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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."
Nature's "reset" switch for Earth. Sometimes you just need to stop what yer doin' and reboot. 'At's what I say.
(although "near hits" would be more accurate)
Gotta love George Carlin:
Speaking of potential mishaps, here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if two planes almost collide it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss.
[WHAM! CRUNCH!]
"Look, they nearly missed!"
"Yes, but not quite."
-- Dr. Eldarion --
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'm reminded of an episode of Stargate SG1 (Failsafe) when Anubis sent an asteroid towards Earth.
"O'Neill: I've seen this movie, it hits Paris."
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
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 wonder if this is something we should really be focusing time and energy on. You know, there are, at a minimum, eight other planets in this solar system that we should investigate - maybe not colonize, maybe not exploit for mineral or chemical (gas or liquid) resources; but we should look at with humans - not robots. I think we'd gain considerable real insight if we looked beyond our terrestrial sphere.
But then again; don't we have a few major telescopes in orbit; and thousands more both professional and personal (like mine) on the surface? Shouldn't we be able to note anything on an obvious trajectory here and consider our options at that point? Maybe not; I have no experience in that sort of 'ballistics' thinking and perhaps there are far too many objects in our sky to track any that might cause us serious damage.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
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
Frankly, what really worries me - and what the article really fails to address - is the fact that while there are a few programs going on in the Northern Hemisphere, there's not much happening with our buddies in the Southern Hemisphere - that means half the sky isn't really being covered well.
On another note, who wants to bet that in the event we had, say, 50 years warning, the politicians would be utterly unwilling to do anything about it for at least 48 years?
I'm the stranger...posting to
What about the new national security solution by Pres. Bush that would create a Multi Yield -- Asteriod Security Shield (MYASS)?
That should take care of the problems with Asteroids...
S
Damn straight. Just Form Blazing Sword and the day is saved! Screw the lions... go straight to the sword.
My sig sucks.
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.
You can't test a nuclear weapon in space - there are treaties that regulate this sort of thing, and they say space has to stay demilitarized. That means no nukes - that's one of the reasons, other than the horrible amount of radioactive pollution, that the Orion project never really took off. For better or worse, the only test we'll get is when there's actually an asteroid on the way to Earth.
I'm the stranger...posting to
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?
Nuclear weapons in space act very differently from those in air. To my knowledge, there's never been a detonation in "deep" space: I believe there was a test in low Earth orbit once, but immediately after that the Outer Space treaty was signed (which banned nuclear detonations in space, among other things). The real difference is that a nuclear weapon in space discharges most of its energy in the form of radiation; because there's no air, there's no shockwave. While the radiation would wreak all sorts of havoc with electronic equipment, e.g. satellites, would it cause an asteroid to break up? I'm skeptical. Does anyone know if someone has thought about this question?
By the title, I thought this was an "Ask Slashdot" post...
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
That aside unless you break up the pieces into very small bits they're gonna impact and n-medium sized craters is worse then ~1 big crater. Or, absolutely devastating some large radius is better then pretty-much devastating a number of somewhat smaller radiuses.
By the way - the worst? Ocean impact. Then you're not just talking an air blast and punching a hole into the surface with some ejecta spraying but doing all of that while vaporizing some megatons of water - much worse on a global scale.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
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
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.
Clearly, the pointdexter astrophysicists who offered this opinion have never seen Armageddon.
People seem to assume that ANY piece that hits the earth will be the end. If you break a moderate-sized asteroid into small pieces, OF COURSE some will hit. And, possibly all the little pieces that hit will burn up in the atmosphere. Of the pieces that do hit, the damage would be MUCH more tolerable.
It all depends on the situation. If something the size of the moon were to suddenly aim itself at the earth, no amount of nukes would help. But a 1km piece of rock travelling at 25km/sec (which would probably poke a nice hole in the Earth's crust and kill us all) could be blown into 1000 pieces, 10% of which would hit the earth and take out a city block if it hit a city, I'll still vote for the nukes.
Then again, maybe it's like choosing between being shot with a big rifle or a shotgun. There's only one way to know for sure...and I'll take a pass, thank you very much.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
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.
Think about an asteroid of a significant size, something on the order of some percent points of Earth's size. Now, if you break such a beast without making sure all pieces will miss (that is, that your bomb will not only break it, but break in such a way that its resultant angular momentum will change drastically), you have just increased the chance that not one, but two or three asteroids with enough mass to destroy civilisation will hit the planet.
I've always wondered something about this line of reasoning. Everytime I see an argument against the nuclear option, there seems to be an assumption of using only one device. I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to use several devices to disperse an asteroid around our planet? For example, the first device is launched, then after a bit of a lag, say a few days, a second is launched, wash, rinse, repeate.
My thought is that we could start by fragmenting the object. Then, using a string of devices, both slow and deflect the resultant cloud of matter. In the article they stated that using a nuclear blast near an object, but not on it, to try and push the object off course would probably fail, since the object would absorb the energy. But would this hold true if the object was fragmented? Each piece would be eaiser to move, and most likely, the "cloud", if you will, would have more surface area to be hit by the blast, assuming the same distance from the center of the explosion, more energy would be transfered to the "cloud" than would have been to the object.
Ideally, if you have a year or so of warning, and you launch with a 1 day delay between devices, you could probably put 100 or so devices on the object before it reached the Earth. and basically set up a poor man's orion drive for the object, or resultant "cloud". What are the possible failings of this idea?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
We had a guy at a place I worked at that was really worried about an asteroid hit. I got some of the people there to knock up a spoof BBC News home page, with a really big story that the end of the world was only about 36 hours away, and added a little tiny weeny DNS entry pointing at the box that was hosting the "site", and waited.
;)
Oh the laughter from the IT dept...
Get your own free personal location tracker
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.
The Solution to preventing an asteroidal impact, assuming time is scarce, is a nuclear rocket. The technology for this was already developed way back in the 1960's, and was shut down for obvious reasons. If an asteroid was going to hit us in less than a year without any prior warning, a massive campaign could get a nuclear rocket launched and into space within 6 months. I haven't done the precise astrodynamic calculations, but the factors are - mass of asteroid, time to left to impact, and specific impulse of nuclear rocket. The higher the specific impulse the less time or large the asteroid can be.
Keep in mind that even if the asteroid was only a month away from impact and it was heading our way at 7 miles per second, that means that the asteroid would be 18.1 Millions miles away, which means that the angle of its trajectory would only have to be diverted by less than 1/1000th of a degree. A moderately size nuclear rocket could easily divert an asteroid of 1-2 miles in diameter in plenty of time to divert the disaster.
Planet P - Liberation Through Technology.
www.enthea.org
NASA has a pretty good website that talks about "near-earth objects" (comets/asteroids with orbits that bring them close to earth). They even have a page detailing the current impact risks.
Fortunately, only one of them is meriting significant attention. I guess we're safe for a little while then.
What about the new national security solution by Pres. Bush...
Unfortunately, unless the asteroid has ties to Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, Bush won't be interested.
Yet Another Web Site
Come on people, it's obvious that the only real workable solution in the forseable future is nukes. Of course the tricky part is detonation at the appropriate time. Afterall, we're talking about a closure rate that is incredible (100k+ km/hr?).
Those who claim that the smaller pieces will be just as destructive as the whole are stopping the scenario short. You don't just shoot and hit with one or more at the same time. Over some amount of time you continously hit it with nukes, breaking the smaller pieces into still smaller until the pieces are either too small to do massive damage or blow out of our path.
In my opinion, all of these exotic solutions are a waste of time and money. Hell, at this point even the nuke solution isn't very feasible and considering the chances of being hit not a very good way to spend money.
I've recently applied for patents on various technologies to eliminate or deviate asteroids on an intercept course with Earth.
If anyone should attempt to use those devices to save the Earth, I will promptly send a horde of evil barbarian lawyers with a cease and desist order.
You can't save your punny planet now... I've used your own vices against you!
My minions at the patent office have served me well on this day.
cylix,
The Lord of Evil and Terror
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Let's test it on the moon! Wicked cool!
It may not alter the tragectory of the asteroid, but it would probably make the asteroid less noticable, in the "if a tree falls in the woods, but nobody hears it, does it make a sound" sense.
Chalk one up for the nuclear age!
Next problem, please.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
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.
... has once again predicted the future. In The Hammer of God, he laid out an entire scenario for just this "gentle push" method.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Announce that the asteroid has decided to pursue an Open Source solution to its software needs. The mass migration of Linux Hippies to said asteroid should be enough to alter its trajectory.
If an additional course corrections are required, announce one of the following:
1) A security hole has been found in IE
2) Ellen Fiess will make another Apple commercial
3) Microsoft buys the rights to Ogg Forbis
The resulting explusion of hot air should be sufficent.
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
Rather than pushing it to the side or destroying it, couldn't we just speed it up, so it passes through the intersection point BEFORE earth gets there? Physicist replies are welcome, all others please stand aside for the people with knowledge.
It's obvious you don't know the law of conservation of mass.
It's also obvious that you've never seen the video of the exploding whale.
Here's a hint... if you start off with an 8 ton whale, and you blow it up, you end up with 8 tons of whale parts! Asteroids also follow this simple rule.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
The author conveniently omitted this
1979 technology that has been safely used to defend against both asteroids and alien vessels for 23 years.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
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).
The effect you are thinking of is called the Yarkovsky effect. The asteroid must rotate for it to come about. What happens is that the afternoon side of the asteroid, having been exposed to the sun longer, is warmer than the morning side and so it radiates more energy, mostly infrared, into space than the morning side. Obviously, the asteroid must rotate for there to be a morning side and a afternoon side.
How this small net force affects the asteroid's orbit depends on the orientation and direction of the asteroid's spin axis. From this month's Astronomy magazine: If the spin goes one way, Yarkovsky thrust adds to the orbital speed and the asteroid moves outward, away from the sun. If the asteroid rotates the other way, Yarkovsky thrust slows the asteroid's orbital velocity, and it draws closer to the sun.
"Painting" the asteroid with a material to alter its absorption and re-radiation of solar energy is very likely to be the most cost-effective method for altering an asteroid's orbit. It may even be the most practical method, assuming that we have enough time to allow the small change in thrust to alter the orbit enough to cause a miss.
There is an asteroid that is a very likely candidate for this treatment. 1950 DA was discovered and lost over 50 years ago, but was recovered on Dec 31, 2000, and was recognized as the long lost asteroid soon afterwards. With a 50-year basline to work with, its orbit was found to be in 11 to 5 resonance with Earth, which has the effect of making predictions reliable out to several hundred years. In the year 2641, the resonance will begin to decompose, sending the asteroid into a more chaotic phase of its orbital evolution. But the reliability holds long enough for scientists to recognize that there is a 1 in 300 chance of 1950 DA striking the Earth in the year 2880. This is the highest chance of collision ever estimated for any asteroid, and due to the resonance effects, it is considered very reliable.
So sometime during the next 900 years or so, we will probably have to decide that an attempt to alter its orbit is necessary. The sooner we act, the more likely we will succeed. 1950 DA is about 1.1 km in diameter, which would directly destroy an area the size of Wisconsin upon impact, and cause widespread devastation over a continent-wide area. But as little as a few tons of white chalk spread over one hemisphere could alter the Yarkovsky effect enough to change its orbit sufficiently over the next few centuries to complete avert any chance of impact.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Legislation is often not founded in science, but in popular opinion. You better come up with some good reasons, not just state history.
I still argue that one or two a-bombs launched from a remote location with limited tonnage directed towards some properly sized space-rocks is a very acceptable risk if we are to assess technology that could potentially save the entire planet. There isn't much chance that the bombs would go off accidentally while in the atmosphere, and there isn't much chance we will experience an extintion level event.
The devil is in the details. There isn't much radioactive material in a modern a-bomb - a few kg IIRC. Even less if it's an H-bomb. That is the reason why a nuclear meltdown at a nuclear reactor is such a major disaster - since there potentially is more radioactive material to be dispersed at such a site than there is inside of a bomb.
Stop the brainwash
You would probably want to know what those trajectories were before launching your second nuke, and those are going to be hard to predict.
I agree, this could be a problem. Though you will have a vague idea of where the bits are going to go. You would be able to expect that they would all follow the trajectory of the original object, though modified slightly due to the explosion.
The object of the follow-up devices wouldn't be to hit pieces individually, but mearly to explode near the remaining pieces and push them into a safer trajectory. As such, I think you could simply explode them at a "best guess" location, maybe also have a bit of fuel on them for manuvering to make last minute corrections.
Also, this doesn't need to be an exact science really. if it misses us by 1000 miles, or a million miles it won't make a huge difference, as long as it misses.
Also, we could withstand the impact of a dozen or so Tunguska sized impacts, they would suck, no doubt, but if we could just get the vast majority of the mass of the object to miss us it would save lots of lives. Though I still would agree with the article, it would be nice, if we had enough warning, to use a non-nuclear approch. I'm thinking more of the short term warning.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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
It's very simple. We need a ship. A ship the shape of a triangle. This ship should be of simple control. Forward movement and rotation only! A single gun capable of halving (on occasion trifurcating) any size asteroid will be mounted on the front. When it has halved the pieces to a significantly small size, they will disappear upon further assault. This ship will also be fitted with a shielding system. Pulling down on the joystick or using a separate button system should activate a circular shield capable of withstanding a certain period of collision with objects, regardless of frequency. In future revisions of this vehicle, we will include a hyperwarp feature to jump out of harms way (unfortunately, technology will not allow us to determine the point of reentry, making this a daunting choice for the pilot).
Finally, be sure to look out for ellusive UFOs with hostile aliens ready to destroy our ship (regardless of its peaceful intentions of saving our planet).
I distinctly remember training many hours on the simulator for this solution not twenty years ago. I don't know why we're worried about this problem seeing as we already have the solution.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
We probably couldn't do the whole thing anyway. Whoever patents "Bodies of rocky material orbiting larger bodies of rocky material in a vacuum" would demand outrageous license fees.
5 to 7 KT does this ...crater diameter of 408 m depth of 100 m nuclear detonations produce disapointing crater, rest assured that 10 to 14 million pounds of TNT would have made a much larger hole in the dirt.
The reason for this is when an nuclear device is detonated, the primary effect is a burst of Gamma radiation. Air absorbs the gamma, and re-radiates X-rays a little cooler until eventualy the radiation drops in color to infra-red. The distance from the center to when the black-body color temp drops to infra-red is called the fireball.
Dirt or astroid is much more opaque so the results are less. In space there is no air to speak of so what you'd have to do is detonate a ways off the surface so an area is irradiated with gamma, heats up and vaporizes a way giving a push from the mass of the vapors expelled by the astroid. This method might be best if the astroid is heading at us and has a high closing velocity, because time would be short.
If the astroid was coming from "behind" and closing slower, a reactor powering an engine place on the surface would be much more do able. It would be cool in such a case to place it in a parking orbit, hollow it out and make one whooper of a space-station out of it.
I've had a fantasy of catching an iron-nickle astroid, heating it up with a parabolic reflector and sunlight and inflating it like a glass-blower would.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"We have one chance, one single point of failure, one instance of probability defining the satisfaction of our continuation as a species."
Well, no. We have only one planet, true, but a planet is a BIG place, it can take a *lot* of damage before it becomes uninhabitable by people. Even if a dinosaur-killer sized asteroid actually hit the planet and ruined the environment and sent us into a new and terrible ice age, we would still have huge amounts of water (later, water ice), oxygen, trace elements, metals, fissile materials (power source) available. In other words, even a post-apocalyptic Earth would have more resources and be more survivable than, say, a domed Mars colony with only very limited supplies of the above items - and it's also worth pointing out that building an airtight shelter than can filter the crap out of the surrounding air is a hell of a lot easier than building an airtight shelter than needs its own self-sufficient air supply, AND has to deal with radiation hazards from the thin Martian atmosphere (I'm assuming mars would be the first choice for a colony), AND deal with the fact that in the event of a breach, you won't have contaminants slowly leaking in - you'll have your air rushing out fast.
The Earth is vulnerable to an extent, yes. But it's so well-suited to human life that even a terrible cataclymic asteroid impact would leave it more habitable, and a better choice for the future residence of the human race, than anyplace else in the solar system.
"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"
Well, no. People did not colonize or even explore the Americas for the joy of it - they were looking for gold, or trade routs, or native to indoctrinate and/or enslave. Their mission wasn't "to boldly go where no man has gone before", it was "To boldly go, get rich (or at least get a better life, or religious freedom), and bring glory to the Crown and god". People do NOT abandon their homes for a whimsical love of the unknown, they leave because "the grass is greener...". And their ain't no freaking grass anywhere but Earth.
"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."
Excuse me? I didn't mean to belittle any "opportunities" - if the opportunity should someday arise, and people decide against all logic to colonize other worlds, good for them. I wish them nothing but good. I do, however, doubt very much that this will happen, for reasons already discussed.
"You have not demonstrated that colonization is any less viable than the multi-generational solutions proposed by the NY Times"
I'm sorry, I should have made the point more clear - but I DID mention that the nytimes ideas use technology we either have now, or could reasonably be expected to have fairly soon. Yes, these are multigenerational solutions, but the issue with colonization isn't time. It's social issues, and to a lesser extent, technology. Building a ship that can sustain life for hundreds or thousands of passengers for months would be *hard* - and please, do not talk to me about suspended animation until it actually exists.
I'm the stranger...posting to
The American space program has, literally, been going in circles for the last 30 years. It desperately needs someplace to go. Now, it looks like NASA is going to keep the shuttle flying for another decade or so, and pull out the old DynaSoar blueprints for a re-do. And where will it go? Well, around in circles for a few days when it ferries new crew members up to the space station.
But, building the capability to send people to investigate and deal with an asteriod or comet that has Earth in its sights would give NASA a place to go. If we don't have the courage to develop an interplanetary capability to ward off armageddon, maybe we don't deserve to survive.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"