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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."
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
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.
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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.
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).
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