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."

Comments

Low priority?

[ajiva]

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.

Re:Low priority?

[YouHaveSnail]

But how important will famine, disease, and war be when 90% of the population has been wiped out by a massive asteroid and the effects after the collision?

When, or if? It's probably true that a major impact is a near certainty. But what's the time frame for that kind of certainty? 1000 years? 10,000 years?

On the other hand, the probability for significant famine, disease, and war is 100%. That is, those things are all happening, right now. And it seems that there's a very strong chance that these problems will get worse in the near future.

I don't know about you, but I'll take a 0.01% chance that an asteroid will land on my county over a 5% chance that SARS or HIV or some drug resistant bird flu will do me in prematurely.

Re:Low priority?

[Free_Meson]

When, or if? It's probably true that a major impact is a near certainty. But what's the time frame for that kind of certainty? 1000 years? 10,000 years?

It will happen -- the question is not whether or not an asteroid will hit the earth and whack us back to rats and cockroaches again, the question is whether we'll still be here when it happens, in some shape or form of an organized society. The risk of dying of an asteroid impact is also very small, but because so many people would die as a result of such an impact the risk in terms of total lives is large compared to other, far better funded projects (like earthquake/volcano prediction and mitigation which, in the U.S., costs taxpayers ~$50M per probabilistic death).

On the other hand, the probability for significant famine, disease, and war is 100%. That is, those things are all happening, right now. And it seems that there's a very strong chance that these problems will get worse in the near future.

Great. any ideas on how to address those problems, or will you just use those problems to make an excuse for not addressing a less likely but much more dangerous hazard? An asteroid is far more likely to put an end to the american way of life than famine or disease. A significant thermonuclear exchange could do the job, as could hundreds of years of economic shifts and global warming, but these are problems that don't effect the U.S. and have no tenable solution.

On Famine: A bunch of people live in an environment where it is impossible to grow their own food and they lack the industrial capacity to be able to afford to import food, so they're starving. It sucks. The U.S. does send aide, but this is not a problem that will be solved by spending -- these people either need to die, move, or find a way to feed themselves because spending billions on some sort of global foodstamps program is not a solution to famine -- just like icing down someone with a fever does nothing to help them defeat the infection that is causing the fever, feeding the foodless will only create more foodless while destroying the global market for food. The problem is not, by the way, that there isn't enough food, just that these people can't afford to buy it and/or won't accept american surplus. It's an economic and distributive problem and, while there is no good philosophical reason to let anyone starve, the economic, practical reasons are the ones that keep you (gainfully employed 1st-world citizen) from starving by keeping the farmers employed.

On Disease: People die. tough beans, that's the way it is. Some diseases are horrendous and terrible, and AIDS in Africa and southeast Asia is horrible, but again there is no good solution to the problem and in many cases these diseases are attacking areas already massively overpopulated, undernourished, and poor. Do the poor deserve to live long, fulfilling lives just as much as the rich? Yes. Should the rich be forced to shorten their lives in order to lengthen the lives of the poor? No. This is the choice -- compell pharmaceutical companies to deliver drugs to third world countries at bottom dollar rates only to have a large portion of those drugs, sold at or below cost (with govt subsidies in the latter case) dumped into the profitable markets. What happens then? Nobody gets the drugs because the ROI disappears. We already give free AIDS medications to many patients in africa, for example, but many of those with the disease sell some of their doses back to american individuals and/or continue to have unprotected sex with uninfected individuals, spreading the disease and allowing it to build resistance to our drugs.

Disease is a fact of life, and seeking to somehow eliminate it is an unrealistic goal. Nevertheless, the U.S. spends massive amounts of money on every sort of disease -- I doubt there's a disease out there that a qualified individual couldn't get federal dollars to research. Medicine has advanced a g

Yep.

[Black Parrot]

> 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".

Famine, Poverty, Disease...

[jim_deane]

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

Perspective

[BoldAC]

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

I'd say it's overblown except

[Daniel Quinlan]

that almost nobody is really taking this seriously, so the lack of interest in space defense seems about right to me. The human species has survived 2 million years without going the way of the dinosaur. It seems like there are many reasons to not stress out about this:

• Low risk/reward ratio, public money is much better spent elsewhere. If someone else wants to spend their money on this, more power to them.
• Our technology is very rapidly advancing, especially relative to the amount of time that passes (on average) between significant asteroid hits. 100 years ago we were completely helpless. 50 years ago, we had nukes, but no missles that were even close to being able to deliver them, in another 50 or 100 years, this may be a yawner due to general technology advances.

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.

Will they ever learn?

[polemistes]

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.

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Need protection against ourselves

[Saeger]

The odds of our civilization being destroyed by asteroid impact in the next few decades is really insignificant when compared to the odds that our advancing technology -- in the hands of still primitive minds -- kills us off first.

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.

--

Re:Saving ourselves from famine, disease, war

[useosx]

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.

Gameplan

[Muttonhead]

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.

this whole thing's blown out of proportion

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Remember basic lessons in probability

[YouHaveSnail]

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.

Re:Saving ourselves from famine, disease, war

[blincoln]

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.

Dual Use Technology

[JGski]

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.

All our eggs in one basket

[Mike_L]

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.

You assume

[Mateorabi]

You assume that the probability of being hit by an asteroid has a Poisson distribution and is therefore memoryless. In which case you are correct, given that nothing has hit us yet doesn't change the distribution function for the future.

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.