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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."
Could we eliminate any risk of being hit by an asteroid by reclassifying everything as a planet?
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.
> 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".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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?
So an asteroid could actually be the solution to these serious problems! I like your thinking.
gravitational tractor beams.
Personally I don't know why this wasn't thought of first before all those silly ideas like just blowing something up
A nice large tractor beam from a high orbiting satellite to repel or attract any asteroid or other thing that's going to hit the planet, and problem solved.
Of course, there's the technical side...
Come on, editors- this is news? We have already researched laser technology, so SDI defense is available. It should only take 2 or 3 turns to equip all of our cities with this technology.
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
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.
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
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!
http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyN ews/asteroid0107.html
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http://personals.galaxyinternet.net/tunga/I7.ht
http://home.att.net/~thehessians/asteroidstrike
http://www.sandia.gov/media/comethit.htm
http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/tps-seti/crater.h
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
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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"
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
War would still be a crucial issue. We cannot allow a mineshaft gap.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
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.
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.
Everyday something hits earth, comets, mini asteroids, space dust. Most burns up in the atmosphere, but every so often something makes it through (meteorites) and hits the surface. True most of these meteorites are about the size of a golf ball or smaller.
I don't have time to comment my code, the program is late already.
To say that probability of something uncertain happening is "50% No more, no less" is a classic trap in misunderstanding the meaning of probability. Because an event has two possible states (does occur, does not occur) does NOT mean the probability of it occurring is 50%...This is degenerate and wrong thinking in probability. The best estimate of the probability of something happening is exactly equal to the rate at which that event occurred previously. This is called the base rate or prior probability and is integral to Bayes' theorem (please see this). Thus, if you flip a coin (of unknown fairness) 100 times and 41 of those flip come up heads, what's the best estimate of the probability that the next flip will be heads? 41%. [Side note: There are tests to determine if this rules out the coin being fair or not, but even these assume some a priori criterion for ruling out chance effects (i.e., "I'll call it unfair if the coin's pattern is likely to happen by chance less than 5% of the time"...this is called the "alpha level" of such tests).]
Anyway, there is a special distrubtion to describe the occurrence of random events in time (the Poisson distribution), but suffice it to say, the probability of an asteroid hitting the earth in the next decade is NOT 50%. This would only be true if, in the past, an asteroid has hit the earth (on average) once every other decade.
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.
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.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
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