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Planetary Defense: Protecting Earth from Asteroids
securitas writes "Space.com has published a feature about developing a planetary defense against catastrophic comet and asteroid impacts. The story arises from the aptly named 'Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids' held in California February 23-26. The article discusses potential methods to prevent an impact, the need for study missions to comets and asteroids, the to-date haphazard approach to monitoring Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and the NASA/US Air Force Spaceguard Survey, which aims to discover and track 90% of 'Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with a diameter greater than 0.6 miles (1-kilometer) by 2008.' Some ideas for anti-impact technologies to develop include gas blasts, nuclear detonations, ramming microsatellites, lasers, mass drivers and gravitational tractor beams. The most disturbing message from the conference? 'It may take a celestial body hit to Earth' before governments take any meaningful steps to address this danger. Mirror at USA Today."
Not sure about everyone else, but humans as a whole we have many more earth bound issues that require our attention. Famine, disease, and war are way more important, and require more of our attention.
> The most disturbing message from the conference? 'It may take a celestial body hit to Earth' before governments take any meaningful steps to address this danger.
Just like every other problem?
And even then, it isn't so much likely to be "meaningful" as to be "just enough to convince the public we're doing something about it".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
None of our earth-borne problems are going to make one whit of difference if an asteroid hits us.
There won't be a welfare problem anymore, because there won't be anyone left to be on welfare.
Jim
Risks of dying in car: 1 in 100
Risks of dying in plane:1 in 20,000
Risks of dying from asteroid 1 in 20,000 to 100,000
Source
May I just get somebody to help me pay off my student loans and make sure that there is enough social security to cover my health when I get old?
AC
To be completely flippant (and yes, I do realize there is a risk, I just think it is relatively low) ... boring! I just hope this doesn't turn into another cause where misguided celebrities drive us into spending money on it disproportionally like certain trendy diseases.
Just to be pessimistic; I'm sure if anyone ever manage to agree on some way to protect the earth from celestial bodies, it will be in the form of some weapon that is capable of destroying the whole planet before anything else can hit it.
Ruthless men control the weapon's industry, and the weapon's industry controls the money that goes to persuade the desicion makers.
It would be better, at least more senisble, to let the heavenly bodies decide our fate, than these fellows.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It would be a cosmic joke for us to have made it these past hundreds of thousands of slow years, only to be wiped out by a dumb rock in the next ~30 years or so that matter most in our evolution to post-humanity.
--
Power to the Peaceful
why should we realistically expect an end to famine, disease, war? They've been with us throughout history. Man has always wished to eliminate these woes -- yes they keep getting worse and worse.
This is an idiotic, self-perpetuating argument. Just because something is, and has been for a long time, does not mean it is an unchangeable truth.
In this particular instance, consider this: the world is rapidly changing and is not the same as, say, during the Roman Empire, yet there is a lot of residual ideologies and beliefs left over from those times. They are not set in stone, however...do not mistake them for "human nature." There have been a lot of improvements to the world that should not be overlooked (civil rights movement, etc).
There are some people who are interested in actualizing change in the world. Some have even written down their thoughts about it.
Here's the gameplan: control Earth from space. How to do it: pretend to protect against asteroids while developing an offensive strike capability. Explore near earth asteroids. Capture one. Guide it around the sun. Hurl it back to earth and drop it on your enemy. Instant population control.
You know what's insignificant in the grand scheme of things? The amount of time humans have been on this planet. So far, the earth hasn't been destroyed by a planet-killing meanie, and neither have any of the other planets in our solar system. Assuming we'll be around another 10 or 20 thousand years, do you really think there's that much danger we're going to be hit with something in the next 50 years when we haven't been hit with something in MILLIONS of years?
Jesus H Christ. Leave it to humans to think the world would end as soon as they came into existance. And leave it to their egos to think they could do anything about it.
What should be considered is the probability that an asteroid large enough to destroy the human race will hit the earth. I think such a thing is, needless to say, pretty astronomical. (When was the last time a big one hit? Back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth maybe?)
All these articles about impending doom -- asteroids, earthquakes, pandemics, etc. -- give one the idea that because we've gone a long time without one of these things happening, the chance that we'll have an occurrance is increasing. That shows a basic misunderstanding of probability. If you toss a fair coin and get heads 50 times in a row, the probability of getting heads the next time is still 50%.
We're not 'running out of time' just because we've gone a long time without a major impact. The chance of a major impact this year is exactly the same as it has been in each of the last million years.
This is an idiotic, self-perpetuating argument.
No more so than the "we should feed the entire planet, cure every disease, and end war before we work on anything else" argument that the original post regurgitated.
That argument is a tar baby - it's designed to attract people in and then get them stuck working on things that haven't been resolved for, what, six thousand years of human society?
Obviously all three of those things are noble goals, but as I've said before, putting other things (like asteroid defence, or space exploration in general) aside until they are taken care of is like me saying "I'm going to wait to have kids until I've got a seven-figure salary, three cars, and a mansion." It could happen, but the probability is so low that it's not worth considering. I will probably be dead of old age before that happens, just like the human race will probably be dead by asteroid impact (or other cause) before we resolve the three issues someone always mentions in this type of discussion.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Anyway saying there are more important issues suggest you have a rather naive view of the world. We can put a man on the moon so why has noone stood on the bottom of the ocean? We can grow oranges in sweden so why can't we grow grain in the sahara?
Because we can do one thing doesn't mean we can do something else even if it sounds similar. And this is just with technilogical changes. Your disease example is just like that.
Hunger is a completly different problem from stopping a piece of rock (or indeed curing a disease). Most people here could probably draw up a plan or two to stop a small asteroid. Now try to do the same thing with hunger.
Smart people, caring people, good people have tried and failed. There are countless farming projects that have failed miserable. Hunger is a problem of human nature. And so far noone has been able to change it. Simple fact is that there would be no hunger in africa if africans learned to work together. They don't, each time a country slightly gets up it starts a war or is dragged into one. Europe did the same but we had better climate that allowed us to feed ourselves even when fighting a war. Africa and other hunger stricken regions do not have that luxury. They need constant peace to bring enough food in. We all seen farm aid. Do you know people are still starving in ethiopia? Why? Lack of food? WRONG. There is food. Plenty. Africa exports food. Until you solved that puzzle you can't even begin to think of a solution to solve hunger.
Stopping an asteroid is simple a tech and money problem. You can draw blueprints for the first and taxation for the latter. Stopping hunger requires us to change human nature. Tech has come a long way in the last few thousand years but are we as people really all that different from 5000 years or more ago?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
But the problem is that whenever we solve a problem our standards for what the world should be like increase. So we keep finding more problems. If we wait until we have solved all of the problems on earth before developing space technology then we never will.
I think one thing that is interesting is how the movie industry already touched upon this. Quite often the movie industry because of their ability to think outside of the box is able to come up with scenarios that ordinarily wouldnt be thought of or addressed.
Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle.
It's a good read. Hollywood tends to regurgitate things that taste better when eaten fresh.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
My only concern is that must of what's on the table for "anti-asteroid" technology is, not surprisingly, the same technology being proposed for "US military domination of space". If it weren't for the recent Bush/Rumsfeld/PNAC/Iraq shenanigans I might give the government the benefit of the doubt. However, I'm dubious about this whole concept.
I think that humans should focus on getting off this planet. There are millions of earth-like worlds out there, just waiting for us. As long as we're stuck here on Earth, we have all our eggs in one basket.
Personally, I think that this will happen in my lifetime. With nanotech gaining speed, it won't be long before the first space elevator is built. That technology will facilitate space-based research in biosphere technologies: hydroponics, solar energy, and efficient recycling.
I don't doubt that an asteroid would collide with Earth. Hopefully the inhabitants of the planet won't be at war at the time and will be able to properly respond to the threat and prevent the destruction of humanity's birthplace. But by that time, I imagine humans will be living in hundreds of worlds - still at war with each other, but not vulnerable to a single asteroid.
We should actually try to blow up or divert a real near earth asteroid so we know which strategy works and which is a waste of effort. That way, when (not if) the real situation arises we will know what to do.
But we don't know what causes asteroids to wander our way, only that it hapens on a semi periodic basis. Perhaps as we orbit the galaxy we come accros regions with more gravitational distortions that are more likely to send stuff hurtling inwards from the oort cloud. Perhaps there is a misterious 10th planet that goes through a dense part of the oort cloud. Perhaps....
Anything that makes the system non-memoryless (i.e. statefull) and makes the events more periodic than random allows us to say that given no events so far, the probability of an event in the near future is greater/has gone up. (Extreme example: We arrive in london at some random time and don't have a watch. The fact that Big Ben hasn't rung in the last 40 minutes allows us to state that it will ring 'soon' with greater certanty than the fact it hasn't rung in the last 10.)
Of couse the fact that an asteroid doesn't hit in just one year makes the already small probability change for the next year only by an infentesmal ammount. I.e. a change of 1/50000000 --> 1/49999999 or even smaller.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Your both wrong actually.
Stats although a purely mathematical concept of probability, is very different when measuring a event such as an asteroid strike.
Probaility of an event is only one issue.
True, we have wars constantly going on, and will continue, but they do not wipe out humanity or even 90% of life on earth.
I think, very few people understand what we are talking about really when we talk about asteroid impacts.
Why? Well, because the event unleashes energies we have no experience with. Energies that by there very nature represent the hand of God in many ways.
Even if we were to build 10,000's of SS20 missiles, widely known as bastards of human minds ability to detroy, and detonated them all at once. It would pale in comparison to some of the impacts that have happened historically in the fossil record.
So when we talk about mathematical probability, with respect to action, it is foolish to think that a x in x chance over 10000 years represents an asteroid impact and it is very low on the risk scale.
True, probability tells us, and so does the fossil record, that this risk is low from year to year.
But unlike a full nuclear war, which has never happened by the way, this probability is deavious in its ways that calm the mind, into complacency.
Unlike nuclear war, we actually do have proof of no less than 4 major events that have hacked the tree of life on this planet to its stump.
We know it is a singular event, and once it happens 80-90% of all life stands no chance against it.
This kind of probability is different than plane crashes, nuclear war or even floods or earthquakes. We have nothing really, to compare it too.
So, you cannot weigh the outcome of such an event simply by talking about the numbers, you need to look at the evidence, fossil records, you need to look at the mathematics or stats.
I would fly in a plane with a 1 and 10,000 chance that it would crash, but I would NEVER bet my species survival in a 1 10,000 bet with ANYONE.
In fact, that is something I would NEVER bet with ANY ODDS, not even a 1 in a googleplex.
I hope I am making myself clear.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.