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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."
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? I'd say this is far more important.
These problems are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
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. A quite clear example is how the US government after sept 11th hired some movie writers to help look at security holes or lapses that could potentially be exploited. I guess the question remains though are we going to then follow hollywoods ideas on how to address such threats?
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Shortly before Carl Sagan died, he wrote an article in Parade Magazine about how he felt this was a bad idea. His premise being that a rouge government or terrorist organization could use technology like this to turn a "near miss" into a direct hit. Which could be potentially far more destructive than a nuke. Obviously he's looking well into the future. But I think he has point.
Famine, disease, and war are way more important, and require more of our attention.
Famine, disesase, and war could all be ended in a moment -- by a sufficiently large asteroid.
Gallows humor aside, I'm sorry to say it but: 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.
At least there's the possibility that a technological fix might save us from asteroid impact. Give me some reason to believe that there's any kind of fix for war etc.
-kgj
-kgj
Back in April 2002, the UK government started to fund a centre studying both the near-earth-orbit rocks we know about, and ways of increasing awareness and detection rates, as well as investigating possible protection strategies.
Personally I think it's just playing at people-politics, at least in the form the UK has done it $600k isn't going to go very far, but it's a relatively cheap purchase of public goodwill... On the other hand, at the moment I'll take what we can get.
There's a tiny chance of life as we know it being destroyed. A really tiny chance, and one thing humans aren't good at is disaster-planning - even when the potential result is extinction, the "gut-feeling" is to say "it'll never happen", because none of us have any experience of it happening. This is short-sighted, we should be doing something.
Although I don't think there's any reason to panic about it, the last great ecosystem was destroyed by (perhaps two, perhaps 1) asteroid, as far as we know. Researching, thinking, creating plans would probably be a good idea, at least IMHO.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
-
As practically a deathbed speech, he educated me about those concepts and who the players were in this game. He gave me the responsibility, since he was dying, of continuing this effort to prevent the weaponization of outer space.
Be sure your Tin Foil hats are well groundedWhen Wernher Von Braun was dying of cancer, he asked me to be his spokesperson, to appear on occasions when he was too ill to speak. I did this. What was most interesting to me was a repetitive sentence that he said to me over and over again during the approximately four years that I had the opportunity to work with him.
He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy. In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had "killer satellites". We were told that they were coming to get us and control us-that they were "Commies."
Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot about terrorism. Then we were going to identify third-world country "crazies." We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.
The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.
Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.
And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card.
"And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens and all of it is a lie."
I think I was too naive at that time to know the seriousness of the nature of the spin that was being put on the system. And now, the pieces are starting to fall into place. We are building a space-based weapons system on a premise that is a lie, a spin. Wernher Von Braun was trying to hint that to me back in the early 70's and right up until the moment when he died in 1977.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Man, that Arthur C. Clarke is portentious - first we run out of Greek and Roman mythology to name astronomical bodies after, and now we're discussing building a planetary defense against asteroids?
It's all there in "Rendezvous with Rama." Just remember, the Ramans do everything in threes.
Hmmmm...Top Raman...
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
The ultimate defense for humanity and all the rest of the life on this planet, of course, is to terraform and colonize Mars. That way, even if a planetary defense system fails and Earth gets pulverized, life lives on on the surface of Mars.
How To Get Humans To Mars
A water impact would be far worse than a land impact, according to the people who've tried to make estimates. A land impact would glow white for a long time and radiate much of the impact energy back into space. A water impact would dump much more energy into the atmosphere.
Though realistically, the most damaging place for an Tunguska-sized impact would be in the India-Pakistan area during a crisis, or just about any time in the Middle East. It could easily be mistaken at first for a nuclear explosion. All it would take would be one decision-maker jumping to a conclusion without waiting for the radiation readings, and even a small impact could trigger a horror that would make the twentieth century look good by comparison.
I will admit that as a general nerd and space geek (I own a telescope) I am concerned about the possibility of the human population getting wiped out by a large space-borne impact.
But isn't it sad that governments throw billions of dollars towards defense (from other humans) yet nobody is willing to invest in defense of the earth at large?
This is the kind of shit that makes us look awfully silly when the aliens come inspect the rubble after the impact.
Natural objects cannot move fast than the speed of light, and substantial size stuff like planets or asteroids cannot move at relativistic speeds (i.e. - substantial fraction of the speed of light) because the stresses when render them to powder.
Therefore the fastest something fairly large could move to get here, starting 1000 LY away, would mean an arrival date of 100,000 to a quarter of a million years from now. I think we have time.
Moving at light speed, it would still take 1000 years to get here. Moving at 99% of light speed, we would see it ten years in advance.
Probably it would stand a fair chance of punching a small hole straight through the other side of the earth due to momentum alone (not a serious suggestion, but stranger things have happened)
Plus, 1 million LY is never a speed. It is only a distance, about a third of the way towards the Andromeda galaxy, as an example.
The trully big hassle are the small rocks which are big enough to do serious damage like wiping out a city, but not big enough to wipe out a province or country. These are hard to spot in advance.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
What SPF do I need for that threat?
In this modern age, it is good to be reminded that you should look out for the simple stuff - like rocks falling on you.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
News Flash:
An asteroid has just hit Affrica and wiped out 90% of it's population. (There goes famine.) The impact has also spewed massive ammounts of dust into the atmosphere and Global Tempertures are dropping (so much for global warming) and we are expecting winter to last for several years. () We are expecting most plantlife on the planet to die off due to lack of sunlight from the dust, and a mass extinction of animals from starvation after that. (ah well, no more animals, no more animal rights activists.) Humanity is expected to follow suit being unable to feed enough of it's population due to not being able to grow anything. Wars develope over the remaining food supplies and total anihaltion results, or some survive and we are back in the stone age.
Water Impact:
An ateroid hit the (Pacific/Atlantic, your choice) today causing 1,000 foor (300 meter) tidal waves along the coastlines of all the continents (unless it was in the atlantic, in which Australia is safe). Millions of people were drowned as the water went 10's (100's?) of miles inland causing flooding and destruction of everything in it's path. Need I go on about what a 30' (10 meter) Tsunami can do? Much less one 30 times taller, occuring all over the ocean at once? Entire Islands would go under, possibly entire contries (Carribean, New Zealand, Japan, etc...). The only place that would be safe would be the mountains (Like the Rockies the Andes,and the Alps). Plus what all that water vapor would do.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I'd agree with you in that money spent developing defense systems is largely wasted, but I do think we need to put MUCH more effort into detection systems. If we can detect an asteroid 10 years before it hits us, I'm pretty confident that it'll get handled. But if we don't even know it's there - we're fucked.
As well, detection systems have other benifits (think advances in optics or radio-imaging, and the discovery of other inner-solarsystem bodies that may be scientifically interesting).
Famine, disease, and war are way more important, and require more of our attention.
That's bogus logic. "There is [x] bad thing happening elsewhere, so any effort towards [y] is misplaced". Society can work towards solving both problems at once you know.
Furthermore, I think that eliminating a small chance of the whole of humanity being destroyed is better than eliminating the certainty of a large number of people dying. I value the human race a hell of a lot more than any particular group of individuals.
I'm not. I worked on a study where we examined what the options would be for dealing with an asteroid due to hit in 10 years if we detected it today. The bottom line was that it would be really hard to stop. And we could only say it wasn't impossible if we made some convenient assumptions about the composition of the asteroid.
Who knows, maybe an Apollo-scale effort could be mounted to stop the impact. But I wouldn't count on it. It is a hard problem, and sheer manpower dollars may not be enough.
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? I think you forgot to mention that it could also be next year that the earth is hit with a celestial body. Nobody really knows.
But let's assume just for the time being that there's an asteroid due to hit the earth in 10 years that nobody's seen yet. In all likelihood, I think that someone would probably notice when it was a week, or maybe a couple of days away. If no country in the world has a plan to defeat such a threat in place, how much time would it take to come up with an idea, and implement it. Do you think that the object would hit the earth before anything was actually done about it?
Disease, famine, war or the like will probably kill lots of humans in the near future. But I would have to say that fighting those is like fighting smoke. It's coded into our genes that those things will kill us anyway. I say let's spend some time fighting things that we can actually stop. And let's remember that if a plague wipes out 90% of the humans on the planet, then there's a pretty good chance that the earth itself will be ok, along with its biological life. If an asteroid hits the earth, it's not JUST humans.
In a strictly pragmatic viewpoint, I would think that humans being wiped out from the earth would be a good thing, but it would be a small disaster if all life on the planet was destroyed along with us.
Exactly. It's fascinating to read one day on Slashdot on how the Chicago fire might've been caused by a comet and then seeing the replies to this article where people seem to claim we don't need to worry at all.
On the contrary - lots of things during the last 1000 years might be due to "cosmic" events. We have very little (popular) knowledge about quite drastic environmental changes like the "little ice age" or even the years without the sun that might've been the cause for the nickname "dark ages" (also a comet).
it's in my head
"It may take a celestial body hit to Earth' before governments take any meaningful steps to address this danger."
Wait a minute... Whose hands are being tied by an antispace weapons poliferation treaties again?? Bush had to dissolve one of those just to get a ballistic missile shield off the ground, let alone something that will actually project weapons into space. And when we do turn our backs on another one of these assnine treaties (and make no mistake, they are assinine), just remember that quote, because whining bitchasses will crawl out of the woodwork to label the US with emperialistic tendancies and world domination theories. AGAIN. We haven't even mentioned the tree-nazies absolute paranoia of putting nuclear anything into space.
I really don't think the government would mind implimenting this project and others like it. Half (if not more) of the problem is the sorry external opposition to such measures, in addition to those who will hammer the administration for ponying up the cash to make it a reality. As soon as they do, you'll hear the statistics of how unlikely it is an asteroid will hit and how we could be spending that money helping the childern!
Perhapse it's partially the fed's fault, but you have a lot of hipocrites out there complicating the issue by serveral magnitudes both inside and outside this country. That quote is ignorant and indicative of a lazy thought process considering their are a lot more parties involved in this- both domestic and ineternational -that desperatly need that wake-up call.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
According to Carl Sagan, the cost of full-sky survey (ie, checking what/when is coming, not necessarily doing something about it) is less than the cost of one blackhawk helicopter.
That is a pretty cheap option to be ignoring.
I don't know why the military machine are not getting behind this. If they can convince congress to fund them to blow up the world umpteen times, surely an intensive earth-colision asteroid detection program would be a great opportunity to keep them in jobs and funding until a new credible 'evil empire' can be created for them to justify themselves with!
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
Seems like it would be a lot easier to move it into a stable orbit that to destroy it.
It would be a great way to build an interplanetary ISP without all the expense of hauling materials up from the gravity well.
Also, it would make a swell military base to be used against those sneaky aliens.
Actually in 1960, the US Navy sent the Trieste with 3 Navy personel to 'Challenger Deep' at the southern end of the Marianas Trench. At 10,920m (about 7 miles) deep it is the deepest known point on the planet.
Also what do you mean it's a simple tech problem?? Are you nuts? It's a fucking immense tech problem. Your talking about changing the trajectory of a piece of rock that could concievably be the size of a fucking state. In space where there's no stabilizing solid like the earth to exert on it's a serios problem. And why is this all of a sudden an either/or type thing? Do you think the people that know astrophysics are the same people that understand world economics??
Statistically it's gonna happen eventually. When it does what do you want the reaction to be, "hey, didn't they build something for that a while back..." or "uh....fuck". Knowones saying if we don't do this right now were all gonna die so throw your arms in the air and run screaming it's the apocylipse blah blah blah. But it's something to think about. Were not the first species that reigned supreme on this planet, but I'd certainly like to be the last.
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
NO NO NO NO.
It doesn't work that way. It just doesn't. I suggest you sober up. Look, coins don't know what their last flip was. There's no mystical force of nature causing equilibrium. The only thing at play is random probability. And the 50-heads-in-a-row vs. 25-25 argument is just silly. The reason it is more likely to get 25 heads than 50 is combinatorics; it's irrelevant to what the next flip will be.
I hope for your sake you don't ever gamble on coin flips.
There's mention of the big buck$ LSST telescope, and a proposal to pop for six dedicated scopes, but nothing about the US$8mil or so that has already been allocated to the PanSTARRS project in Hawaii. UH is developing a telescope array and automated asteroid detection system to scan almost the entire sky every few days. Once deployed on either Mauna Kea or Haleakala, a five year campaign is planned to catalog at least 90% of the estimated number of 0.3km or bigger NEOs out there.
If an orbit is found that seems to intersect with us, then it becomes someone else's problem.
Luke, help me take this mask off