it's orbit? How likely is it?
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
Or better yet, what's a Far Hit?
I think of a near miss as a miss that was close enough to be scary. A far miss is like passing by at a safe distance.
It sounds like you are/he is treating "Near" as "Nearly" or "Almost". I think of "Near" as close distance.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
...at least any current nuclear weapon, it would seem.
The problem with nukes in space is that chemical explosive blocks are used to create the pressure required for the fission chain reaction, whether U235 or Pu. This is the spark plug for the fusion reaction that any large weapon (> 100kt) would need. You'd have to design a system that created those same conditions without using a chemical explosive, or alternatively provide a pressurized compartment where an atmosphere would exist capable of sustaining the explosion.
Then again, I am not a physicist (IANAP?) so maybe someone smarter than me can comment on this seeming problem.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
An observatory in Florida can see all but about %10 of the sky. (One in Equadore could see everything)
The big problem is, no-one on this planet can see anything coming from the sun. We could easily get hit on our blind side.
My solution is to get some freaking people on a nother planet. NOW.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
There is a chance that something will happen to the earth that will kill everyone on it. Asteroid/War/Biological being the prime candidates. There is nothing we can do to reduce the probability to zero.
What we CAN do is get a self sustaining colony on another planet. I wish we could come up with a way to convince more people of this, and impress the implications of not doing it.
I would like to see all religious activity funneled into the work needed to make this off-earth colony happen. It's not that I think religion is bad, I just think it is so much more important to preserve our species than to worship a possible creator/creators of it.
Instead of "thou shall not work on the Sabbath" we should have "thou shall work on off-earth colonization on the Sabbath." If the whole of humanity dedicated it's resources to making this happen, it would happen.
M@
Krispy Cream is people