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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."
Planetary Defense. What's it all about? Is it good, or is it whack?
Greetings all I know have the first post...
Probably close to the last when NASA announces a meteor will be hitting the earth Monday...Not enough time for this defence sheild.
I'm a member of the Harvard Space Flight Programme (HSFP) and one of the first things that we do is tell everyone in the programme that if they fail to use the imperial system correctly - giving all distances in meters, all volumes in liters, and all weight in grams - they can be expected to be kicked out of the programme. We are no longer tied to England - why should we continue to use english measurements?
As a society, we cannot tolerate simple errors in fields like space flight. The errors are catastrophic and involve human life.
We cannot afford to have any asteroid predicted to land in the US, only to find that we've miscalculated and it is due to land in the middle east in a number of days and there is nothing we can do to prevent it.
I am a MUFON field investigator. I happen to know that "stargate" technology is real, and our government has been using it to travel to other planets since the mid-70's.
The reason it isn't being addressed is because those in power already have a means of escape - the stargate.
No, this isn't an attempt to be funny or some unfounded conspiracy theory. This is real.
I am withholding my name and posting anonymously for obvious reasons. I would suggest that anyone who responds do the same.
Defender Stargate can really take over your life and drain you of quarters. That's what they should be defending us from.
"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"
this isnt always necessarily the case. We saw terrorists destroy two major buildings and kill thousands of innocent people, yet we have people who think we should not be trying to protect ourselves against future terrorists. We have people who think that government spending is too high, even though a large amount of it is being spent to help protect against terrorists.
I see an asteroid hitting the planet being no different. Let's just hope it hits those same idiots.
also, why the sudden worry about asteroids hitting the planet? where was this concern for the past several thousand years?
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