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NASA Can't Pay for Killer Asteroid Hunt
CGISecurity.com writes "NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding nearly all the asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth, but there isn't enough money to pay for the task so it won't get done. 'We know what to do, we just don't have the money,' said Simon 'Pete' Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center." But hey, it's just the potential end of the world, so nothing much to worry about there.
Does it really matter? If there is a life on earth ending event occurring from some asteroid they COULD find, does it matter at all? There is nothing we can do about it anyway. So tell me, what is the big deal.
I'm a United States citizen.
... what's another billion? I mean, it's obvious NASA's not asking us to spend a significant amount of our income on "Asteroid Insurance."
I have paid ~$50-60 for a few smoke detector and pay maybe a dollar or two a year to maintain the batteries in them.
I make an average amount of income so $50 is nothing when a fire could take my life. I've seen other people's houses destroyed by fires but never mine. I don't know if we see other planets regularly destroyed by asteroids or impacts but if you can make a case for it, then this analogy may be apt.
I also know that walking down the street in Prince George's County might result in your death. So do I hire a body guard to protect me? No. Why? Because I don't have the money for that. If I were a billionaire, I would definitely look into it and probably hire a driver too. I see people robbed and killed on TV so, again, if you can point to examples where planets have been destroyed, this analogy is apt.
Considering the war in Iraq has cost me, the taxpayer, $300 billion and I'm not sure that that is increasing my safety
In my opinion, all NASA needs to do is present congress with a scientific statistic claim with percent confidence of global destruction. If we have craters on our planet & there are bones of things that shouldn't have died lying all around, I'm guessing they could place something like a 1% chance of a decent sized asteroid hitting us within a couple thousand years. Given that information, $1 billion may not seem like a bad idea considering most of us employ smoke detectors with even less risk of harm/loss to us.
My work here is dung.
Seems to me that a thorough survey of NEOs (Near Earth Objects) should be part of NASA's charter.
Might be time to hassle my congresspeople again.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Seriously, the British seem to be really obsessed with this, couldn't they kick in a couple of quid? How about the Russians, or the Chinese, or...
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Whether or not we find the asteroids, there's nothing we can do it about them if one is going to hit us.
like finding so called 'terrorist'..
There is nothing we can do about it anyway.
Seems like a questionable assumption to me. There's quite a bit we could possibly do about it, if we knew long enough in advance. It's only if we only knew about it a few weeks or months in advance, that it would probably be a bend-over-and-pucker-up moment.
There is a whole lot of ingenuity (and a whole lot of explosives) spread across the globe as a whole; assuming that people got together and decided that the continued survival of the human species is a Good Idea, I suspect we could probably figure out a way to annihilate or deflect a rock, given enough lead time.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If the thing is small enough to destroy, money will be found. Yeah, we may have to tell Iraq "sorry" and stop all Social Security payments but we'll find a way.
If the thing is too big or too close and it's curtains for life as we know it, well, "eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Actually, NASA is already tracking objects >3,300 feet in diameter, but this would be to track all objects capable of doing "massive damage" to Earth.
My question is - why is it the job of the US to protect the world?
Wouldn't this be a UN issue?
This is Jenny. She and her family are having a picnic at the foot of a volcano. Oh no. The volcano has errupted. What do you do now Jenny? That's right duck and cover. What do you do Jimmy? Duck and cover. DUCK AND COVER!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And mothball the shuttle as soon as hubble gets serviced and put the rest into tracking asteroids.
Depending on what asteroid we are talking about it would be a relatively long time frame between hitting the earth. There is one asteroid that we are tracking that if it basically passes through the certain area we know it's going to hit earth but there will be plenty of time to prepare. It had some ironic name involving some god of death. I really wish I knew the name. According to wikipedia one might hit 800 years from now.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
See, hunting for killer asteroids requires money, that money can serve Congress better by buying votes through some "aid" program. NASA will continue to get the short end of the stick because we as American citizens keep putting back the same aristocracy that is allowing the US to fall behind the world in science.
NASA doesn't need to justify it, we the people need to justify ourselves by putting people more concerned about advancing this nation instead of advancing their own status.
That $300 billion tab in Iraq is meaningless in this conversation as NASA's budget would still be what it is. The money would have just vanished down some vote buying program that forever indebts us.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yet we had enough money to make a (horrendous) movie about such possible events. We very well might deserve anything that hits us.
Hey, it's only a government official asking for more funding for his agency...
Contrary to what people may think, the danger of getting hit by an asteroid has not increased over the past, uhmm, 5000 years. What increased is the frequency, with which the potential incident is mentioned in the media...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The explosion alone could have with the power of 100 million tons of dynamite, enough to devastate an entire state, such as Maryland, they said.
Maryland? Here in Texas, we call that a "county". Call me when you have something that can devastate a real state.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
That way I could greet the end of the world heavily in debt and with an empty wine cellar. No sense in saving up for retirement if a killer asteroid is just going to destroy the world a week after you quit your job and move to the Caribbean.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think we also need NASA to monitor the Sun for any signs of impending supernova.
A supernova would destroy the Earth and clearly kill all of us. Therefore we should spend whatever it takes to monitor the Sun.
Oh, and I suppose we need NASA to keep a death-clock for the heat-death of the Universe too.
And perhaps satellites to monitor the humongous black holes in the center of galaxies to make sure we aren't drifting towards any of them.
Oh, and we shouldn't eat charcoaled food either. Don't forget the blackened food...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The Bush Administration announced a while back that NASA's priorities should be to get us back to the moon and come up with a way to get humans to Mars, and NASA's been complaining that it's interfering significantly with the budget for earth science projects - satellites and such. They only get so much money, and if they've got to put it into planning for human missions to places that should really be handled by robots at this point, then they don't have enough to do most of the other work.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
More of a United Federation of planets issue. Why are all my tax dollars paying for ships and phasers if they are not going to be used to protect the homeworld?
News flash: Government agency asks for more funding
I like the part where they say... "enough to devastate an entire state, such as Maryland"
"Oh, not that we'd WANT anything to happen to Maryland, Congress. No. But, you know, sometimes things go wrong. Especially when NASA doesn't get funding. It makes NASA so disappointed when it doesn't get funding, and when you're disappointed, you sometimes don't look so hard for killer asteroids. You know how it is."
"I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space ... [as] there are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet."
Like Hawkings says, we can't stop everything... or maybe that was Murphy... anyway, i'm all for interstellar travel as the ultimate solution to 'this' problem.
Someone at NASA is learning how to play the game with Congress.
They can barely get funding for exploration, with the myopic bureaucrats babbling on about how things like going back to the moon or a manned mission to Mars are a waste of money.
Head on back to your constituents and explain why you won't pony up a measly $1 billion for this project. We'll bring out some nice PowerPoint slides showing Barney the Dinosaur narrating what happened the last time a major asteroid hit the planet. Maybe add some clips from Armageddon and Deep Impact, just for the effects.
By the time NASA is done, Congress should approve funding for survey missions to the Asteroid Belt.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
A cheaper option would be to simply piggyback on other agencies' telescopes, a cost of about $300 million, also rejected
Thats $1 per American. There shouldnt even be a debate.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
It'll be like the movies, we won't know a killer asteroid is coming until it is right on top of us. Why? Because our political leaders can't think past the next election. There's no way they'll fund anything to find threats that may not be an issue for thousands of years, thousands of years past the end of their terms. I only hope human technology will be up to the task of defending the Earth from these threats on short notice.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
It was just a few years ago that a fairly sizable asteroid passed between the Earth and the Moon and we didn't even notice it until it passed by because it came from the direction of the sun. We need at least several years notice on these things if we want to avoid a direct hit at some point. There's no argument to be made against paying for the survey. We know big rocks hit the Earth. It's happened plenty of times in the past. It will eventually happen again. And it's one of those things that doesn't really cost that much compared to the GDP.
That said, it's to the benefit of the entire planet and the entire planet should pitch in to help pay for it. Someone said, "So what? There's nothing we can do about it." Actually, given a few years notice, there's a lot we can do about it. An asteroid 5-10 years from hitting doesn't need much of a push to get it completely out of our way. It's when it's only a few months away that we're just completely screwed. But if there were an imminent threat of collision a few years out, I guarantee you, we'd figure out a way to move it. The world would definitely come up with the resources to figure out a solution.
..that the only feasible organization that has the ability to spot and prevent such disasters is based in the US. Maybe it's time NASA started looking for serious, private funding? Imagine how much they could do if the government contracted NASA with billions of dollars instead of spending all the tax dollars on new tanks..
Reality is, unfortunately, that war is expensive, especially when the current president thinks that money is just a bunch of numbers he gives to other people for things that go "boom". I'm afraid the longer this war goes on, the more government-funded organizations we're going to see having problems like this.
Blerg.
Whether or not we find the asteroids, there's nothing we can do it about them if one is going to hit us.
I don't buy this for a second. In fact, I suspect that if the resources of the entire planet were committed, over a number of years, it would probably be possible to put a breeding population of humans on another planet, with at least a small chance of surviving and propagating the species. Or of digging deep subterranean caves and squirreling away some people down there, etc. Or of blowing the incoming asteroid up with nuclear weapons, deflecting it with some sort of propulsion unit / system of complex mirrors / etc.
In short, I really don't think there's any particular reason why we couldn't ensure our own survival, if we (a) really wanted to, and (b) knew about the impending problem long enough in advance. While funding NASA's search would do nothing about problem (a), it would do a whole lot about (b). Which, to me, puts us about 50% closer to surviving than if neither (a) nor (b) are true.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
We could just cut out the middle man and send Steven Tyler into space to eat it....or maybe Chuck Norris could give it a roundhouse.
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
All they really need to do is develop an automated identification software and telescope computer interface. Then sell them for about $200 each. It would only take a 12" scope to ID 99% of the objects!
:)
Then set up a registry and offer the Discovery announcement, naming rights, and mineral rights to anyone that ID's them.
Hell, I would spend all night ID'ing them for the mineral rights alone
Even if there was nothing we could do about the asteroid itself - which is pretty possible given the sheer momentum of 50-km lump of rock moving at tens of km per second - we could certainly be doing useful stuff with bomb shelters, seed banks, food caches etc in the hope that civilisation at some level could survive the event. After all, rodents survived the dinosaur extinction, with our intelligence and technology we should be capable of pulling off the same feat.
NASA is tracking an asteroid, that could hit the earth in 2036. OF course by "could" NASA means 1:45,000. Still, why is the US the only country tasked with worrying about this. Hopefully the members of the UN wake up and smell the asteroid!
This should be funded by the nations of the world, not just one country.
Quota from Armageddon - "No offense General, but it's a big ass sky..."
The number of people in this thread saying "Oh well, there's nothing we can do about it anyway" is just bizarre. It's one thing to think the threat is not worth the money, it's another to think there's no point in even trying to defend against it. Weird.
Remember that these are not comets that we are talking about, they are asteroids with elliptical orbits with major and minor radii similar to that of earth. If that orbit has a chance to intersect that of earth, it is because it has always been nearby. The asteroid and earth pass near each other on a regular basis.
FTFA:
So this particular asteroid will pass very close to Earth in 2029 and has a chance to hit in 2036. If further observation confirms that it will in fact impact earth in 2036, then we can send up 150 nukes when it passes in 2029 and detonate them one at a time at the right spot.
A tiny nudge + 7 years of drift time = a miss!
Now, if we were to discover a comet was on a colliding course with Earth. Then it would be time to stockpile beer and fireworks.
This is such an easy equation in the CYA department. If there is no big asteroid coming to kill us all and you spend a bunch of money to find it, then you're in big trouble with your superiors. If you do nothing though, you're lauded for being thrifty or you're dead; either way you don't have to deal with bullshit.
This whole thing reminds me of something that sickens my stomach. It's not that we can't do it. It's just that there isn't enough profit in it. This theme resonates everywhere.
No, don't sell a cure, it's more profitable to treat the disease.
we all fail this: we underestimate threats until they hit us, then we overreact
look at 9/11 for example, or the 2004 tsunami
the problem is, it's emotional. the emotions are hooked up to some other issue before the catalclysm hits us, then when it hits us, it becomes very emotional, and we start doing all sorts of crazy stuff, including stuff we don't have to do/ shouldn't do for our own good
and don't poopoo this fact about "other" people: you do the same thing, don't lie to yourself. like you can't find an example of what i just described above somewhere in your personal life history. it's essential human nature, and that includes your behavior, human
the lesson?
we better be hit with a big asteroid that takes out a country or a continent before we get hit with the one that takes out the planet
only in the former case will humanity's response be effective at saving itself
but if we get hit with the planet-killer first? we're flat out doomed. we won't be prepared. simple human nature dictates this fact
so the history of humanity is wrapped up in this coin flip: planet-killer or country killer. combine this random chance with essential human natue, and whichever hits us first determines whether or not humanity surivives
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It may have happened in the middle of nowhere many years ago but if we could predict that months in advance, perhaps an evacuation of the area would be possible? Also, if it is hitting on/near another country and we are able to warn them or help them through the debacle, that's gotta be worth a lot too, ain't it?
My work here is dung.
It's the only consistent policy from the Bush administration regarding science, so why does anyone expect anything different now?
It's just cheaper to wait a few billion years for roaches to evolve sentience in the unlikely event of a near-term collision. We'll kill ourselves off sooner than that, so no sense in worrying about asteroids unless one's coming in <100 years or so.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Someone just tell Bush/Congress that the terrorists have achieved a presence in orbit (thanks to Iran!), and we need to be able to keep an eye on the entire atmosphere and beyond to be able to defend against this new threat. Push out the same idea to the media, and the general American public will rally and cry for it (well, a few concerned citizens with too much time and too little intelligence will send some e-mails to their congressmen) causing congress to back the plan (well, some interns will get a few minutes with their congressperson to mention some odd e-mails about this, and the congressperson will back the plan without doing any sort of research), and it's practically guaranteed!
Oh, and will you look at that, the same technology used to protect us from terrorists can also detect killer asteroids and potentially habitable planets in a galaxy far, far away.
Well, ain't that a coincidence. TWAT succeeds yet again!
You would think that in an event like this currency would be ignored and people would manufacture to save there lives as well as the lives of there loved ones. In this day and age everyone has to get paid for something...>_>
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Grover Norquist, neocon "think tanker" and propogandist extraordinaire, once eludicated that he wanted to shrink government down to the point where one could drown it in a bathtub. Huzzah, cheer, all that from his audience.
Budget cuts are effectively impossible now, as discretionary spending, defined as non-obligatory, is now a tiny percentage of the Federal budget and essentially irrelevant in cost cutting.
How does one cut then? Apparently the neocons are using a new trick: spend like maniacs. Eventually discretionary funding, like NASA, becomes impossible because so much of the budget has gone towards military and privatization expenses. So much was spent that they had to borrow trillions to keep spending more.
Effect is that the government owes so much that the largest non-discretionary line item, outside of the military, is simply paying yearly interest on the debt. So the two biggest expenditures are now the military and paying out national treasure to service the debt of the money lent to us to cut taxes and spend like fools.
End game: government has three purposes: spending on military, spending on now-privatized government services, and debt service on monies borrowed to spend in the 2000's (and the Reagan 80's) on tax cuts. Government becomes a military contractor, a corporate contractor, and a welfare fountain for the very wealthy, while never actually paying off the debt incurred to give tax cuts to those same very wealthy.
And NASA doesn't get funds, the NSF gets defunded, a chain reaction of penury resulting from this spending NOW. The neocons get their new, streamlined government which looks a lot like a classic fascism, with direct-to-corporation payments, with no spending on things not deemed necessary to fund guns or debt. Bankruptcy.
Both financial and cultural. Other nations without ideological madness spend less on military and tax cuts, keep government services cheap by using civil service, and keep debt low or nonexistent, as Canada or Norway does. Neocon ideology will cripple the future of the U.S., as we are consuming our present and future human capital to enrich the wealthy of today.
Maybe the rest of the world could do something like this once in awhile???
...that a problem can be ignored if mankind isn't responsible for it. After all, an asteroid striking the earth is a perfectly natural phenomenon, so why spend precious dollars on such a project when we could buy another F-22 instead? If God intended mankind to be destroyed in a freak cosmic accident, then so be it.
Do you really trust FEMA? Do you really think you will be protected by the government? The American government is one government I do not trust as it is too easily manipulated by Israel's MOSSAD and the Zionist's. http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=FEMA+CAMp I am glad I live in a socalist member state in Europe and my apartment has a nuclear bunker right below it (as do most here) :)
We still have the siren's regularly nationwide (when they stop we have been invaded or something and we report to our posts).
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
NASA needs a "You can't win if you don't play!" ad campaign!
Forgot to use the preview button, and my URL was not formed properly. Here you go! "Armageddon"
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
We have a war to fight people. We can't be siphoning off important funding for the wermacht so these chicken little NASA upstarts can play with more of their silly toys. In fact, it seems that these NASA types are obviously not team players and must be "against us". Therefore the Florida pan handle is next up on our schedule for liberation. Scorched earth style.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Eventually we are going to become extinct if not by an asteroid, then by the sun expanding into a red giant and gobbling up the Earth. The only way to eliminate extinction is to get our collective asses off this rock, into space and on as many planetoid surfaces as possible. That way at least a small part of humanity will survive.
Earth getting hit by an asteroid? Won't happen. Why? Because we have Intelligent Design.
... unless of course, it was designed that way ...
So it won't happen
"Traditional" asteroid hunts are EXPENSIVE.
Why don't they make use of open source software? Sasteroids is free.
Doesn't Halliburton do asteroid diversion?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
If NASA is fighting for funding, this is the way to so it.
You make a clear connection between funding and services.
The museum here in Albuquerque used this to great effect recently. They were planning a three part exhibition to coincide with the city's tricentennial. Pretty much the most important (i.e. popular) art exhibitions ever seen here. At some point the city announced a funding cut. All the director had to do was announce that part 3 (featuring Picasso, Miro, and Dali) was no longer within scope. Cha-ching!
..well I just checked and according to Wikipedia one might hit in the next twelve days!
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
The problem is many sciences use human hazards (read end of the world) justification for increased funding: seismic research, volcanology, climatology, oceanography. The fear market is tapped out.
an ill wind that blows no good
I've heard that if you took the money spent making Deep Impact and Armageddon, you'd have enough money to do the search.
I think this must be another failure of George Bush administration. But on the other hand, why the bad boy is US administration or NASA? When the Kyoto scam was a hot topic everybody pointed fingers at US that it does not want to pay its "fair share" in "saving" the Earth. Hey. Maybe rest of the world can now step up to the responsibility and fund this asteroid search instead of just complaining? At least in this case there should be no doubt, that the whole World including every living endangered species would be the main beneficiary of the NASA efforts. Where is the UN panel on the space emptiness regarding this topic? The world can seize to exist and UN is not active on this? What is EU panel of flying rocks doing to save us? You can't blame Catholic Church this time. They kind of predicted that something like this will eventually happen, and at least they are trying to be prepared to the best of their abilities. Plus they don't belive that it is the end of everything anyway. But I don't see any scientific approach from the progressive, enlightened, moral elites of the world. Any way you measure either by population size or even by wealth, US is the minority and should not be obligated to fund the whole cost of "Saving the Planet" however small or large the cost is. Mega pop stars can organize a big music concert inside the Arizona Crater to support NASA efforts and also to feel good. Al Gore can continue his stream of Oscar winning documentaries, this time under the tile of "Inconvenient Rock" (TM) :-). Union of Concerned Scientists can start immediately designing a space gun to deflect incoming doom. Think about environment. All green movements can start pressuring their governments in Asia and Europe to make them acting seriously and stepping up to the planet responsibility. For how long President Bush administration will be single-handedly saving life on Earth? This is simply unacceptable ! What if despite the cost cutting NASA manage to discover and deflect incoming rock. Bush administration will attempt to take the whole glory! We cannot allow for this to happen. There is so much work for activists on every panel outside of US government structures to do something about it.
JAM
We've made it this far without it... So we build the searchy-thingy (I'm sure that's the engineering term) and it tells us maybe we're all going to die, or maybe we should have spent the money on some pizza and beer, because there's just as many doomsday rocks coming tomorrow as there've been since... the last one... 65 million years ago! And if there's a great big, mean-ass rock a-coming, WTF? Do we shoot Bruce Willis into space to blow it up?
Actually that's a good idea for movie.
Born-again Bush and his evangelical whack-job support base actually WANT the world to end. These people are so deluded by their "faith" that they really want the world to end in fire and blood. They don't support Israel because they care about little Jewish kids growing up in peace, but because Jesus will come flying to earth on a cloud swinging a sword soon! They don't care about asteroid wiping out humanity, because humanity is unimportant to them.
These people actually BELIEVE that Jesus will return to earth in their lifetime, and that they are going to be ushered into heaven, while everyone else dies a horrific death at the hand of the "Prince of Peace", Do you REALLY think they are interested in advancing human understanding and civilization? Do you actually think these people ponder the future of the human race?
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
Nothing we can afford to see here. Please move along.
Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way.
to find out at the last moment that the asteroid is going to miss, imaging, you are sitting there in the Caribbean, in crazy heavy debt and not even a bottle in the cellar to cheer you up, when the collectors start hunting you down.
--
On a more serious note, if everyone knew about the killer asteroid, the money itself would immediately become completely irrelevant, noone would bother flying you to the Caribbean, noone would cook for you or clean up after you in a resort etc.
You can't handle the truth.
What a bottle of encapsulated crap pills!
Earth has survived millions of years on its own. We've only been able to *monitor* asteroids for what ? hundred ish years old ?
Why are suddenly asteroids such a problem ? Are they trying to promote a (false) sense of (in)security by making them a threat ?
Hell, we know so little about the actual impacts of a missile delivered space blast that we could actually make safe asteroids unsafe due to the debris and/or change trajectory. possibilities are endless.
Sure we got hit a few times, the strongest (to my knowledge) being a million years ago in the dinosaur era but we survived. History shows that when humans tries to take control of something they don't understand properly they will undeniably cause more problem than they will solve. (WW1, WW2 & Hiroshima are quick examples. Tchernobyl ?)
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
I'm pretty sure that if I get smashed by an asteroid I won't be too concerned.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
But hey, it's just the potential end of the world, so nothing much to worry about there.
So maybe the rest of the world can chip in?
the killer asteroids cannot find the funding to track you!
if they can't flip the earth on its back?
to the Dept of Homeworld Security.
And if the took NASA off the job and outsourced it to Haliburton then I'm sure the Bush administration would fund it. It wouldn't work, but there'd be plenty of money!
NASA doesn't have any firehouses to close, so the only way they'll be able to preserve their core missions against the budget axe is to invent one. If it takes a little bit of bureaucratic dirty tricks to keep basic science and the unmanned probe programs going instead of dying on the altar of a directionless manned program, I say more power to them.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
If they find a "global" killer, it better be 200 years away from us before they were to release it to the public.
Imagine the chaos that would arise. The planet would wipe itself out long before the asteroid would hit.
Religous nuts
Stealing
Killing
Apathy
Would it be better to know or not to know?
in soviet russia, asteroid finds YOU!
oh, wait.
If we do it right and colonize other worlds, nobody will have to leave Earth when the Sun expands (it will take a good couple million years to do it, anyway). Everyone will have left when the climate becomes unmanageable, long before full expansion, unless we develop some very, very fancy technology to shield the planet from the excess radiation, preserved for its historical importance.
By that time, if this is the only planet we have managed to colonize, we deserve to go extinct and leave the rest of the galaxy to more apt species.
I hope not. I just like mankind and I think we are worthy to be preserved.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Don't worry, as soon as the government gets enough fearful citizens like you demanding security from those terrorist asteroids they will pass enough pork bills for tracking them and hire a company like Brown & Root to study methods of destroying them.
So please, quit the worrying over low probability events. If you really want them tracked then start a private space colony and start mining asteroids, the corporations if they find they can profit this way will track down every pebble in space. Fork the space program!
given enough tracking and preparation, even a small explosion far enough way will alter the trajectory of a large asteroid to buzz the earth rather than slam it. of course, not done carefully enough, and you could make things worse. so therefore, we shouldn't try at all, right?
you go ahead and lay down and die. apparently, according to you, it's superior not to try and just accept death. what an ultranegative loser you are
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd like to point out that if Alaska were split in half to create a new state, Texas would become the *third* largest state in the US.
on monies borrowed to spend in the 2000's (and the Reagan 80's) on tax cuts
Look, I've grown much less libertarian over the years. I'm now OK with money being taken from people (including me) by force and spent on "good things".
However, I'm still not OK with pretending that we're not doing that. The money is ours, the government takes some away by force and spends it. Them's the facts.
There's no such thing as "spending on tax cuts". That would be like my wife wanting to buy something, me objecting, and then her saying "well, you would just 'spend' the money on savings or paying off debt if I don't spend it!". The one thing is spending, and the other isn't.
If the current US administration isn't going to pay for (or even admit to the existence of) global warming, what makes you think they'd pay for something even more tangible?
It cost 100,000+ people their lives.
Now there's a network.
Just hope it's the not the earth destroying kind that hits.
..don't panic
and this is more important than if the sun runs out of fuel?
Why is that not an international effort? A NEO is just as likely to take out China or Iran as New York or Kansas.
At least when the big one hits, all of the crap in the atmosphere will solve the global warming problem...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
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Now we know why protecting Earth was dropped from NASA's mission statement http://www.physorg.com/news72971590.html.
s -selling-solar.html
It costs to much. Not too suprising considering how we're spending money like we can just print more of it. As NASA becomed the can't do agency, who will fill the void?
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Energy delivered from space with no shipping charge: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I remember as a youngster, reading about the Return of Halleys Comet, in the far future. I even wrote a note and put it on my bulletin board that Halleys comet would return in the 90s. Since then I did a few reports on comets through the years and actually went and reviewed the newspapers of the day when Halleys came around the last time. Then when it did come around, it was a flop for me, since the weather was overcast in my state. didn't see it at all. But I did see sevaral of the other comets that swung by in the late 90s.
Point: plenty of other things could have wiped me out through the years, I didn't need to spend time worrying about halleys.
should be:
"NASA doesn't have the funds for astroid hunt" is more accurate.
I know it seems to be the same things, but when dealing government agencies it is a world of difference.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They can still hunt for the biggies... no one wants a 100 meter wide asteroid hitting their town... but that's just an 'owie' asteroid in the grand scheme of things... not remotely a world ender... not really even a nation-ender. World enders are not that common and much easier to find than 'owies' are. This complaint seems contrived to me.
>>Congrats on the stupidest comment I've seen today.
... like military!
Glad you liked it.
>>but the difference is that now, for the first time, we have the ability and resources to actually do something about it.
Ever heard that phrase that says worst disasters comes from the greatest ideas ?
>>but if a chunk of rock a few miles wide happened to land in the Atlantic or Pacific, the death toll would be in the millions
wow, you really know what you're talking about. are tidal waves the only threat you can foresee from asteroids ?
>>the US is the world leader in military spending
Yup, your military sure is strong, fire away!
>>For a relatively small amount of money
on top of all the other relatively small amount of money we spend
>>we could have a very good chance at detecting and deflecting anything liable
Not that we were scared before but we sure will be sleeping safer now that someone told us they're now watching it. hey wait... what were they doing before then ? we should be dead after years of not paying that insurance!
>>I saw an idea recently where (if we saw it in time), simply strapping an ion engine to the side and gently pushing it for a few months would divert it quite safely
Not saying an ION engine would be bad but did that idea or study or whatever it was calculated the new trajectory of the asteroid and what collision it might create by making it take a new trajectory.
>>Don't you think NASA has people (much smarter than you) who have already thought about this?
Are these the same people that made the apollo moon landing ? That sure makes it comforting that they're taking care of it.
>>Also FYI, humans were not around in anything like our current form 1 million years ago, and the dinosaurs died out tens of millions of years before that.
Not that its of any actual point to my post but if you were half smarter than i am, which in your terms, doesnt make it a big challenge, you should have picked up that i was merely pointing out that earth and its inhabitants have managed to survive "on their own" for many (many) years.
i'm not claiming to be smart and maybe i am an idiot. I just like the Dr. Obvious show on TV. one of the episodes said that if its not broken, dont fix it. What makes you think the universe needs a fix ?
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
but I know a few people who do who say that we could solve the problem of a giant asteroid if we had enough warning. We know blasting it into little chunks wouldn't do much but we could actually shift it's trajectory by using just a shuttle. The shuttle would go up alongside the Asteroid to one side or another (90 degrees off the collision course) and just sit there, keeping as little distance as possible without crashing into it. By doing this, the gravity between the shuttle and the asteroid would cause a shift in the trajectory of each. As long as we keep moving the shuttle a little at a time so the don't actually collide, over the course of a decade or two it would shift enough to miss Earth. And we are capable of seeing well into the future. We already know that there is an Asteroid that could possibly hit us in (I believe) 29 years. It may not have been tried but as physics stands, there are things we can do. It's based in simple Physics and could work. We aren't totally helpless until we throw out information, either of physics or... well... physics I guess =).
I'm SICK of hope and faith, how about some down-to-earth initiative and planning??
Someone in the associated press has aligned themselves with the surfer community. "killer" indeed! The Dude abides.
He said my License was invalid. Couldn't help me. Referred me to the creation department. I'm still on hold.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Even after a major asteroid hit (or nuclear war, or global warming, or pick-your-favorite-doomsday-scenario), the earth with still be considerably more inhabitable than the moon or mars. It could vaporize 99% of our liquid water and we'd still have more than mars. It could vaporize 99.999% of our atmosphere and we'd still have more than the moon. Life on earth has survived several previous asteroid hits; I'll take my chances down here.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
This isn't "just the potential end of the world". It's yet another sneaky way to fund Star Wars "missile defense" projects. Why not siphon that sleazy loser program's funding over to this asteroid hunt program? Then convert the whole BS Star Wars system over to asteroid defense.
Missile defense has so many ways to work, starting with investment, peace and diplomacy, and ending with Star Wars that doesn't work. While asteroid defense might not work either, but there's no alternative, and at least we're building an American space exploration industry.
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make install -not war
We live in a capitalistic society, so everything has a value, which is discounted according to the current interest rate. This means that the sum total of everything of value that could possibly exist in 1000 years, or at any point thereafter, is worth less today than the candy bar sitting on my desk. Therefore, unless you think the asteroid will hit within the next 1000 years, it's simply not worth looking for. QED
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Since when did NASA get tasked with saving the world? If it is such a big deal, then every country in the world should pay for it.
This announcement needs to be taken with a HUGE grain of salt IMO. They're picking one item that's popular or scary, and purposefully cutting funding for it in order to get headlines. They did the same crap a year ago with Hubble. Sure there's a lot of fantastic and important science that NASA could do if it had more money, but they already have GOBS of money, and the line needs to be drawn somewhere.
Who says history doesn't repeat itself??
Name the asteroid Katrina.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Other than politics and human complacency, there's no reason why other nations can't come together with the US to help should the cost, or at least help out and/or build their own technology to help detect earth-destroying asteroids. What's the point of saving $1 billion from the budget if we're all dead?
I always wondered if I would ever hear it, for real...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044207/
...that H*llib*rt*n has no astronomical research division.
It is a great immediate need that they open such a venture!
THEN, the money WILL be found!
Trillions to enrich the Corps; Not one Cent for the survival of the Species!
- Hawks: No more problem with Iraq, or Iran building nukes, or anything else in that part of the world.
- Doves: If we know the asteroid is coming, you can bet the troops will be coming home now.
- Global Warming Alarmists: With all the resulting dust in the atmosphere, Global Warming won't be a problem any more.
- Alternative Energy Dreamers: Take all the oil in that region our of play and we'll have no choice but to find more energy sources.
- Religious Nuts (of all flavors): The apocalypse is really here - all of your dreams/nightmares are coming true.
Really, what's not to like here?Sorry, we recently spent a load of our money fighting a bunch of chaps who *definitely* had weapons of mass destruction. Still spending on tidying up the chaos. Turns out they didn't have any in the first place. Plus we need to spend the rest of our money investing in a new generation of weapons of mass destruction for us, buying them off the Americans, you know. Because *we* need weapons of mass destruction apparently. So not much money left over I am afraid. We've got a healthy pop music industry though so if your REM chaps want to come over and record some songs we'll be happy to help them with that.
NASA just needs to classify it under the War on Terra.
... this would never happen. Capitalism at it's finest. Central planning may have it downfalls, but science, especially of such crucial variety, never took a back seat to profit making in the USSR.
Confused? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Que_Sera_Sera/
I'm wondering if the parent was modded Flamebait because some 14-year old moderator couldn't believe that government really works this way? I'd like to give a message to that kid: Santa Claus isn't real either, and neither is God. Sorry.
Based on recent observations (5 millenia)... what does anyone here think is the likelyhood of a catastrophic, civilization-destroying (much less planet-destroying) meteorite impact occurring in 1) 1 year, 2) 10 years, 3) 100 years, or 4) 10 centuries? Compare that with the likelyhood that: 1) some country in the world will get nuked by some other country, 2) a super-bug will appear wipe out 1/3rd of the world's population, 3) anyone who reads this post will die in a car accident.
Life is all about priorities. Some things just aren't worth worrying about, particularly if all you can do is worry anyway.
But hey, it's just the potential end of the world, so nothing much to worry about there.
Not from a political standpoint, since if it happens there won't be anyone around to bitch about it.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
LINEAR
LONEOS
NEAT
Spacewatch
The next generation involves ones that will find more, find smaller (but still dangerous) ones, and find them faster. Like:
Pan-STARRS (prototype built)
LSST (proposed)
Pan-STARRS most certainly is funded, is in active development, already has a single-telescope prototype up and running to some degree, and hopes to have its full system (4 telescopes, each with a 1.4 gigapixel camera) operational in the next few years. (The nastiest rock we're aware of so far will miss us in about 22 years.)
Actually, there is. Nature ran an article 2 years ago on a proposal for a "gravity tractor" by NASA astronauts Ed Lu and Stan Love. I've seen Ed's presentation on it, and he knows his stuff. (He's a farkin' astronaut, after all, and was an astrophysicist before that.)
So, to recap:
NASA has funded this stuff all along. The stuff Congress wants done probably will actually get done. And NASA's own people are already telling anyone who will listen what to do if we do find the big nasty rock.
Exactly why nobody at NASA can remember any of this when testifying before Congress... I have no idea.
Disclaimer: I work for the institute that's the lead organization on Pan-STARRS. Ed Lu used to work there too; I've met him; I may be biased.
Oh, and if you'd like to check out a talk given by Ed, David, and Pan-STARRS's Rob Jedicke and Nick Kaiser, I'm sure my buddy over at AstroDay.net won't mind a few visitors... dunno if you'll all be listen to the audio podcast of the session at the same time, though!
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
And Maryland is very very close to Washington, D.C. Hmm.
Oh wait, I guess cockroaches can survive pretty much anything.
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as the odds of winning the lottery are equal to being hit by an asteroid, they should secure their funding through the purchase of tickets.
/powerball!
Queensland is Australia's second largest state measuring more than 1.72 million square kilometres, 25% of Australia's land mass, which is four times the size of Japan, nearly six times the size of the UK and more than twice the size of Texas in the US.
In case you were wondering, Australia also has a station (ranch) that's bigger than Belgium, and bigger than anything in Texas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_station
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
This kind of argument "but hey, it just the end of the world we're talking about" is called FUD. It's used to get people to buy MS products, drum up wars against terrorists, and so on. The last time the earth got hit hard, apparently, was millions of years ago. As of a few hundred years ago nobody even realized that, and if an asteroid was going to randomly hit us, it just as well could've done so already. So let's not overreact now. I personally don't want to live my life constantly freaking out about everything the universe throws at us. These loud extremist types get control over everything we do, and make everyone's lives worse than before.
SCNR...
Easy to find near Earth asteroids - those of at least a few hundred meters diameter and with a favorable orbit - seem to be already mostly discovered. NASA statistics (on their Near Earth Object (NEO) website) suggest that the rate of new discoveries of easy to find objects is slowing, suggesting that there are not many of these left. Therefore the future strategy has to concentrate increasingly on finding and tracking the more difficult objects. This would be done partly with new earth and space based telescopes as suggested in the original post and partly by effective use of existing equipment.
It should be emphasized that finding the asteroid is less than half the job. After finding the asteroid it is necessary to track it long enough and well enough to get an accurate orbit calculation. If this is not done, the asteroid sighting becomes almost useless because the orbit is poorly predicted. The asteroid will thus probably never be found again if it is small. In addition, the list of potential impact hazards is cluttered by an increasing number of poorly resolved asteroid orbits with very small impact probabilities.
A few strategies that can be employed are:
- More use of observatories in the Southern Hemisphere, to track objects in the southern sky, and also to improve asteroid finding in the northern summer (southern winter)
- Observing the sky closer to the sun's position (lower elongation), to study objects that remain entirely within the Earth's orbit and objects that cross near the Earth's orbit
- Observing every day of the month, even near full moon, to track objects whose apparent brightness is decreasing rapidly (there are a few such objects on NASA's NEO hazard list right now, just after full moon)
What's the point in finding killer asteroids if we don't invest in the systems required to shoot them down? Sure, we have smoke detectors, but our communities also have fire trucks. Systems cabaple of killing killer asteroids would be capable of killing just about anything else we don't like overhead. Remember Star Wars? then again, maybe Pres. Raygun was just ahead of his time.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Borrowing money to spend on tax cuts. As in, they accept investment from some people in order to not have to take money from other people, making them obligated to pay certain people back (presumably with more money from the people they didn't have to take money from in the beginning). Except, the very rich people they cut taxes on in the beginning, won't be the ones paying through the nose on interest later.
^ Is that confusing? It confused me. It's perfectly reasonable to be confused about borrowing money to spend on tax cuts- such behavior is insane.
What a silly way to say 'we can't do anything'. Please, start thinking a way to do it, but cheaper.
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
Building good space stations is another high priority - if we're going to get out of here, they're a lot more useful than putting humans on Mars, and any major colonization project will probably happen from space stations rather than launched from the ground.
Colonizing Mars or the moon, or probably more realistically asteroids, will probably happen eventually, but there's no sense in being a hurry to do it just to make politicians look good, when waiting a few decades or centuries means that Moore's Law gives us better robots (and realistically, most of the work in space will get done by robots) and we'll have time to get better materials (hopefully good enough to build space elevators.) And realistically, you're going to want cheap transport into orbit before making a trip to Mars, whether that's a space elevator or just a big rail-gun to ship raw materials into orbit to build space stations with.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks