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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.
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.
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.
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.
And please forward this to 20 of your closest friends.
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.
Good thing too. Nuclear weapons in space might someday be used to turn it into a sterile environment filled with deadly radiation which would be unsurvivable to anyone not wearing a special protective suit.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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
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."
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
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).