Slashdot Mirror
Request for Cosmic Collision Insurance
HobbySpacer writes "According to this article a group of distinguished citizens has sent an open letter to Congress, the President, and other world leaders to request that they begin a serious program to protect the planet from the possible impact of a comet or asteroid. The petitioners include Freeman Dyson, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, Neil Tyson (Director of the Hayden Planetarium) and others. They say that for "the first time in human history, we have the potential to protect ourselves from a catastrophe of truly cosmic proportions." A three phase program is urged that includes detection, exploration, and contingency planning. See the full letter at www.CongressNEOaction.org"
about 20 years ago i read a blurb in the newspaper where this man slipped on his front poarch and fell into his rosebush and somehow a branch went into his throat and he choaked to death. a very unusual occurence to say the least. but i think this is more likely(no i did not crunch the numbers) than someone or vast numbers being killed by outerspace junk crashing to earth and causing wide spread destruction. i think we should spend our resourses on things like aides in africa. dealing with lost nuclear weapons or stupid politicians going to war and invading sovereign nations wasting billions of dollars and causing vast destruction for some asinine reason that no one understands. it seems to me when 5000 kids die everyday from diarrhea for lack of clean water and a couple of dollars worth of antibiotics then should we really spend a lot of resources on a possible cataclysm from space? let us face it--a million years from now the human race will be extinct--whether any life in existence then is our ancestors or not doesn't concern me very much. let us pass this ecosphere onto our children in better shape than we inherited it from our partents and let chicken little worry about the sky falling!
flowerbear adrift on a sea of confusion since 1958 flowerbear@phreaker.net FORTRAN programers don't eat quiche!!
Forget Congress. They're asking for an increase of less than 17 million/year! Come on, how many Slashdot readers are there ... we could almost pull off that much money ourselves.
You'd think out of the 7 billion on the planet, at least 17 million of us (less than half a percent) would care enough to pitch in a dollar a year. I'm in for my buck.