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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."
The patient is the earth. People are the disease. :)
No, no. I'm not going to go into some silly rant about "Earth Conciousness" or anything of that nature. Within the context of this discussion it's reasonable to model the earth as a big rock. And stupid as one. And posit that rocks are pretty damned stupid.
What I'm saying is something more akin to "There's too many fleas on the dog."
And the dog only has so many choice spots on it. Behind the ears, under the neck, at the base of the tail, maybe around the ankles.
About a billion fleas feels about right to me. Maybe two billion, but no more than that. The only real political solution though, is for the fleas to stop making so damned many new fleas.
And that is not going to happen.
KFG