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.

Comments

Lets assume they had the funding

[hsmith]

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.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Zeek40]

I'd certainly like to know. I've got a decent chunk of change sitting in my retirement accounts that i could throw one hell of a world-ending party with.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Apocalypse111]

What do you mean "nothing we can do"? I'm certain we can find a rowdy-yet-lovable bunch of oil drillers to send up there on a suicidal mission to blow up the asteroids from the inside with some nuclear weapons, all set to an Aerosmith soundtrack. What's so hard about that?

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

If you're assuming that any threat they find will destroy us within a year or two, then yes there's not a great deal we can do about it - Bruce Willis is always busy and Robert Duvall isn't getting any younger.

But in all likelihood any threat they find won't be destroying us within the next couple of years, it'll be something that will hit in 10 or 20 or 100 years. On those timeframes there are many things we can do, even if at this specific moment it could only be summed up as "let's give a load of smart guys a lot of money to figure out what we're going to do".

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[penguinrenegade]

So instead of doing something valuable like finding killer asteroids that actually exist and have hit the world in the last 100 years, we send a mission to Mars, send up commercial satellites on government paid for shuttles?

Use the money for something useful instead of finding out the effects of sending rats into space.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[192939495969798999]

As it turns out, there are ways to hit that asteroid out of the way, assuming we see it in time. If we don't know it's coming, there won't be crap we can do, because it will be "too close" by that time. One proposed way to hit them out of the way is with interstellar billiards, where you hit a smaller one into a bigger one into the threatening one, and even a slight nudge when it's far off will do the trick.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[jcorno]

I've got a decent chunk of change sitting in my retirement accounts that i could throw one hell of a world-ending party with.

Yeah, but why would they give it to you? As soon as we know it's coming, every bank on the planet is gonna throw hundred million dollar embezzlement parties.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[hiroller]

Well a mission to the Moon and Mars, bent on colonizing planets outside of our native planet, would be extremely beneficial and would pay off tremendously if Earth was ever faced with a crisis that we could not prevent. It would at least save our species from extinction!

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Fozzyuw]

here is nothing we can do about it anyway.

Sure we can. I saw a documentary not long ago that showed how we could fly onto the comment and drill a nuclear weapon into the core and explode it. All we need is to make sure Ben Afflack's schedule is empty.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Anonymous Coward]

Call it a hunch, but I have a feeling that most chefs, servers, waitresses, entertainers are not going to want to spend their last days working their asses off for Zeek40 let alone a bunch of rich bankers.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[ProppaT]

Sorry to break the news to you, but the second the "world ending" asteroid is announced, all your money becomes null and void. At that point, you'd better hope you have a buddy who owns or works at a liquor store, cause it's going to be chaos. Heck, I know if I knew the world was going to end in a year, I'd just go home from work right now. I'd probably start biking to places I haven't been and find ways to eat off the land. I hate to say it, but there's not going to be much of a demand for technical writers if the products I'm writing manuals for would never even see the light of day.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Ngarrang]

Personally, I would not want the world to know that The Killer was on its way to hitting us. Can you imagine the mass hysteria and panic such information would cause? Lawlessness and chaos would reign. People wouldn't care to do their jobs anymore. And worse, Slashdot might go offline!

I fully intend to be reading and sending e-mail up to the last day of my existence, thank you very much. And, doubtless, someone will find a way to blame Micro$oft or SCO, causing a flood of responses for me to have to read...and then ignore.

So, no, let us NOT look for them. We are better off.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[pilgrim23]

NASA has shown several times they can afford to send money controlling Senators and other congress critters into space. Seems a perfect example of Newtonian physics; toss hot air bodies at asteroids until they slow down to a crawl like all governemnt service.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you (or anyone else) actually think that we will be able to live on Mars? We can't fix the problems here, and it will be no different on Mars. The USA will claim some of it, Russia another part, and China some more, and then they will just fight each other like they do here. Terra-forming is a pipe dream, and the only thing we can get from Mars is precious elements, which will have so much radioactivity that we would not be able to use them.

This is real life, not BSG or some other Sci-fi where they just ignore the shit that doesn't fit the plot.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Grismar]

Yeah, because your money will still have the same value it has today, once we all know the world is gonna end in two weeks.

I don't know, but I expect you better get looting and pillaging with the rest of them, or hiding in the hills, praying to your preferred deity.

I recommend Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle, it's a great read and on topic in this case. Fiction of course, but a hell of a lot closer to the truth as I see it than parent.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Floritard]

Any reason to launch Ben Affleck into space is a good reason...

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[bobertlo]

Or spending a huge majority of our budget sending our own soldiers to die for oil?

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[revlayle]

anyways... Mars has a thinner atmosphere... probably even MORE susceptible to asteroid impacts

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[ucblockhead]

What is much more likely than a life-ending event, is an asteroid that would take out a city. Is it worth $1 billion to potentially save a city?

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[briggsb]

I think we should be more worried about the killer germs on the asteroid. At least that's what this article says.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[general scruff]

If spotting and tracking these things is the issue, I wonder if a SETI@HOME type setup would help. Use the collective resources of thousands of PCs to do the number crunching for a lot less money. I'm sure you could set it up to track all incoming asteroids, and check the trajectory of each to see which ones we should worry about.

I'm curious is this approach has been looked at before...

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[gbreit]

In my opinion it's not about whether or not NASA *has* the funding. It's a matter of return on investment for them. NASA is not in the business of performing quality scientific research or other unglamorous activities, no matter what their benefit to the public good is. NASA is in the business of self-preservation, accomplished by generating a steady stream of public relations propaganda centered around spectacular photos of astronauts floating in space, applying fresh duct tape to the latest leak in the ISS, or inspecting insulation tiles on the long-obsolete Shuttle for damage due to falling ice during liftoff. The taxpaying public goes, "ooh ahh, pretty pictures! Don't cut their funding," and the money-go-round continues. Something as un-sexy as searching for killer asteroids does not lend itself to the sort of self-serving PR NASA is accustomed to generating. Much more to be gained to do all they can to extend the life of that deathtrap called the Space Shuttle. To defend NASA for a second, their efforts in planetary and environmental sciences are money well-spent, despite the customary emphasis on more pretty pictures (which are admittedly awesome). However, the manned space program in its current form is a sham with no concrete long-term goals, only a near-term need to keep the $$$ rolling in on a year-to-year basis. The consequence of this lack of vision is that unglamorous scientific and technical projects which truely benefit the public good (e.g. asteroid hunting) will always receive the table scraps from the money pile, if anything at all.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[rbanffy]

"There is nothing we can do about it anyway"

If a killer asteroid were about to hit us in the next year, I would think so. Still, a couple months is a lot of time since we already have shuttle and Progress launch capacity plus a couple very good LEO launchers for smaller stuff, lots of nukes and the soviets have built at least one 50GT device, so, they know how to do it. It's not difficult to imagine a rocket-propelled asteroid-penetrator (grabs the asteroid and fires a rocket deep into it) that could neutralize a pile-of-rubble type and turn it into smaller pieces that would not be able to reach the surface. Also, a life-threatening deadline can work miracles in terms of budgets.

If we had more time - likely a couple decades - the greatest danger would be to slip on deadlines until we can no longer respond effectively to it.

Seriously, even a couple years from now we could try to do something without breaking a sweat.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Maximum Prophet]

Maybe the asteroid is only going to knock out 1/4 of the earth. It's still quite valuable to find out which 1/4.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[kalirion]

So instead of doing something valuable like finding killer asteroids that actually exist and have hit the world in the last 100 years, we send a mission to Mars, send up commercial satellites on government paid for shuttles?

I don't think any asteroids that have hit the world in the last 100 years are likely to hit it again any time soon....

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[hiroller]

Definately true and even truer for the moon. However, with a dispersal of the population, it would take multiple catastrophes (at least one on each colonized planet/moon) to wipe us out. Not to mention that if we have learned how to survive harsher habitats than the one we are made for, then it would stand to reason that the human species would be able to survive a drastic change in our environment here on earth, which would hopefully reduce our chances of being extinct in the same fashions as the dinosaurs

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[interiot]

If there's an asteroid that's big enough to strip off Earth's crust, a trivial thing like the atmosphere is going to be a rather trivial defense.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[deviceb]

yes the money should be spend on finding out the effects on sending snakes on a shuttle instead.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[ArcherB]

Wasn't the UN supposed to be taking this on? Why is that those that don't want the US to be the world's policeman are suddenly crying for the US to be the world's defender? This is a global problem that requires a global response!

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Orange Crush]

There is nothing we can do about it anyway.

There's probably nothing we can do about it right now. That doesn't mean we can't figure something out. The first step is in detecting an asteroid and determining when it will impact. Given enough advance notice, we can devise a way to deflect a killer asteroid.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Rei]

Do you have any clue how horribly difficult a truly independent colony will be to establish? I'll demonstrate. Let's just pick one task that will be essential -- just one. Say, mining. Now, let's pick just one aspect of mining -- say, a loader. Let's just pick one thing that that loader will consume over time (ignoring what it takes to make more of them or replacement parts) -- say, lubricant. What do we need for this?

Well, there are three kinds of lubricants that would be reasonable for different tasks on Mars: petroleum, plant, and silicone. Plant, probably the easiest, wouldn't work for this task. Even processed plant oils, like soybean polyol esters, are not suited for high loading tasks. Plant-derived lubricants are only for mild conditions. They're also much more prone to degradation. Really wouldn't work. So, that leaves petroleum and silicone. Petroleum, you'd need long chain fuel oils -- saturated and unsatured hydrocarbons, linear and/or cyclic. Your base could also be phosphate esters, although they'd be low viscosity. Diesters might be good, as could short chain polyglycols. Silicone oils can be good by themselves or as additives. So, we have a few options for bases. But is that good enough? Not really, unless you want to wear through parts and oil like there's no tomorrow. What additives do we need? Anti-foaming agents (silicone is good for this). EP additives allow the lubricant to work in higher stress conditions (like mining), so that's things like sulfur, phosphorus, and chlorine compounds. You're still going to be getting particles in solution, though -- how to keep them there to prevent them from abrading the surfaces? Detergents: sulfates, phosphonates, thiophosphonates, phenates, or salicylates of barium, calcium, or magnesium. And/or dispersants. And heck, if this lubricant is to be used where there's combustion, you may need emulsifiers as well to allow it to mix with some water.

Now, let's chain back just one of those chemicals -- let's say a fuel oil. What do we need to produce a fuel oil on Mars? We need to use something like the Fischer-Tropsh process or Sabatier synthesis to turn CO2 + H2 into hydrocarbons. H2 comes from energy-intensive cracking of water. CO2 will have to be frozen out of the uberthin atmosphere in a huge facility. Of course, we'll get mostly methane from our hydrocarbon synthesis. Let's just assume that this tech advances enough that appropriate catalyst packs can be gotten to selectively make heavier hydrocarbons. You'll still need a whole distilling facility to process the hydrocarbons (picture a small oil refinery) to seperate. All of this power? Well, if it comes from nuclear, you better have a way to make nuclear fuel (and you don't even want to see the dependency chain on that one). Solar? Solar panels have an even bigger dependency chain. Solar thermal? Ignoring initial launch costs for that much mass, even if you can make the mirrors locally, you still need to make the heliostats. Once again, depenency chains. See where this is going?

Note how much I had to narrow the subject down just to get into this one set of resource dependencies. The simple fact is that modern technology spawns *huge* dependency chains, and on another planet, you simply can't live/expand a colony without modern technology. You can make some simplifying assumptions -- say, substitute HDPE for LDPE in a plastics task. But you couldn't generally, say, substitute HDPE for neoprene, teflon, polycarbonate, or nylon. Even simplified dependency trees will still be monstrous.

This assumes that everything we need *can* be found on Mars. What if it can't? What if we can't find, say, fluorspar? No aluminium industry (not only will that hurt construction and refining, but also would be a double-whammy for rocketry; you'd have to use titanium alloys (more expensive) for structural integiry and would have much weaker solid rocket engines). No hydrofluoric acid (needed by many industrial processes -- including the most realistic uran

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[AlHunt]

>So instead of doing something valuable like finding killer asteroids that actually exist and have hit the world in the last 100 years
>we send a mission to Mars, send up commercial satellites on government paid for shuttles?

They need $1.0 billion that they apparently don't have and congress won't give them. Yet there seems to be $93.4 billion in the congressional sofa cushions for Iraq.

Houston - we have a real problem.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Rei]

It's not about "not understanding probability". It's about weighting risk with consequences. Just from one known asteroid, we have a 1 in 45,000 chance of impact. It's energy on impact would be about 880 MT. The Tungustka explosion? 10-20 MT. The largest atomic bomb ever detonated? ~50MT. Krakatoa? ~200 MT. We're talking about a *huge* release of energy. 2 in 3 odds, it lands in an ocean. Which means collosal tsunamis all around the ocean's rim. Which means that coastal cities all around the ocean are hit with an energy that makes the Indian Ocean tsunami look tiny. Trillions of dollars in damage. Even an impact on land would be catastrophic.

One in 45,000 chance suddenly doesn't sound so little, does it? Say the expected damage was 2 trillion dollars. Ignore the cost in human lives. This one NEO would justify a ~50 million program (assuming no other benefits from the program). Yet we're just talking about *one NEO* here. There are many thousands of NEOs. Most aren't as risky as Apophis. But it is important that we know about them, and refine their orbits as soon as possible. We're talking about very small odds, but very huge consequences. Each year that you don't look for them is a year that you're taking an unjustified (economically) risk. We can, and will, stop an asteroid if it is likely to hit us. But we need to know years in advance.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Kronik Gamer]

Oh sending snakes on a shuttle with Samuel L. Jackson...

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[kinglink]

According to Armageddon yes.. yes it does. But only if we can get Bruce Willis to stop it.

On the other hand Deep Impact informed us we should start digging large underground caves so we have them in time.

So it's up to the government to either fund NASA or some excavation crew, either way we need a little more dough.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Citizen of Earth]

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.

If we found an asteroid that was going to wipe out the earth five years from today, there's plenty we could do about it. You'd be surprised how much $200-trillion will buy. (Maybe they'd just write "$ALL" on the cheque.)

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[nasch]

You're right, that sounds *really* hard. So.... we shouldn't try?

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[rucs_hack]

Finding them isn't always the problem. Finding ways to hit them is.

After all, we know about Apophis, but no-one knows yet how to stop it.

I planned to have a go, but the competition for an answer has too short a time period for me to try. I need at least a year.

Want to see how close aphophis gets? check this model, it has the asteroid in it.

http://code.google.com/p/nmod/

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Frumious Wombat]

So, I can see space colonies for (1) national pride and cultural jockeying for position, or (2) a frontier stirs the imaginations back home, or even (3) a place for people who reject the Lockean "social contract" of our society to go. However, why is colonization to ensure our species's survival an issue? What makes our DNA so uniquely valuable that if removed from the civilization we've built (here and there) it deserves to be propagated. If the big one hits, then unless someone thought to digitize and send along our cultural heritage, then we've lost most of what made us noteworthy anyway. If you do, then it's removed from living contexts, and just ashes of a lost world. Memento Mori.

Press a bunch of gold disks with a mixture of Bach and Shakespeare, send them into the void in all directions, and announce, "We are, We were" far more effectively than colonizing Mars ever will.

This post probably influenced by a caffeine headache, but putting money into trying to make a self-sustaining colony on mars just in case an asteroid hits home, versus putting that money into finding the blasted things and learning how to steer them away (and maybe mining them in the process; imagine Pt/Ir cheap enough to use for plumbing), seems like misplaced hubris. Again, if you say we're doing the colony-thing for reasons 1-3, I say go for it, as it's an extension of our civilization. Option three is simply a change to crawl back up from the mud again, with memory of where we fell from. (and just imagine the legends from that process that will be passed down, misinterpreted, and misapplied.)

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Master of Transhuman]

More importantly, we spend $750 billion to kill Muslims and anybody else who "threatens" US (and Israeli) world hegemony...

We could knock a few billion off that figure and divert it to NASA, I'm sure.

Oh, wait, that's primate fear and primate competition we're talking about here.

Never mind.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Jehosephat2k]

I liked this comment:

"There's always some fun at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/ "

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[C0y0t3]

Rather than curling up and waiting to die (which you theoretically embrace with the utter calm of a Jesuite monk awaiting penance), I suggest we should collectively attempt to do something about it... the ones of us at least who are not picking flowers and waiting to die, of course. Pool our worthless money and try to come up with a solution. Fire off a couple nukular warheads in the general vicinity if nothing else... at least put a few mating pairs of humans into orbit in a life boat space shuttle on the off chance the entire physical mass of the planet is not vaporized.

Sheesh...

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[saskboy]

You're thinking too short-term. We may not be able to get to Mars and live there reliably for another 500 years, but if we don't keep working at it now, we probably will delay the time we can do it, past the life ending event on Earth.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[hey!]

There are three reasons why this scenario is not worth factoring in.

(1) Humans are extremely adaptable. It is extremely unlikely that the Earth could become completely uninhabitable for people.
(2) Be that as it may, we need materials to work with. Specifically biological materials. Therefore a Mars colony without Earth support would be a precarious proposition indeed -- you'd be pretty much one crop failure from a Mars extinction. If your crops fail, you have no chance to forage insects and weeds.
(3) Should we somehow manage to make Earth utterly uninhabitable, we are going to bring the most likely cause of that calamity with us to Mars, namely: us.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[spuke4000]

I'm not sure your analysis is complete. First of all, where does that number 1 in 45000 come from? Assuming that means that one of these events happens every 45000 years (I don't know if that's what you meant, but let's go with that) then the fact that there are lots of NEOs is already taken into account. As for your claim that if it will cause $2 trillion in damages then spending $50 million/year is warranted, that's true if the $50 million will completely mitigate the $2 trillion in damages should it occur. But the $50 million will only buy us detection. Total prevention of the collision would probably cost more than the $2 trillion, if at all possible. Frankly, I think it would actually cause quite a bit more than $2 trillion if one of these babies hit the earth, but I can't back that up, and I don't think it's possible to do much about it even if we knew about it, so I say just sit back and enjoy the show.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[edwardpickman]

Now, let's pick just one aspect of mining

Don't you just need a pick and shovel and a mule to mine with? Okay it's going to be hard to stick a space helmet on one but it's got to be cheaper than all the fancy hardware.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[timeOday]

Ah, but you're neglecting the much cheaper Washington solution: for only a couple hundred $K, you can bribe some "experts" to determine that the liklihood of impact is negligible.

Problem solved.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[arevos]

You're right, that sounds *really* hard. So.... we shouldn't try? At our current level of technology, spending money on finding killer asteroids is, dollar for dollar, probably more beneficial for our long-term survival.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[LunaticTippy]

Seriously?! They're going to use a Red Dwarf plot device to save the planet?! Cool!

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[nasch]

Oh, definitely. It's hard to think of anything that can kill everyone or nearly everyone on the planet in the next few billion years other than nuclear weapons and asteroid/comet impacts, and there are better ways of dealing with both of those than offworld colonization. Really long-term, should we last so long, we'll have to part ways with the sun, either with or without this planet we live on. But by then we should have figured out ways of doing it.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Rei]

1 in 45,000 is the odds of Apophis hitting us in (2036?). So no, that only takes into account that one NEO.

No, total prevention of a collision would not cost nearly that much. There are many different proposals, and none are even in that ballpark. Some are as simple as coating one side of an asteroid with graphite or aluminum powder (dark or shiny) so as to use solar pressure to adjust its orbit. The longer in advance you find out, the cheaper the collision is to mitigate. If we wait until Apophis's keyhole pass to find out whether it will hit us, mitigation costs will greatly increase (although only into the billions/tens of billions range instead of tens of millions/hundreds of millions range)

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[GodInHell]

Well, there are three kinds of lubricants that would be reasonable for different tasks on Mars: petroleum, plant, and silicone ..and water ..and super smooth surfaces.. and magnetic bearings... and whatever solution NASA will develope to use in the place of your options. Before the first moon mission, "plastics" would not be on any ley-man's list of materials options, "computers" were mainly people with a calculator, and "rockets" were things you fired blindly at the enemy with minimal steerage.

Here's a question.. if we don't start developing the technologies we need for long-distance space travel.. what will you do when NASA ids a killer asteroid on a collision course... wish it gone?

-GiH

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Rei]

Heh, you want me to chain back what you need to simply maintain your space suits? Just ignoring that you wouldn't be able to mine at a fast enough rate to keep your operations running for you to live, you'd be better off just sticking with mining equipment. ;)

People often love to compare colonization of other planets to colonization of the new world.

There Were No Massive Dependency Chains To Surviving In The New World

Yes, there were challenges in New World settlement. Big ones, certainly. But the comparison ends right there. The facts are simple: to have an independent colony on a non-Earthlike planet, you have to deal with monstrous dependency chains, which means a monstrously large industrial base that takes in hundreds of types of ores and through thousands of intermediate products produces tens of thousands of final outputs in hundreds of thousands of variations.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Shag]

From what I've heard from David Tholen and others in the field, we have to wait until 2029 to see exactly what orbit Apophis winds up in after its pass.

However, we shouldn't wait that long to develop and test the technology necessary to alter its orbit. If we have a good orbit calculated by, say, 2030, and have the technology to alter it devloped and tested, 2036 becomes a non-event, and we can go back to worrying about the UNIX time overflow in 2038 instead.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Prof.Phreak]

Indeed. I also find it ironic that the presidential -election- runs a few hundred million dollars per candidate; mostly spent on advertising, fancy dinners, renting out big enclosures, and lots of balloons.

But eh, it's not the end of the world.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Nataku564]

We are (currently) the only known intelligent species in existence. I dare say the genetic material that made that possible is darn special, and worth preserving. Oh sure, at some future date we may find out that we aren't so unique - but until that day, we are the only beings to have even considered the meaning of our own existence in this way.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Anonymous Coward]

But by then we should have figured out ways of doing it.

Not if we keep procrastinating. If we don't take the first steps (i.e. actually going to Mars), it will never happen.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[mOdQuArK!]

I think our technology at the moment better supports building big (~miles in diameter) space colonies, perhaps dug into a big asteroid for radiation protection, perhaps orbiting around the Sun. Once the colony is built, not only do you not have to worry about going in & out a planet's gravity well, but you have absolute control over the getting energy (no clouds or weather to obscure the solar panels), the internal climate/environment & spinning the colony for desired level of gravity.

You also have the limited ability to get your colony out of the way of incoming big rocks (if you see them in time).

Such habitats are physically possible to build even given our current state of technology, although it would certainly be insanely expensive as far as necessary resources was concerned.

Unless we came up with a cheap form of artificially controlling gravity, then just about every sort of living arrangement becomes possible, planetary or not.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[oatworm]

Dependency chains? Sounds like we're living in dependency hell, and we all know what the solution to that is:
 

sudo apt-get mars-colony

I suppose I could just install that in Userspace, though...

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Xyrus]

"Well a mission to the Moon and Mars, bent on colonizing planets outside of our native planet, would be extremely beneficial and would pay off tremendously if Earth was ever faced with a crisis that we could not prevent."

You mean, like, ourselves?

~X~

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Rei]

That's not correct. The Planetary Society is pushing to get it tagged with a transponder before then. A transponder would allow us to very accurately determine its orbit. It couldn't guarantee an impact, but it would either eliminate the chance or refine it to the degree that there would be no controversy over funding the preparation of a mission to divert it.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Dirck_the_Noorman]

"We're talking about very small odds, but very huge consequences. Each year that you don't look for them is a year that you're taking an unjustified (economically) risk." This reasoning is sound. Unfortunately, if added up all the costs of every probability-adjusted world threatening disasters like this we would very soon have no money left. Scientists have unfortunately low credibility among the public in providing an honest assessment of the importance of their work. University basements are full of bright people who think their own projects are the most important things on earth and everyone should pay attention to them. Too many scientists knowing exaggerate the consequences of their work in an effort to promote their own careers. The result is a public growing increasingly jaded to claims of global catastrophe - a boy who cried wolf problem. Shame on the scientists. http://www.dirckthenoorman.com/?p=81

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[GodInHell]

If Nasa has the capability to colonize other planets, I'm pretty sure they can also destroy one asteroid or change its course... That was sorta my point. If we don't develope the tools, we won't.. but we need something to build tools for, and "colony" is a far better goal than "big bomb."

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[arevos]

Not if we keep procrastinating. If we don't take the first steps (i.e. actually going to Mars), it will never happen. Insightful? So if we don't go to Mars right now, then in several billion years we won't have the technology to relocate to another solar system when our Sun runs out of fuel? On that timescale, you'd have to delay a trip to Mars by at least a million years before anyone could seriously accuse you of procrastinating.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[meringuoid]

Scientists have unfortunately low credibility among the public in providing an honest assessment of the importance of their work. University basements are full of bright people who think their own projects are the most important things on earth and everyone should pay attention to them. Too many scientists knowing exaggerate the consequences of their work in an effort to promote their own careers. The result is a public growing increasingly jaded to claims of global catastrophe - a boy who cried wolf problem. Shame on the scientists.

True enough. If we were to spend trillions on a vast, high-profile project to protect ourselves against some theoretical perceived threat on what later turns out to be flimsy or outright fraudulent evidence, and that threat then turns out not to have existed in the first place - why, it would be the most appalling embarrassment. The people responsible for providing the misleading evidence and incorrect assessments would never be believed again, the politicians who funded their project would have to resign en masse as a matter of principle, or if not then they wouldn't stand a chance at the next election.

I'm certainly glad our leaders have the wisdom to avoid any such scenario.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[evilgiu]

I'll trust the wisdom of the universe in this. Whenever it figures out it is time to wipe us out, let it do it. I don't see much worth saving around here anyway.

I'll totally go for cosmic-event-driven annihilation. I'd only oppose Darwin-award-winners-driven annihilation. Not that they are not supposed to obliterate themselves, but keep off my lawn.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Shag]

There's no impact in 2029, but I'm skeptical that even a transponder would tell us exactly what its orbit after the 2029 near-miss will be. It'd have to be very accurate, since a little distance closer to or further from Earth will result in a different post-2029 orbit.

Re:Lets assume they had the funding

[Rei]

Because of the corner cube reflectors on the moon, we know the distance to the moon with a precision of about one millimeter. While a radio transponder wouldn't be that precise, it would still give us a far, far greater level of precision than we currently have. The precision wouldn't be enough, as I stated previously, to guarantee an impact before the 2029 keyhole pass. However, a transponder could change the odds to, say, "infantessimal chance" or "1 in 15 chance". In the former case, we'd know that we don't need to worry. In the latter case, we'd know that we better start working on a diversion mission just in case.

About $1 Billion

[eldavojohn]

I'm a United States citizen.

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 ... 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."

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.

Re:About $1 Billion

[Intron]

"I don't know if we see other planets regularly destroyed by asteroids or impacts"

We saw Shoemaker-Levy

Re:About $1 Billion

[Kadin2048]

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.

This sounds like an entirely rational, sensible argument. As a result, I predict that it will have absolutely zero effect on anyone in Congress.

As an alternative, I suggest you come up with some "evidence" suggesting that an asteroid impact would transform their children into mutants, preferably homosexual ones; or, that the asteroids are a Arab Terrorist Plot. Double points if the asteroid is Mexican.

Re:About $1 Billion

[caeili draziw]

"Considering the war in Iraq has cost me, the taxpayer, $300 billion and I'm not sure that that is increasing my safety ... what's another billion?" Do you really think that if the US were not in Iraq NASA would all of the sudden have all the cash they need to run all the missions they could? Gimme a break. The Iraq adventure has cost far more than $300 billion and if we were not there that money would not have gone to NASA. That money would have gone to more government cheese for the poor or some other program.

Re:About $1 Billion

[Billosaur]

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.

Normally I might agree, but we're talking the general populace here. You can show Congressmen and their constituents all the holes in the ground and Shoemaker-Levy photos you like, but we live in a world of "that's not my problem" and "can't happen to me" and "it's not going to happen tomorrow". Unless a sizable chunk of something streaks across the heavens, lights up the night's sky, and obliterates an area where there are a few hundred thousand people with cell-phone cameras and video cameras and a CNN satellite truck nearby, no one is really going to care. Remember, a larger number of people than was previously thought are starting to question evolution -- asking them to worry about an asteroid impact is probably asking too much.

Re:About $1 Billion

[geoffspear]

That's just more proof that we don't have to do anything... There's still exactly as much life on Jupiter now as there was before it was hit; therefore if the Earth is hit by a similar-sized object, life will survive just fine. Q.E.D.

Re:About $1 Billion

[RabidMonkey]

"If we have craters on our planet & there are bones of things that shouldn't have died lying all around,"

What if the people paying the bills don't believe in the bones of things laying around?

Re:About $1 Billion

[Red Flayer]

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.

B-b-b-but those craters and bones were placed there in order to test our faith!

If an asteroid is going to hit the earth, obviously that is part of the end times, and the Rapture is nigh. Who are we to disrupt God's plan?

I jest. But the scary thing is that there are plenty of people out there who would think I'm serious -- and would agree with me -- and some of those people are sitting in the House of Representatives.

all NASA needs to do is present congress with a scientific statistic claim with percent confidence of global destruction

Erm, that's not quite how the Congressional budgeting procedure works. The responses NASA might get could be:

"Well, OK, but how much of that budget is going to be spent in my state?" or
"But your budget is alreay over $16Bn. Surely you can cut some fat and some useless programs from your budget to cover this, if it is so important." or
"Surely this should fall under the aegis of the Homeland Security Department. Maybe you should go talk to them." or
"How's that moon landing coming, Bob?"

Your logic makes perfect sense. But getting money out of Congress for something seen as low-risk (even 1% over a couple thousand years) isn't so easy, particularly when tax cuts are all the rage and there is a looming federal budget crisis over the next two generations.

Re:About $1 Billion

[Red Flayer]

You forgot to mention that the asteroid looks like a breast, and will be visible to the naked eye (albeit for a couple milliseconds) before it hits. Then maybe the FCC would drop some of it's budget on the problem.

Re:About $1 Billion

[gurps_npc]

We have seen Jupiter hit by a killer comet. While not 'destroyed', the damage created a violent weather system that lasted for YEARS over an area many times larger than the planet earth. In addition, we have record that our own planet has undergone massive extinctions that we believe was likely caused by asteroids or commets. So I would say that we have in fact seen a planet sufficiently damaged and have records of others, so the case is made.

The real problem is that what NASA wants to do is pay $1 billion to FIND the asteroid, not to deal with the problem. Preventing it may not be possible, and if it is possible, could cost a lot more than the mere $1 billion.

So, the question is, is it worth x cash to get a smoke detector if the house is locked up tight and we can't get out of it. Or is it better for us to not know, as we can't do anything about it, and just continue on with our lives without worldwide panic.

Re:About $1 Billion

[truckaxle]

Considering the war in Iraq has cost me, the taxpayer, $300 billion

Yes but don't forget the rallying sound bite "They hate our freedoms"

Re:About $1 Billion

[xj]

A smoke detector will not prevent your house from being destroyed by fire, only alert you that is about to be if you do noting about it. It can alert you soon enough to get out with your life, or put out a small fire with a fire extinguisher should you happen to have one and know ho to use it. While a sprinkler system might help save your house and your life with little effort on your part.

Same thing here, we have no "the world is about to be destroyed detector" which would only be useful if we could do something about it, or someplace else to go if it detected anything.

If you had 1 billion dollars why would you want to live in the people's republic of maryland?

Re:About $1 Billion

[liliafan]

Statistically you have a better chance of being killed by an asteroid than by dying in a plane crash.

It is worked out on the basis that lets say 200 people a year die in a plane crash over a 5,000 year period that is just 1 million deaths.

If we got hit by a world killer or even a regional killer asteroid in the next 5,000 years the number of deaths would be a hell of a lot higher for a regional killer you are looking at millions of deaths for a global killer billions of deaths.

This proves two things firstly you have a better chance of dying from an asteroid than a plane crash, and secondly that statistics can say whatever you want them to say.

Re:About $1 Billion

[ThosLives]

...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.

It's all about discount rates and risk. Estimate the loss of a house at $600k, and say that happens once every 30 years. At a discount rate of, say, 5% that's a cost of about $8500 per year - much more than the cost of a smoke detector and insurance, so you pay the latter.

Now, let's say that's once per hundred years - now the rate is only $219 per year. Once per thousand years, and it's less than 0.00000 dollars per year (Excel hit its limits). So, let's say the cost of an asteroid impact is, oh, 1x10^15 dollars. ($1000 trillion). Excel can't do math that small, but Matlab says the annual discounted cost of $1000 trillion at 5% over 1000 years is $3.23 x 10^-8. Heck, increase the cost to $10^24, and the discount is still only $32 / year.

The point is, risks of that scale - even with insane costs, just don't happen often enough to have a significant present value when discounted.

Re:About $1 Billion

[Grishnakh]

B-b-b-but those craters and bones were placed there in order to test our faith!

If an asteroid is going to hit the earth, obviously that is part of the end times, and the Rapture is nigh. Who are we to disrupt God's plan?

I jest. But the scary thing is that there are plenty of people out there who would think I'm serious -- and would agree with me -- and some of those people are sitting in the House of Representatives.

It's actually not that funny: I'd estimate that around half the US population actually believes what you just wrote there. And the number is growing. The US is likely to become a fundamentalist theocracy in 50 years.

Re:About $1 Billion

[sumdumass]

You realize that this statement although seemingly true, goes to validate all the wacko's who belive the way science gets money is to concoct some doom and gloom scenario that without their work, would kill us all.

Some have put this to work in the global warming issue. Some are claiming it is the reason they are blindly rejecting any suggestion the sun or natural causes are causing it.
.
I find it ironic that NASA would resort to this type if ploy for money. We don't have the money to keep you safe so we aren't going to! if we had more money we could protect you. But unfortunately our budget shortfalls will result in your doom and demise. And you go on to validate this by suggesting they show the results effecting the policy makers personally. Simply amazing!

Re:About $1 Billion

[phoenixwade]

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. But when you present that evidence we are in for 20 years of conservatives and their paid "scientists" denying that Asteroids exist, then when the existence of asteroids is irrefutable, they'll deny that we'll ever get hit, then they'll deny that humans can do anything about it.....

[sigh]

Re:About $1 Billion

[rbanffy]

This seems to be an extremely pragmatic approach that could succeed.

Sometimes, I am afraid the human race might just win a collective Darwin Award.

Re:About $1 Billion

[ksheff]

The US pays out a little over $36 billion a year in entitlement payment mistakes. Congress could find the money if they wanted to.

Re:About $1 Billion

[Rakshasa Taisab]

I would prefer the smoke detector.

I'm not sure if I'd be able to extinguish the fire or not, but at least I'd try instead of sleeping my way into death. Besides, for some reason if I were to die, I'd want it to be a death I'd be able to experience. It is a once in a lifetime experience after all.

Re:About $1 Billion

[Iron Condor]

I find it ironic that NASA would resort to this type if ploy for money. We don't have the money to keep you safe so we aren't going to! if we had more money we could protect you. But unfortunately our budget shortfalls will result in your doom and demise.

Why do you find that "ironic"? NASA does whatever congress decides. Congress decides that they don't want NASA to do any kind of science but that they should throw their budget at some kind of rewarmed Apollo program. NASA says "fine, we do what we're being paid for, you hold the purse strings, but the public expects certain things from us and they should at least be informed what services we're NOT providing because their elected officials do not deem them important enough".

If perchance some kind of earth-threatening asteroid shows up and the statements are "we could have done something about it if we had known about it ten years earlier" then YOU are going to wail how NASA has been sitting on their hands and wasting their money on all kinda of crap for all these decades.

This way, at least, the cards are on the table: "You, taxpayer, elect the congress-critters that decide that we shouldn't undertake this (and many other) kind/s of study." You choose.

In the end, NASA is in the employ of you, the people. But it gets its directions from Congress. And where the interests of Congress are in conflict (or even just may be in conflict) with the interests of the people, I'd say NASA is obligated to keep those who foot the bill informed of what those who give the commands have decided should/n't be done.

Re:About $1 Billion

[Red Flayer]

It's actually not that funny: I'd estimate that around half the US population actually believes what you just wrote there. And the number is growing. The US is likely to become a fundamentalist theocracy in 50 years.

I know, it's very dispiriting. But look on the bright side, we get to claim responsibility for the 21st/22nd century dark ages.

Re:About $1 Billion

[Shotgun]

In my opinion, all NASA needs to do is present congress with a scientific statistic ... I'm guessing they could place something like a 1% chance of a decent sized asteroid hitting us within a couple thousand years.

A couple thousand years!?

Dude, do you realize how LONG that is past the next election? No politician that has been elected since the TV became popular give a damn about anything past the next buzzword.

Re:About $1 Billion

[VernoWhitney]

If we're all going to die anyways, who cares about worldwide panic?

Re:About $1 Billion

[sumdumass]

Why do you find that "ironic"? NASA does whatever congress decides. Congress decides that they don't want NASA to do any kind of science but that they should throw their budget at some kind of rewarmed Apollo program.

I fid it ironic because redoing apollo misions is just as much science as hunting for killer asteroids. I find it ironic because as you say, Congress decides what they do with taxpayers funding and NASA seems to want to take this from them. I find it Ironic because NASA is doing other things that doesn't have anything to do with rewarming apollo misions or finding killer asteroids that NASA has decided not to cut or reaportion to this cause. I find it Ironic that you would consider rewarming apollo misiosn not to be science rather the only thing NASA could do is hunt for killer asteroids and have it be considered science.

Maybe Ironic is the wrong word here. Stupid, ignorant or idiotic might be a better fit. Hunting for killer asteroids has nothing to do with science any more then going to the moon or mars does. If anything they involve exactly the same amount of science but apply it differently.

NASA says "fine, we do what we're being paid for, you hold the purse strings, but the public expects certain things from us and they should at least be informed what services we're NOT providing because their elected officials do not deem them important enough".

The public isn't apropriating fuds to NASA. If we listened to the public, A good majority of the public thinks NASA should be dismantled and the funding used for other things. This is one of the reasons why NASA is in the budget problems they are in now.

And how is it sciece when you are procuding results for the purpose of getting funding? I meanhow can we trust the results. We already think that Anything produced by Exxon employies is slanted when concerning global warming. Now are we supposed to belive anything NASA says towards impacts are slanted towards keeping thier spicket turned on? And this brings up a much larger question, If doom and gloom sell, Then Is the insitsance that Global warmingis caused by humans and not the sun based soley on the ability to get more funding? I mean is the negetive reaction to the suggestion that included bling dismissals without anything opinting to were it was wrong, Is this all because they need the doom and gloom to keep funding availible? IS the entire worste case scenario that we aren't hitting despite the insistance of the IPCC and the newly labeled climatoligist scienctist really just a smoke screen to trick funding out of people.

Do you see what this causes? And NASA should know better then this. If there was even a slightest threat of something hitting earth now, There will be a vast groupof people saying Oh, NASA must be trying to trick money out of us again. It won't work this time.

NASA is a science group funded by the public and some comercial services. Science is about being objective and not letting popular opinion sway or skew the facts. Not about swaying and skewing the facts to create a doom and gloom scenario to extort funding form a groups of people. In no other industry is this type of apprach acceptable. I doubt anyone would accept me going around claiming "everyone who doesn't have this medical proceedure before my trip to the jamaca will die". Or "If you don't buy this energizing health drink, I can be responcible for your lack of energy that will result in you eventual death." Yet is it prfectly fine for science to do this when dealing with matters of funding. So i guess the answer is to comercialie NASA and the Global warming investigations so we can get a fair honest and unbiased results? Do we need to comarcialize these parts of science so we can fine and imrision people for falsly representing their research for the attempt to extrot funding?

I cannot believe people invovled in science are supporting this.

This way, at least, the cards are

Re:About $1 Billion

[Grishnakh]

Well I'm hoping The Rest Of The World doesn't succumb to it, so while the Americans are all spending their time in church learning about how evil Science is and how everyone else is going to hell, progress will continue elsewhere.

Re:About $1 Billion

[Cornflake917]

The Iraq adventure has cost far more than $300 billion and if we were not there that money would not have gone to NASA. That money would have gone to more government cheese for the poor or some other program.

That's because the leaders of our government are stupid. If we voted for the right leaders, then it is possible that money would be going to more important things like schools or even NASA programs.

Re:About $1 Billion

[alienmole]

"Sometimes" you're afraid the human race "might" just win a collective Darwin Award? I'm afraid Agent Smith was closer to the mark: "No lieutenant, your men are already dead."

Re:About $1 Billion

[g-san]

You think a Billion to look for earth smashing asteroids is cheap? Wait until you see the bill for the gizmo to destroy them!

And we better pay it now! If we wait, China will build it first, then just tell the rest of the world, "Hey, We know about this asteroid that's gonna hit Earth, send your economy and all your citizens dressed as slaves and..."

Re:About $1 Billion

[alienmole]

My friend, if it is NOT our purpose to find out if such a thing is out there, then what are we ALL breeding, working, spending, and living for?

Just to pass the time until we die? One could argue that the rational thing to do about random disasters is to wait until they happen. You can't control everything, and it isn't necessary to drive yourself crazy trying. Perhaps what you see as the human race "not doing well with regard to disasters" is actually the human race being quite philosophical, as a whole.

Consider the situation with venture capitalists: they don't care if pushing their companies to grow big, fast, results in some of them failing spectactularly, as long as some companies succeed (preferably spectactularly). Similarly, the human race as a whole doesn't feel the loss of a few thousand, or even a few million lives. Now, a true extinction-level event would be something different, and at that point I agree with you: the human group intelligence is not necessarily up to the task of guarding against extinction level events, precisely because of the otherwise rational attitude I've just described.

I like Gandalf's advice (from the movie; it's easier to find than any related text in the books):

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

Re:About $1 Billion

[Seumas]

I am highly amused that you appear to think congress would be swayed by scientific *anything*. Sadly, you would be more successful if you could present them with an aspect of the cause that is more religious in grounding.

*Scratches head*

[Stanistani]

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.

Re:*Scratches head*

[Cedric Tsui]

Nasa does keep a thorough survey of NEOs
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

They (try to) keep track of any asteroids 100m in diameter or greater that can come within 0.05 AU of earth.

The end of the world as we know it,

[AltGrendel]

And I feel fine.

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...

Re:The end of the world as we know it,

[dotzen]

Seems to me this is something the entire planet would be concerned with. Couldn't NASA work with the other agencies (India, China, Russia, EU, etc) to get the funding necessary?

Re:The end of the world as we know it,

[Maxo-Texas]

Considering that we were paying russian space scientists out of our budget, I don't think that's a very good option.
They even held up a couple parts for the ISS until they got their checks.

Doesn't Matter

[Debello]

Whether or not we find the asteroids, there's nothing we can do it about them if one is going to hit us.

Re:Doesn't Matter

[compro01]

actually, we have a number of ideas on how to make them not hit us, several of which is doable with today's tech, such as a gravitational tractor, kinetic impact, or the classic "nuke it".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_deflection_s trategies

Re:Doesn't Matter

[peacefinder]

"Whether or not we find the asteroids, there's nothing we can do it about them if one is going to hit us."

We can land rovers on Mars. Japan came very close to putting a lander on an asteroid. We have space-launchable fission-powered electricity generators. We have ion thrusters that can turn electricity and relatively small masses of reaction gas into steady low thrust for years. Put that all together, and we have the technologies we need to build a vehicle which can rendezvous with an asteroid, land on it, and fire up a thruster to start pushing it very slowly.

If we can build and emplace one, we can build and emplace a dozen. Or a hundred. Or a thousand.

With enough such vehicles - and enough warning - we can probably deflect even large asteroids by enough to miss the Earth on any particular close approach.

So don't go thinking that there's nothing we can do. If we don't detect the threat until just a few years before the potential collision, then yes there may be nothing that can be done. But with at least twenty years' warning, asteroid deflection is very likely to be possible.

And since that's the case, it's going to mighty embarrassing if we find one too late just because we didn't look hard enough.

Re:Doesn't Matter

[Maximum Prophet]

It's entirely possible that we could find a smaller asteroid that would only make a big dent when it hit. If you knew where it would hit several months before, you could move.

Why would that be the case?

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[jimstapleton]

in essence...

Everyone wants nuclear disarmarment...
And there's a big freaking rock heading towards our planet...

Two birds, one stone anyone?

Re:Why would that be the case?

[XxtraLarGe]

That would never work. Didn't you ever see "Armageddon"? That explains it all! It's the difference between holding a firecracker in an open hand versus a clenched fist. If you just throw nukes at a killer asteroid, it's not disintegrating, you're just breaking off small chunks. What you need is a tight-knit, highly competent, yet maverick and juvenile sea platform drilling crew so you can train them as astronauts, and launch them into space so they can embed the nukes in the asteroid's core and blow it to bits!

Re:Why would that be the case?

[GreggBz]

you're such a piece of shit bureaucracy

Are you sure your not talking about our lawyer politicians?

Right, NASA is easy to insult. But they pretty much try to do what they are told with they budget they are allowed to have.

Vote a scientist into congress already.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[Cedric Tsui]

The article indicates that if we find the asteroid, then we in fact know several decades before impact that it will happen.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[jimstapleton]

The point isn't to blow it up.

The point is to knock it off course. A small change in velocity early in it's travels can lead to a larger one in position over time, especially lacking friction.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[Peter Trepan]

Per the movie, you can destroy the asteroid with as little as eighteen hours to go, provided you recruit not just any sea platform oil driller, but the best sea platform oil driller in the world..

Re:Why would that be the case?

[Pwipwi]

Completely, and seeing how we (I mean by that all major nuclear nations) can blow our own planet several dozen of times, I think it's completely in the feasible range :)

Re:Why would that be the case?

[Sciros]

That asteroid was the size of TEXAS. I think if there were something of *that* size heading for us, a nuke wouldn't really do anything to it besides piss it off. And if it hit Earth, it'd probably smash it into countless pieces.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[Rei]

In the real world, that is a concern; you don't want to try to destroy it. However, nuclear weapons can indeed "push" an asteroid through radiation pressure if detonated far enough above the surface. In space, nuclear weapons behave very differently. There's almost no blast wave; that comes from the atmosphere absorbing radiation and becoming superheated; pv=nrt takes over. Instead, you have a huge amount of radiation that stays intense for a long, long, long distance. Hitting the asteroid, you'll directly apply even pressure to it as well as heat up the surface enough that it outgasses (for a good while), providing further thrust.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[Doug Dante]

C'mon, you're saying that NASA had NO PART in the policy decisions that created the International Space Station? I've seen all sorts of "news articles". NASA is engaged in am active and constant campaign to create positive feelings for itself with politicians and the public. Even the Wikipedia page to which you linked is riddled with NASA "contributions". ISS exists in part because NASA lobbied to kill the Superconducting Super Collider, because it represented a funding threat.

Like any other agent, NASA actively campaigns and seeks a more significant roll for itself. As an agency, NASA's core income is government funding for its manned space exploration program. I believe that NASA intentionally selects programs to fund that are part of its overall strategy of manned space exploration, and avoids unmanned space programs and ground based monitoring, which represent a threat to the justification that we need people in space.

So, if Congress wants NASA to monitor asteroids, it's going to have to force the issue by putting a special line item in the budget, and I bet that NASA will campaign against it, saying that it's taking money from the ISS.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[Kijori]

Completely, and seeing how we (I mean by that all major nuclear nations) can blow our own planet several dozen of times, I think it's completely in the feasible range :) When people talk of our ability to blow the planet up "several dozens of times", they mean that we could kill everyone and everything on it. We don't have nearly the power to literally destroy the entire planet.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[jimstapleton]

alternatively, a few meters below the surface, you would turn solid mater into part of the propulsive material.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[Fozzyuw]

The point isn't to blow it up.

The point is to knock it off course. A small change in velocity early in it's travels can lead to a larger one in position over time, especially lacking friction.

Yes, so we can send it at on a collision course with a different planet and make them worry about it. =P This sounds like something from Futurama...

Re:Why would that be the case?

[toleraen]

Blasting exhaust vents in 5...4...3...

Re:Why would that be the case?

[Talchas]

Yup, see the old Orion drive project. Basically you stick a thick "pusher plate" at the rear end of your ship with a way to drop nukes out the rear. Then you set off a nuke at some distance, pushing you forward. Then drop another one + set it off. Its a decent source of propulsion, and something we know we could do - we can build nukes easy.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[moatra]

There is currently ongoing research as to how to most effectively destroy the planet:

http://qntm.org/destroy

Please note that the information at that site should be used for educational purposes only, and by no means should you actually attempt to destroy the world. ^_^

Re:Why would that be the case?

[nuzak]

Every time I heard that line, I always pictured an asteroid that was the size and shape of Texas. Hitting Texas. Making a perfect Texas-shaped cookie-cutter-hole crater where Texas used to be. Yeah, I know it wouldn't happen like that, but it's a combination of fantasy and too many Roadrunner cartoons when growing up.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[dcam]

There needs to be a girl too.

Re:Why would that be the case?

[Shag]

"Knock" is a bad word. You don't want to be playing pool with asteroids for balls. Hit it wrong and you just spin it around... even hitting it right, you don't know where it's going to end up.

"Pull" is a better word. :)

Re:Why would that be the case?

[GodInHell]

Everyone wants nuclear disarmarment...
And there's a big freaking rock heading towards our planet... As I understand it (I am not a phsicist), nukes operate by superheating air and creating a compresion wave which does most of the damage to rocks, buildings, and all them. The actual radiation release creates a good deal of heat, but this is not a sudden conversion of chemicals into gases which creates its own blast effect, vis. most explosives.

So.. probably not a nuke.

-GiH

They'll find the money

[davidwr]

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."

Re:They'll find the money

[Red Flayer]

The problem isn't the money to destroy it or alter it's course... the problem is the money to find it.

If we don't know about it until it hits us (the likeliest current situation) then not only do we not get to try and destroy it, but we don't even get to party like it's 1999.

NASA vs. UNASA

[bronzey214]

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?

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[Eunuchswear]

Oh yeah, like someone is going to give the UN the means to "protect the world".

The UN is powerless 'cos that's how the US (and others) want it to be.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[Applekid]

Because, all cynicism aside, at the end of the day it's the US's job to protect the US. And a global catastrophie would definitely run counter to that credo. No other space agency is stepping up to the plate. Some people are going to get a free ride, but that's the way it is when you lead.

Not to say that United States of America is a leader, but a leader would definitely take on the challenge, or at least a nation that wants to bill itself as a "world leader".

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, centralized power is the root (and first prerequisite) of most of the evil that has occurred in the history of human civilization. All the "private" criminals in the world combined, with their own acts of injustice, can't even begin to approach the evils committed by organized coercion, i.e. government. Government is clearly the most dangerous force that could ever exist (what could possibly be more dangerous than a special "right" to employ coercion against peaceful human beings), and logically, the more centralized the power (the more power concentrated into the hands of the elite few), the more injustice they are capable of.

The worst possible scenario, as far as death, destruction, and injustice, is one massive world government: the pinnicle of centralized power and (listen carefully) the eventual goal of the UN. They have already started the process of acquiring military and economic power of their own, and if you believe this won't result in death, destruction, and injustice, then you haven't been paying attention to history.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[oliderid]

Ok here is the deal. You will be the only industrialized country to respect the Kyoto treaty and the rest of the world takes care of this Asteroid hunt.
Ok? :-)

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[amper]

If you believe that, then you clearly don't understand anything about international politics.

The UN is relatively powerless because that is the nature of international relationships. Each member nation of the United Nations is a sovereign entity, and agreements between such entities can only be reached through cooperation. This is the very reason why each permanent member of the UN Security Council holds veto power. If a sovereign nation disagrees with the rest of the world, it is still within its rights to act on its own.

Go back to school before you start spouting off about the UN.

On the other hand, if you're really advocating for a world government, then perhaps you'd care to state a reasoned case why?

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[Eunuchswear]

Uh you seem to be agreeing with me.

I never said anything about how things should be, just how they are.

Me:

The UN is powerless 'cos that's how the US (and others) want it to be.

You:

Each member nation of the United Nations is a sovereign entity, and agreements between such entities can only be reached through cooperation. This is the very reason why each permanent member of the UN Security Council holds veto power. If a sovereign nation disagrees with the rest of the world, it is still within its rights to act on its own.

Same thing, just more words.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[zippthorne]

It isn't. It's the job of the US to protect the US. Protecting/Establishing democratic, free-market governance in the middle east is seen as a way to turn hostile enemies into neutrals or allies.

Reducing potential threat == protecting the US.

You could argue that it won't accomplish the goal, but that is the goal.

Now stop being pithy and find a way to help the situation rather than just yelling at it.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[ucblockhead]

Because we don't know whether it will hit the US, or some other part of the world, until it is far too late to do anything about it.

Arguing about whose responsibility it is a good way for nothing to get done.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[bronzey214]

Or maybe the UN should write off the outstanding debts to the US because, gee, isn't that what we did in WWI and WWII?

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[zoftie]

If you heard of bureaucracy in UN, compounding that of NASA, we'd be dead before lunch.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[fotbr]

The Brits just finished paying for the lend-lease program. We didn't exactly write ALL debt off.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[amper]

My apologies, then. I took your statement in a manner in which it would seem you did not intend.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[rbanffy]

"This is the very reason why each permanent member of the UN Security Council holds veto power"

I would like to ask why those permanent members should be permanent and why they should have the veto power - I think the UN would function much better if all members had equal rights and equal representation.

The whole thing exists so we can decide conflicts with better means than the "who has more guns" method, so, it makes sense not to allow distortions like this.

Of course, any attempt to do it would face a couple vetoes, so, it will never be done.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[*weasel]

I thought we've long-since billed ourselves the Protectors of the Free World?
Sounds to me like tracking those objects falls under the job description.

In any event, it's a hell of alot cheaper than our playing in the sand.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[ryturner]

"I would like to ask why those permanent members should be permanent and why they should have the veto power - I think the UN would function much better if all members had equal rights and equal representation."

The UN would not exist at all if all the members had equal power. Equal power works great if you are a small powerless country. But if you are large powerfull country (USA, China, Russia, etc), then why would you want to be part of an organization that gives small countries the same power?

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[zippthorne]

Well the brilliance of these smaller impactors is that, while threatening, they're not world-destroying threatening. We don't need them to miss the Earth. We only need them to miss US.

A cynical nation could interpret this to mean that such a body could be directed to land on its enemies.

A more productive nation would suggest nudging just enough to land in an area that is unpopulated, or at least, could be made to be unpopulated in the time available. Say, Antarctica, parts of northern Canada, Or perhaps Siberia (one such event has already occurred there, even), Gobi, Sahara, etc.

Depending on its concentration of minerals it could be far more valuable having impacted than simply pushed away.

Re:NASA vs. UNASA

[RealGrouchy]

My question is - why is it the job of the US to protect the world?

Doesn't the U.S. still control 50% of the world's resources/economy/something?

I'd say it'd be in their interest to protect the world, because they've got the most to lose.

- RG>

Duck and Cover

[billstewart]

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!

Re:Duck and Cover

[Cro Magnon]

That is SO outdated! Nowdays, the solution is duct tape & plastic.

Prioritize - Dump the space station!

[Anonymous Coward]

And mothball the shuttle as soon as hubble gets serviced and put the rest into tracking asteroids.

Re:Prioritize - Dump the space station!

[edward2020]

I agree with mothballing the shuttle. If my memory serves, the original planning for the shuttle was for it to already have been taken out of service to make way for a more economical orbital craft. However, and this is my take on it, since every Congressman has companies within their district that make parts for the Shuttle - when budget time comes around the shuttle program doesn't take many hits. A more efficient craft might not take 10000 contractors 1000000 man hours to make 2 widgets and thus some people/voters/companies would be out of a job/contract.

It's a slow slow process.

[technoextreme]

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.

Re:It's a slow slow process.

[Martin Blank]

I believe you refer to Apophis, the asteroid that will pass within about 35,000km of Earth in 2029. It will make another pass by the Earth in 2036, and has a 1:50,000 chance of striking somewhere between the Kamchatka Peninsula and Venzuela. Apophis was named after the Greek spelling of the Egyptian god Apep the Destroyer.

Re:It's a slow slow process.

[swillden]

Apophis was named after the Greek spelling of the Egyptian god Apep the Destroyer.

Shows what you know. Apophis was named after that nasty Goa'uld dude on Stargate SG-1.

Re:It's a slow slow process.

[alienmole]

Apophis was named after the Greek spelling of the Egyptian god Apep the Destroyer.

Is that how they're sanitizing the Stargate connection? Do you have a reference?

Re:It's a slow slow process.

[Z1NG]

I believe you refer to Apophis, the asteroid that will pass within about 35,000km of Earth in 2029. It will make another pass by the Earth in 2036, and has a 1:50,000 chance of striking somewhere between the Kamchatka Peninsula and Venzuela. Apophis was named after the Greek spelling of the Egyptian god Apep the Destroyer.

Just curious, if there is only a 1:50,000 chance of Apophis hitting Earth, then how the hell would you know where it will hit? It seems like you are recalling something you read somewhere else, and I'm just curious how the statement about impact location was supported.

Re:It's a slow slow process.

[Blastrogath]

The Kamchatka Peninsula is in north-eastern Asia and Venzuela is on the northern end of South America. It's not like he's giving an address, it's a pretty big slice of the earth he's pointing out.

Asteroids usually have huge relative velocities to earth, passing by in minutes or even seconds. This means that even if you only know where it's going approximately you'd know which way the earth would be facing from rotation and the angle of approach.

The probable location of impact (if there is one) is simply based of which side of the earth will be pointing at it as it passes (or doesn't).

Re:It's a slow slow process.

[Martin Blank]

We know the range of space where the asteroid might be. Matching that with where we know the Earth will be allows us the ability to figure out the range of locations where it might hit. You are correct, though, that the information is recalled from something that I read elsewhere.

Apophis has to thread a comparatively very tiny needle -- the area through which it must fly is about 400m across, IIRC. The chances that it will do this are slim, but because our observations and math don't provide the precision required in this multi-body gravitational system, we have to continue waiting to see where it will go.

Congress is the roadblock.

[Shivetya]

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.

Re:Congress is the roadblock.

[Unnngh!]

Yeah, NASA's been crippled on way more fundamental programs than asteroid detection/deflection by decades of political maneuvering. What we need is private space enterprise to develop to the point of being able to deflect an asteroid. Here's praying that the next killer asteroid to approach earth is made of solid gold...

Re:Congress is the roadblock.

[Paulrothrock]

The real issue is that an asteroid hunt doesn't employ people back home, so there's no reason for congressmen to support it. If it involved building huge arrays in the Midwest or Arizona desert and staffing them with hundreds of workers, I'm sure they'd be throwing money at it.

But really it just uses current technology and a few dedicated employees (who all look like nerds, and are therefore distrusted by the congressmen and citizenry alike). It's not big and sexy, so it's ignored.

Re:Congress is the roadblock.

[gad_zuki!]

>The money would have just vanished down some vote buying program that forever indebts us.

Who says? This is what good bookeeping from the government looked like. If we would have kept that path by say, voting someone else in but Bush, the deficit would still have been under control if not paid for. The 300 billion is very serious money and writing it off as 'money that was good as gone' is being willfully ignorant.

Re:Congress is the roadblock.

[rucs_hack]

NASA started life as an organisation designed to gaain political power. That it should therefore be governed by perceived political needs should not be a surprise.

Personally I'm more interested by the Chinese space program. Congress's paranoia aside, it rocks. They are having the same kind of exciting time as america had in the sixties/seventies, and will no doubt exceed the performance of the US. Most interesting is that the backbone of their effort is not the US tech, but that of the former Soviet Union. The russian tech is more basic, but time has shown that their more robust and simpler aproach has produced better stuff.

Yes they are trying out satellite shooting stuff, but so did the US. the US just don't like that someone else can do what they do. The debris they have left in orbit is annoying, but it has a long way to go before it exceeds the crap NASA have left in close earth orbit already.

I don't think China will be dangerous in space long term, the US mostly needs to worry that they will get to Mars first. I beleive that is the reason why the US is now trying to reach Mars. It's a shame that America always needs someone else to get ahead of them before they provide funding to their space scientists. All those guys in NASA and JPL have excellent skills, and they should get all the money they need all the time.

Re:Congress is the roadblock.

[OBeardedOne]

Might the solution not be to give the $1 billion to the military then and ensuring that the money is allocated to doing the work? After all, spotting deadly space rocks and defending the earth against them sounds to me like it comes under the banner of "defence" so maybe it could go in the defence budget. If the military doesn't have the capacity to do the job then they outsource it to NASA like they do with so many other parts of military spending. Problem solved.

Re:Congress is the roadblock.

[RealGrouchy]

See, hunting for killer asteroids requires money, that money can serve Congress better by buying votes through some "aid" program.

I would think that scientists are already suffering, given the current administration's bias against facts.

Therefore, we need an aid program for scientists!

- RG>

Re:Congress is the roadblock.

[aliquis]

Compared to the rest of the world are you really falling behind so much? I live in a rather small country (Sweden) but I doubt EU/Europe overall does much more science than the US, especially in space. Or?

Aflack, err Affleck

[jadin]

Yet we had enough money to make a (horrendous) movie about such possible events. We very well might deserve anything that hits us.

Re:Aflack, err Affleck

[Gr8Apes]

I'd mod you up, just for disparaging Armageddon. That piece of tripe was terrible. I thought deep Deep Impact was much better, although too much mushy story in there, so still only a C+ at best.

Re:Aflack, err Affleck

[scotbot]

Anything is better than Meteor with Sean Connery. The not-so-special FX speak for themselves.

Re:Aflack, err Affleck

[Gr8Apes]

Oh good god. Was that the one with the 3 waves of ICBMs (US and USSR) attempting to blow up the asteroid?

If so, I'd agree with you that a movie has to be pretty bad to top that one. Here's one that easily bests it at being horrible: Reptilicus. :)

Re:Aflack, err Affleck

[HedRat]

That's probably because you haven't seen "Night of the Comet". After sitting through that, I had a look of bewilderment much like when you ask Wynonna Ryder for a sales receipt.

Re:Aflack, err Affleck

[Gr8Apes]

I have seen Night of the Comet, it's bad, but funny bad and at least watchable. Both those other movies aren't.

A contrarian look at it

[mi]

But hey, it's just the potential end of the world, so nothing much to worry about there.

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...

Re:A contrarian look at it

[EMeta]

Also increased:

The amount of people whom it will kill.
The capacity we have to do something about it.

Re:A contrarian look at it

[frankie]

Contrary to what people may think, the danger of getting hit by an asteroid has not increased

Contrary to what YOU may think, the danger of getting hit is (and always has been) non-trivial. A middling-sized brick hit Tunguska only 99 years ago, and did as much damage as the largest H-bombs of the cold war could. And when Comet SL9 broke up and hit Jupiter in 1994, the largest fragment had a 6 TERATON detonation with a fireball the same size as Earth. There's plenty more where they came from.

It's money worth spending, especially compared to the various rogue white elephants we've paid for in the past 5 years.

You call that a state?

[RobertB-DC]

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.

Re:You call that a state?

[networkBoy]

Texas? Here in Quebec, we call that a "region". Call me when you have something that can devastate a province. ;-) Quebec? Here in the former Soviet Union we call that a ... aw fuckit

Re:You call that a state?

[Aladrin]

Seems like an odd name for it. Is that English or Russian?

Re:You call that a state?

[amper]

Well, here in New Jersey, we have lots of names for Texas, Quebec, *and* the former Soviet Union...but we're in mixed company, so I won't repeat them here.

Aussies, on the other hand, we find amusing.

Re:You call that a state?

[caluml]

Man. I was going to do something funny regarding Soviet Russia with Google's Translator, but apparently, Slashdot doesn't like that. Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

Re:You call that a state?

[Captain Nitpick]

Maryland? Here in Texas, we call that a "county". Call me when you have something that can devastate a real state.

Texas? Here in Quebec, we call that a "region". Call me when you have something that can devastate a province. ;-)

Texas is bigger than Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and I'm just going to stop listing there. To be fair, no Texas county is bigger in area than Maryland.

Re:You call that a state?

[babyrat]

Yeah Texas is pretty big - you can only fit about 3 and a half of them in Ontario...

Re:You call that a state?

[amper]

(Disclaimer: I am a native New Yorker, and my family has lived in NYC for over 80 years.)

Funny though, that New Jersey doesn't have an 8.25% sales tax rate and many essential items like clothing are entirely tax free, so hordes of people from NYC who can afford to keep a car in The City (and yes, "The City" will always mean NYC to me) frequently spend a goodly portion of their money here rather than there... ...but then, you don't get a lot of French-Canadian tourists crowding the beaches of Manhattan with their socks-and sandals getups in the summer, so I suppose it all works out in the end.

Re:You call that a state?

[PoopDaddy]

Yes, it's well-established that the worth of a state and its residents is solely based on that state's dimensions. You are more than justified in basing your pride on the size of the state you happen to live in - a factor over which you have no influence.

Re:You call that a state?

[garompeta]

"Scientists say there is a 1-in-45,000 chance that it could hit in 2036." Does that mean that is more probable to be hit by an asteroid that to win the lottery?... o_O

Re:You call that a state?

[g1zmo]

Not knowing the relative sizes, I got curious. According to Wikipedia Ontario=917,741 km^2 and Texas=695,622 km^2, so about 1.3 Texases (Texi?) per Ontario.

I'd Rather Know

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:I'd Rather Know

[Anonymous Coward]

That way I could greet the end of the world heavily in debt and with an empty wine cellar.

Fortunately, I don't have do anything once the asteroid is detected. I'm already heavily in debt and with an empty wine cellar.

Re:I'd Rather Know

[SamSim]

It's worse than that. The end of the world is EASY to deal with. But the chances are, whatever asteroid eventually hits us will NOT kill everybody on Earth. Extinction level events are far rarer than simple cataclysms. If you live inland, you'll survive. And it will be you who has to pick up the pieces. Looking forward to it? I know I'm not.

Supernova insurance

[hoggoth]

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...

Re:Supernova insurance

[The Living Fractal]

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.

The sun cannot supernova. And BTW, we are monitoring the sun. All the time. It's not just a nova that poses a danger. How about solar storms? I would sure like to know if the Sun is about to spew electromagnetic radiation all over
us, especially if it was a very powerful storm capable of knocking out electronics. We might not be able to stop it, but we can mitigate the consequences.

The rest of your post is unrelated and asinine.

Consider this: we have auto insurance because there are wrecks frequently.

Well, on an astronomical scale, there are impacts frequently. That might not translate into tomorrow, or it might. Point is, we don't know. Don't you think we SHOULD?

You seem to think there's nothing we can do about it.

In this respect, you are wrong.

TLF

Re:Supernova insurance

[hoggoth]

Humor, meet 'Living Fractal'. 'Living Fractal', humor.

My joke had a point, which was illustrated by gross hyperbole to the point of ridiculousness, or as you put it, 'unrelated and asinine'.

If we found a comet headed right at us there is nothing we could do about it. Not even Bruce Willis could save us.
The universe is full of dangers on a scale so large that we would have no hope of avoiding them should they involve us.
Some of them are not merely possible, but inevitable. Everyone dies eventually. Even the Earth.

"insurance" is meaningless when there is nothing left to benefit from the payout.

That is not to say we shouldn't do something about the dangers we CAN avoid, mitigate, or prepare for, like charcoal grilled food and sunspots. But let's not get too upset about the dangers we can't do anything about.
Case in point: I have a fire detector. I can detect and avoid the worst repercussions of a fire. I do not spend any time worrying about an airplane crashing on my head. It could happen but I cant do anything about it.

Re:Supernova insurance

[MattHaffner]

I do not spend any time worrying about an airplane crashing on my head. It could happen but I cant do anything about it.

No, but you probably pay taxes which fund the FAA. They worry for you so you don't have to.

Re:Supernova insurance

[hoggoth]

> No, but you probably pay taxes which fund the FAA. They worry for you so you don't have to.

Ah, if only there were a UUA (Universal Universe Administration) to make sure all those objects in space are behaving!

Re:Supernova insurance

[The Living Fractal]

"If we found a comet headed right at us there is nothing we could do about it. Not even Bruce Willis could save us.
The universe is full of dangers on a scale so large that we would have no hope of avoiding them should they involve us.
Some of them are not merely possible, but inevitable. Everyone dies eventually. Even the Earth."

How do you know there is nothing we could do about it? Have you researched every possible angle? Do you know that if we decided to employ our nuclear weapons (the USA alone probably has enough) against it in a all-out effort to deflect the comet/asteroid that we couldn't succeed? No, you don't. Do you know if we developed a spalling laser using said nuclear weapons (to avoid actually having to go out there with the nukes) we couldn't deflect the mass? No, you don't. And I think the people on Earth (ok, except you) wouldn't just give up so easily.

TLF

Re:Supernova insurance

[hoggoth]

NASA seems to agree with you:

How can we protect ourselves?

NEO impacts are the only major natural hazard that we can effectively protect ourselves against, by deflecting (or destroying) the NEO before it hits the Earth. The first step in any program of planetary defense is to find the NEOs; we can't protect against something we don't know exists. We also need a long warning time, at least a decade, to send spacecraft to intercept the object and deflect it. Many defensive schemes have been studied in a preliminary way, but none in detail. In the absence of active defense, warning of the time and place of an impact would at least allow us to store food and supplies and to evacuate regions near ground zero where damage would be the greatest.

Re:Supernova insurance

[bigpat]

That is not to say we shouldn't do something about the dangers we CAN avoid, mitigate, or prepare for, like charcoal grilled food and sunspots. But let's not get too upset about the dangers we can't do anything about. I agree that pushing away a 500 mile across asteroid heading straight for us with just a few days notice isn't practical. But a 250 meter wide asteroid like apophis could certainly be dealt with with our current technology and probably with a price tag that makes it reasonable to have several back up plans. Given that an asteroid of this size would cause regional devastation and kill millions of people, it seems a worthwhile expenditure of money.

Earth-science priorities vs. Republicans on Mars

[billstewart]

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.

news flash

[Kohath]

News flash: Government agency asks for more funding

Hm. Nice planet. Shame if anything happened to it.

[andreamer]

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."

time to make moves

[penguinbroker]

"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.

Re:Funding something else matters more to US gov..

[TheCRAIGGERS]

Obviously, these are terrorist asteroids launched from the bug planet.

Finally!

[chill]

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.

Re:Finally!

[novus ordo]

"By the time NASA is done, Congress should approve funding for survey missions to the Asteroid Belt."

Mission approved! BRB.

$1

[mastershake_phd]

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.

Re:$1

[stubear]

"But hey, it's just the potential end of the world, so nothing much to worry about there."

Last I checked, the U.S. isn't the entire world. Perhaps Europe, Russia and China could kick in a bit to save the planet too. If the rest of the world is going to continue to utilize the resources of the U.S. tax payer they perhaps the rest of the world had best be prepared to accept U.S. sovereignty.

Re:$1

[n2art2]

yeah. . . and the next $1 per person should be the same way. . . no debate. . . . and the next time, and the next time, and the next time. . . .

give an inch. . .

Re:$1

[mastershake_phd]

yeah. . . and the next $1 per person should be the same way. . . no debate. . . . and the next time, and the next time, and the next time. . . . give an inch. . .

Ok, theyre shouldnt be much of a debate. We have been deficit spending for most of my life. Whats $300 million.

Re:$1

[clintp]

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.

That's about $.05 per person on the planet. Lemme know when you manage to collect India and China's fair share, and I'll rummage through my couch for my family's.

Re:$1

[Malakusen]

Shit, I'll kick in fifty bucks to keep me and mind from being plastered by asteroids.

Re:$1

[ucblockhead]

I'd rather pay $1 for safety than argue about "fairness", and be not safe.

Life Imitating Art

[blueZhift]

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.

Re:Funding something else matters more to US gov..

[GundamFan]

It could be argued that not finding terrorists is more in the best interest of the government at this point. If they find them then there won't be anything to distract the American people from seeing the problems that the administration is trying to ignore.

So yes they will spend money "looking" for terrorists but they won't ever "find" enough to call the job done.

Bonus points for locking up innocent people and trying to make them look like bad guys to save face by the way.

What a shame!

[Pedrito]

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.

Re:What a shame!

[RetroGeek]

It was just a few years ago that a fairly sizable asteroid passed between the Earth and the Moon

Sure, and how much media coverage did it get?

One or two stories, and then back to celebrity tracking.

What SHOULD have happened was a long series of stories about the event and the consequences.

Re:What a shame!

[RealGrouchy]

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.

Yeah, but from a few years out, how certain would we be that it would actually hit us?

- RG>

It's a shame..

[zyl0x]

..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.

That's a bit of a stretch to just say.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:That's a bit of a stretch to just say.

[r_jensen11]

That would only work if the people working on said project thought they were going to be participants in the final stage of the project. Once they realize that there's no chance that they can partake in said colony, they're going to stay away from the project and enjoy themselves for the rest of their shortened life.

or...

[lpcustom]

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.

Re:or...

[rez_rat]

No, easier would be for Chuck Norris just to start doing PUSHUPS to shove us all out of the way of any killer asteroids.

So, forget spending money! We have Chuck Norris!! (for now)

Think out side the BOX

[Anon-Admin]

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 :)

Re:Think out side the BOX

[Cedric Tsui]

Such a system exists. It works on the simple principle that asteroids move while stars do not. I believe they use wide field of view lenses. I know they cost much more than $200.

Existing systems include (Wikipedia)
        * The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) team
        * The Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) team
        * Spacewatch
        * The Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search (LONEOS) team
        * The Catalina Sky Survey (CSS)
        * The Campo Imperatore Near-Earth Objects Survey (CINEOS) team
        * The Japanese Spaceguard Association
        * The Asiago-DLR Asteroid Survey (ADAS)

Such a registry exists
ftp://ftp.lowell.edu/pub/elgb/astorb.html

Naming rights belong to the discovering team, which is actually a bit of a sore point since these systems are SOO much more efficient at finding comets than amateur astronomers. So it's almost impossible to find and name something after yourself. It is simply given a number designation followed by the acronym of the team which found it.

Mining rights? Err... Yeah... Right.

Re:Think out side the BOX

[IAmATuringMachine!]

How sad is it, though, that you conceived the notion of selling objects in the known universe, as if interstellar conquest and ownership is the purview of single organisms on one of many planets in one of billions and billions galaxies. :) -- Laugh, it's funny.

Re:Think out side the BOX

[IAmATuringMachine!]

That is to say, I wonder if anyone owns the earth, and when they're coming to pick it up...

There is a real concern

[s31523]

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!

Re:There is a real concern

[Arimus]

1:45,000 is still better odds than winning the lottery - yet people do...

Re:There is a real concern

[MattHaffner]

Still, why is the US the only country tasked with worrying about this.

Because all the other countries are busy worrying about whether we are going to destroy them first.

Re:There is a real concern

[HedRat]

Typically asteroids are odorless unless of course you mean an asteroid like the one in the movie "Joe Dirt".

Re:There is a real concern

[Arimus]

I know.... I was just in a daft mood due to extreme boredom at work.

But as to your point... bear in mind we don't know how many asteriods have a 1:45,000 or better (worse for us, better for the rock) chance of hitting us so the realistic odds of getting a rock in the kisser are unknown.

Re:There is a real concern

[MattHaffner]

Yah, like all the Middle Eastern towel heads are going to do anything for science/space research.

I know. It's not like most of the bright stars in the sky have Arabic names or anything.

Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

This should be funded by the nations of the world, not just one country.

Hope the MPAA doesn't see this

[penguinbrat]

Quota from Armageddon - "No offense General, but it's a big ass sky..."

The fatalism in this thread is bizarre

[rbanzai]

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.

But there IS something we can do about them

[Cedric Tsui]

I disagree. If we determine an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, we can deflect it.

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:

Earth got a scare in 2004, when initial readings suggested an 885-foot asteroid called 99942 Apophis seemed to have a chance of hitting Earth in 2029. But more observations showed that wouldn't happen. Scientists say there is a 1-in-45,000 chance that it could hit in 2036.

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.

essential human nature

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:essential human nature

[stratjakt]

Regardless of what "science"-ish crap you saw on Discovery Channel, we have no defense against a true "planet killer". Just a bunch of theoretical crap about gravity machines or huge parachutes or other fanciful stuff. Stuff that doesn't exist, stuff that we don't even know if it's possible.

There's nothing we can do about giant asteroids. There's nothing we can do to prevent another tsunami, or another hurricane Katrina. All we can do is "batten down the hatches" here at home, and hope for the best.

Of course, we expect "teh government" to save us, and the whole world expects the US government to do something about it. Part of me laughed, and part of me cried, after Katrina, reading articles that quite seriously tried to blame the hurricane itself on Bush (not the reaction to it, but the fact there was a hurricane - was the presidents fault).

Whatever, NASA is just capitalizing on this to get their budget boosted. Lately they've been launching broken satellites, blwoing up space shuttles, and having probes slam into the desert. This is just a media game: "see, we're important! we're not like those other bloated government agencies, we want to save the world!"

Giving NASA a billion dollars would not solve the problem, or even help. It's like giving a crackhead 20 bucks and expecting him to go buy a healthy meal and change of socks with it.

Re:essential human nature

[khallow]

It doesn't take much to modify the orbit of an asteroid. Let's suppose that you have twenty years to prepare. An immediate velocity change of a kilometer a day, can turn that hit into a near miss that will knock the asteroid into an orbit that will in turn interact down the road with another planet and completely remove the threat of the asteroid (ie, it no longer crosses Earth's orbit). If you have more time than that, then it just gets better.

Tunguska Event

[eldavojohn]

Unless a sizable chunk of something streaks across the heavens, lights up the night's sky, and obliterates an area where there are a few hundred thousand people with cell-phone cameras and video cameras and a CNN satellite truck nearby, no one is really going to care.

Why don't they just show them pictures and proof of the Tunguska Event and play the emotional card a la Fox News? "Find out what is already going to kill your children!"

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?

Eh

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Terrists in Spaaaaaaace

[RyoShin]

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!

Re:Terrists in Spaaaaaaace

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

I like your thinking but NORAD is already tracking every bit of space trash in orbit.

Bathtub drowning

[Catbeller]

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.

Re:Bathtub drowning

[jwiegley]

I'm not sure this is a "neocon" problem. The other "neoliberal" parties have contributed an equal share to the problem.

Secondly, I don't see how any government spending isn't "discretionary". Somebody chooses to spend every last penny. The government doesn't need to eat or be sheltered and therefore doesn't have a mandatory spending requirement to live. But using the word "discretionary" is a nice way of saying "Oh but see you have to fund all these non-discretionary programs because we don't have a choice. See, it's not our fault".

Last, while DOD-military, if considered "discretionary", is the number one annual discretionary expense ($424B) it should be pointed out for fairness of all sides that it is NOT the number one government line-item expenditure. That lofty title belongs to Social Security ($540B). And by 2010 Medicare will have caught up to the military ($460B vs $483) and that right now the combination of Medicare and Medicaid also exceeds the DOD-military budget ($539B). (And it is useful to note that for all intents and purposes discretionary spending is 100% military, there is no other discretionary spending.)

Note the one caveat to my argument is that discretionary funds also include the Non-DOD military spending which I don't think is fair to include because that money pays private sector companys and produces a lot of the technological advancement and products that we all use in our homes so it is more difficult to argue it as wasteful. But if we do then, yes the total military budget is larger than either Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid... but not combined since their total is $1.1T and the discreationary is $0.92T. (Since we really seem to discussing budget summary line items and not individual accounts.)

And yes, personally I think that Social Security/Medicare and Medicaid are far more wasteful than the military spending. Fine, call me heartless but I'm sick of paying for everybody else's inability to take care of themselves. But if we are going to throw stones at wasteful spending we might as well spread it fairly and hit every target worthy of blame.

Re:Bathtub drowning

[constantnormal]

EXACTLY!

And we don't need to look very far to find examples of nations that have taken this path, and see where they are today.

Take, for instance, the USSR, which squandered its future in a hopeless game of economic chicken, pouring more and more of their nation's resources into military resources, until eventually their economy imploded and shattered the country into the previous nations.

And we can look at what kind of governments the fragments of the USSR have today -- in particular, Russia. The pattern of assassination and rule by intimidation follows very closely the path taken by the brown shirts in 1930's Germany. And Vladimir Putin is the envy of Dubya, who wishes devoutly that he could run the US the way his good buddy Vlad runs Russia (before you rise to lynch me, go back and review history).

I can certainly imagine the US fracturing along the lines of red and blue states, with the reds arriving at a charismatic, fundamentalist leader eager to bring on the Resurrection and Armageddon. In a nation where most of the people do not believe in Evolution, where skills in the sciences are plummeting in comparison to the rest of the world, this is a VERY believable scenario.

Believe me, killer asteroids are pretty far down the list of things that could wipe out humanity. All of the most likely spots on the list are events due only to the actions of humanity.

And what happens when they FIND one?

[JackMeyhoff]

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).

Re:And what happens when they FIND one?

[FishWithAHammer]

Protip: As soon as you say "Zionist," you give yourself away as a fucking loon.

Food for thought.

Re:And what happens when they FIND one?

[JackMeyhoff]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism It is a valid term.

Re:And what happens when they FIND one?

[JackMeyhoff]

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=israel +spy+america&search=Search Ask alot of Jewish people, the main problems in are caused by Zionism, this dates back to all the world wars. They did the same with the UK then dumped the UK and switched focus to America for their manipulation. My point was about the government not having your interests at heart in any scenario, not specifically an Asteroid impact scenario.

Re:And what happens when they FIND one?

[Grashnak]

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). Wow, you have nuclear powered bunkers in your apartment buildings? What do you do with the waste? Wow, you have sirens blaring all the time and if they stop you know there's a problem? How odd, one would have thought that the opposite was more conducive to sleeping.

re: It's like the lottery!

[King_TJ]

NASA needs a "You can't win if you don't play!" ad campaign!

Link for Armageddon

[XxtraLarGe]

Forgot to use the preview button, and my URL was not formed properly. Here you go! "Armageddon"

Priorities

[wiredlogic]

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.

Re:Earth-science priorities vs. Republicans on Mar

[sadler121]

...and if they've got to put it into planning for human missions to places that should really be handled by robots...

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.

open source

[dustball23]

"Traditional" asteroid hunts are EXPENSIVE.

Why don't they make use of open source software? Sasteroids is free.

What about Halliburton?

[peacefinder]

Doesn't Halliburton do asteroid diversion?

According to Wikipedia

[TheNinjaroach]

..well I just checked and according to Wikipedia one might hit in the next twelve days!

Fear market is tapped out

[amightywind]

But hey, it's just the potential end of the world, so nothing much to worry about there.

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.

Ironically

[ClosedSource]

I've heard that if you took the money spent making Deep Impact and Armageddon, you'd have enough money to do the search.

Asteroid, Shmasteroid

[6-tew]

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.

As NASA puts it...

[NiceRoundNumber]

Nothing we can afford to see here. Please move along.

Wouldn't it suck

[roman_mir]

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.

A bottle of encapsulated crap pills

[Programmer_In_Traini]

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 ?)

So What?

[trongey]

I'm pretty sure that if I get smashed by an asteroid I won't be too concerned.

Re:So What?

[Prof.Phreak]

I'm pretty sure that if I get smashed by an asteroid I won't be too concerned.

Indeed. It's the waiting that everyone cannot stand.

Re:So What?

[trongey]

I'm pretty sure that if I get smashed by an asteroid I won't be too concerned.

Indeed. It's the waiting that everyone cannot stand.

Yeah, sorry about that, but you've probably got another 25 years or so to put up with me. C'est la vie.

Re:Jesus on an asteroid

[griffjon]

People have believed that the end is near (in an xtian sense) for over 2000 years now, and in other mythologies for even longer. It's when people change their day-to-day behavior towards that belief that it gets ... dangerous.

He has an implied point

[Quiet_Desperation]

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?

In soviet Russia...

[Floritard]

the killer asteroids cannot find the funding to track you!

how are they supposed to cause massive damage...

[Logicalmoron]

if they can't flip the earth on its back?

They Need to Rename the Dept of Homeland Security

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

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!

Scare Tactics - Hurray!

[Embedded Geek]

This smacks of political scare tactics, albeit in the best possible way. It reminds me of the classic case where a mayor needs money for long term infrastructure needs for the city, but can't sign on any taxpayers for something as unsexy as better sewers. What does he do? He budgets the sewers and threatens to close some firehouses, daring anyone to call his bluff.

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.

NASA: In 6 months, we're all going to die...

[TimeForGuinness]

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?

obligatory

[mjolnir_]

in soviet russia, asteroid finds YOU!

oh, wait.

Re:Earth-science priorities vs. Republicans on Mar

[rbanffy]

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.

you're an idiot

[circletimessquare]

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

As 1/16 Inuit...

[bluemonq]

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.

There is no such thing as "spending on tax cuts"

[cascadingstylesheet]

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.

paying to save the world

[dyob]

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?

Nobody paid for a Tsunami warning network either

[xtal]

It cost 100,000+ people their lives.

Now there's a network.

Just hope it's the not the earth destroying kind that hits.

International Effort?

[truckaxle]

Why is that not an international effort? A NEO is just as likely to take out China or Iran as New York or Kansas.

Re:International Effort?

[Prof.Phreak]

A NEO is just as likely to take out China or Iran as New York or Kansas.

In every movie I've ever seen, New York always gets it the worst. The rest of the world doesn't seem to suffer at all.

Oh well...

[Eric Damron]

At least when the big one hits, all of the crap in the atmosphere will solve the global warming problem...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Now we know

[mdsolar]

Now we know why protecting Earth was dropped from NASA's mission statement http://www.physorg.com/news72971590.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?
--
Energy delivered from space with no shipping charge: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:Now we know

[geekoid]

It was dropped because of all the hard evidence in support of global warming it kept discovering.

Re:Now we know

[mdsolar]

That was the understand the planet part. NASA can't do a lot on the protection front for gloabal warming. My firend Ed Lu is persuaded it could do something on the asteroid front though.

headline misleading

[geekoid]

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.

No offense to the fallen, but...

[emagery]

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.

its not broken, dont fix it

[Programmer_In_Traini]

>>Congrats on the stupidest comment I've seen today.
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 ... like military!

>>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 ?

I'm not into Astro...

[NRISecretAgent]

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 =).

Re:I'm not into Astro...

[Shag]

Well, it'd need to have significantly more mass than a Shuttle, and be able to get further from earth than a Shuttle, but you're thinking of the gravity tractor proposed a couple years ago by two of NASA's own astronauts.

Duuuuude

[mgabrys_sf]

Someone in the associated press has aligned themselves with the surfer community. "killer" indeed! The Dude abides.

Had a quick word with God about this one.

[EddyPearson]

He said my License was invalid. Couldn't help me. Referred me to the creation department. I'm still on hold.

You can have the moon and mars, I'll take earth

[Comboman]

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.

Use the Force

[Doc Ruby]

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.

It's Not Cost-Effective

[mkcmkc]

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

NASA and US Saviors of the World?

[DoomfrogBW]

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.

Bureaucratic Grandstanding

[kilgor]

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.

Asteroid Katrina

[bussdriver]

Who says history doesn't repeat itself??
Name the asteroid Katrina.

Share the cost

[Kyeetza]

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?

127 Days to Bellus!....

[awfar]

I always wondered if I would ever hear it, for real...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044207/

Sorry, spent all our money, good luck though!

[fantomas]

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.

Easy way to get funding:

[quixoticsycophant]

NASA just needs to classify it under the War on Terra.

In Soviet Union...

[andreyw]

... 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.

Idealistic moderators?

[alienmole]

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.

Hard to worry when you're dead

[StikyPad]

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.

They've already funded this. Did they forget?

[Shag]

NASA and others have already funded a whole bunch of things to find asteroids. Like:

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.)

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.

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. :) I also know and work with the (in)famous David Tholen, who found that 2029 rock, Apophis.

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!

Re:There is no such thing as "spending on tax cuts

[Logic and Reason]

I'm now OK with money being taken from people (including me) by force and spent on "good things".

Out of curiosity, why have you become OK with it (principles, practicality, defeatism, etc.)? And do you have an answer to the questions of who may collect the money, and on what "good things" they may spend it?

Re:Hm. Nice planet. Shame if anything happened to

[rabiddeity]

And Maryland is very very close to Washington, D.C. Hmm.

Oh wait, I guess cockroaches can survive pretty much anything.

Real state != TX

[RockWolf]

From this link: http://au.travel.yahoo.com/guide/australia/queensl and/index.html

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

A more effective plan

[Spasmodeus]

In my opinion, all NASA needs to do is present congress with a scientific statistic claim with percent confidence of global destruction. I think a better idea would be to sit congress down, make them watch Armageddon, and tell them "If you don't fund our program, the earth could fall victim to more shitty movies just like this!

FUD

[kwoff]

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.

A word from the mutant...

[ArsenneLupin]

And then throuhg in something about how it will effect their children that is even more false. False, yes, but at least it would bolster your cause. See, the effect on the children would have been by choice. Well, not the children's own choice, but their parents' choice. Their parents who voted congresscritters into office who cut the funding to the program which could have prevented the asteroid impact that caused such outpouring of happiness...

SCNR...

Re:A word from the mutant...

[sumdumass]

False, yes, but at least it would bolster your cause. See, the effect on the children would have been by choice. Well, not the children's own choice, but their parents' choice. Their parents who voted congresscritters into office who cut the funding to the program which could have prevented the asteroid impact that caused such outpouring of happiness...SCNR...

lol... But you see, In the real world, when you are forced to make a decision about your money based on purposly falsified information to bolster your cause, we have created a criminal act. And whoever does this deserves to go to jail!

I find it simple amazing givin out previous conversations that you would even consider As an alternative, I suggest you come up with some "evidence" suggesting that an asteroid impact would transform their children into mutants, preferably homosexual ones; or, that the asteroids are a Arab Terrorist Plot. Double points if the asteroid is Mexican. as a valid action.

I mean threatening someone that "their kids will be mutated into homosexual because of an Arab terrorist asteroid made of mexicans". I have always argues that sexuality is choice. I think I have even discussed this with you. But to suggest this is a mutation for any reason is somewhat appalling. Maybe this is the new age science and anything goesno matter how stupid or who is steps on.

Re:A word from the mutant...

[ArsenneLupin]

I find it simple amazing givin out previous conversations that you would even consider [...] as a valid action.

Chill! Nobody here is seriously considering that NASA should use this line to convince the Republicans in Congress. It's a joke (yes, a j.o.k.e. , as in woosh, that flew right over your head!) poking phun at the Republicans' homophobia, by suggesting that they would somehow consider gay kids a worse catastrophe than global destruction.

I have always argues that sexuality is choice. Well the most interesting part of your argument was your redefinition of choice. With such definition, just about anything could be choice. For instance, the flooding of New Orleans may have happened due the choice of an anonymous butterfly in the Brasilian Amazon rainforest.

Re:A word from the mutant...

[sumdumass]

Chill! Nobody here is seriously considering that NASA should use this line to convince the Republicans in Congress. It's a joke (yes, a j.o.k.e. , as in woosh, that flew right over your head!) poking phun at the Republicans' homophobia, by suggesting that they would somehow consider gay kids a worse catastrophe than global destruction.

Is it now. I thought they were serious because the entire intent of the article was to scare people into requesting funding. Sorry, my bad.

Actualy I knew it wasn't serious. But it is the underlying principle that people are seriously considering doom and gloom for profit scenarios I have issue with. I think it is even worse when this is being touted by a comunity who claims they just look at the facts or evidence and makes decisions from there.

Well the most interesting part of your argument was your redefinition of choice. With such definition, just about anything could be choice. For instance, the flooding of New Orleans may have happened due the choice of an anonymous butterfly in the Brasilian Amazon rainforest.

Well, although there are some zen like idealisms that think everything is conected and a butterfly flapping it's winge could cause a storm halfway around the world, I'm not one of them. And I never redefines choice. My position is and always has been that you make choices about sexuality. You may prefere certain things like redheads over blonds or the color blue to black, Maybe bitter foods to spicy hot ones. This is choice too caused by influences over your life time.

And the only reason I brought it up was to show how absurd it is to enven imply that someone could be mutated into being queer. Reguardless of it being a joke. Is the real punchline that people can be mutated or that homosexuals are mutated freaks? I dunno.

Re:A word from the mutant...

[ArsenneLupin]

Well, although there are some zen like idealisms that think everything is conected and a butterfly flapping it's winge could cause a storm halfway around the world, I'm not one of them. Actually, this doesn't have anything to do with "zen idealism". More with chaos theory. The idea is that weather is so dependant on "initial conditions" that a tiny change now (such as caused by a butterfly flapping its wings in a different way) could snowball into something very big 6 years from now.

Ok, while true (according to chaos theory), this still does not mean that the butterfly exerts choice. Indeed, for the choice to be meaningful in a classical sense, the butterfly would need to make an informed choice, i.e. be able to anticipate the effect of its actions. And this is notoriously not the case, as another butterfly flapping its wings 10 seconds later could "undo" the choice of the first one, or even turn it into its opposite.

For me, choice is not really choice, unless it is informed choice. By drinking that last coke, you didn't really chose to harm your diabetic colleague, because you couldn't know that he would have a seizure on that very afternoon. Likewise, by playing with your willy as a toddler you didn't chose to be gay, because at such age you had no way of knowing that such would be the consequence, or even what that means (if even that was true...).

Maybe bitter foods Actually, there are genes that govern how you experience the taste of certain foods such as broccoli. Some people experience them as being much more bitter than most of us, and this is apparently a genetic predisposition.

Is the real punchline that people can be mutated or that homosexuals are mutated freaks? No, the punchline is that some conservative homophobes are more concerned about their kids being mutated into queers than about half of the human population being wiped out.

Re:A word from the mutant...

[sumdumass]

Actually, this doesn't have anything to do with "zen idealism". More with chaos theory. The idea is that weather is so dependant on "initial conditions" that a tiny change now (such as caused by a butterfly flapping its wings in a different way) could snowball into something very big 6 years from now.

Yep For some reason I remeber some oriental guy holding a butterfly or something like that on a comercial for something and the wording went that way. But your right.

Ok, while true (according to chaos theory), this still does not mean that the butterfly exerts choice. Indeed, for the choice to be meaningful in a classical sense, the butterfly would need to make an informed choice, i.e. be able to anticipate the effect of its actions. And this is notoriously not the case, as another butterfly flapping its wings 10 seconds later could "undo" the choice of the first one, or even turn it into its opposite.

Of course not. The buterfly does it out of instinct. Very little of their life is experienced by choice if any at all. We cannot be certain that their mind exhibits the ability to chose at all. You started taking us along this butterfly journey so i give up, Why?

For me, choice is not really choice, unless it is informed choice. By drinking that last coke, you didn't really chose to harm your diabetic colleague, because you couldn't know that he would have a seizure on that very afternoon. Likewise, by playing with your willy as a toddler you didn't chose to be gay, because at such age you had no way of knowing that such would be the consequence, or even what that means (if even that was true...).

Oh.. Well, here are a few dispositions you need to cler first. If you knew that one coke needed to be there in case he went into a siezure, then you chose to harm him. You can blame it on your lack of concern or compasion for his need. If you had no idea, then there is this thing called unintended consequences. Just like the toddler playing with his willy. But he has no idea about sexuality. A toddler cannot become gay at this point. And no one else really does untill they hit puberty. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there isn't deeling down there and it doesn't feel good to them. But they have no idea of what it means at this stage.

But there is a difference here. The choice to have sex is a concious choice. There is nothing stopping someone fron having sex with anyone or anything that could physicly fit the need. There is however preferences and those preferences are dictated by diferent decisions and experiences in life. And just like anything else, You can learn to like something that you didn't like before.

Actually, there are genes that govern how you experience the taste of certain foods such as broccoli. Some people experience them as being much more bitter than most of us, and this is apparently a genetic predisposition.

But you see, this is a loaded statment. It asumes that everyone doesn't like bitter foods. On the contrary some people like bitter foods and choose to eat them. This is were the choice comes in. There is a whole market of candy aimed at being bitter or sour. Something you would think people avoid but it seems to sell quite well.

No, the punchline is that some conservative homophobes are more concerned about their kids being mutated into queers than about half of the human population being wiped out.

OK. I'm sorry that I didn't get this. I thought the democrat's holding the majority in both offices meant that primarily liberals had the power. I didn't realize a lot of the democrats were conservative homophobes. Although homophobe has a moving definition so it is possible i still don't understand the meaning of it. I was once told that I was a homophobe which is odd, I don't have a problem with a gay person or people for that matter. Oh well. I'm over it and i hope everyone else is too..lol

Re:A word from the mutant...

[ArsenneLupin]

The buterfly does it out of instinct. The butterfly was chosen as the metaphor because it is a tiny little thing. It's to point out that really tiny changes can lead to huge divergences later on. Obviously, something bigger, such as a human walking around, would cause the same kind of divergences, and even sooner (like 4 months down the road, rather than 6 months, or whatever the actual numbers would be).

I thought the democrat's holding the majority in both offices You are right of course. Kadin2048 (who originally made the queer mutant comment) probably forgot that now Democrats have the majority. Or he recycled a tagline from last year. Or maybe he thought that Conservatives still had a sizable influence (if there are already a number of people in favor of continuing funding NASA for legitimate reasons, but not enough to win, maybe a tiny minority of additional yes votes from right wing nuts is all it takes to tip the balance?). Or he thought that even liberals occasionally pander to conservative voters on matters that are unimportant to them personally.

Or more likely: he was not expecting that people would overanalyze a joke in such a way...

Re:A word from the mutant...

[sumdumass]

Or more likely: he was not expecting that people would overanalyze a joke in such a way...

I was just done with a converstion were someone was arguing that Global Warming As it is being presented is little more then a scam designed to extract funds from the government and push once rejected political agendas. As soon as I hang up the phone, I see a story one slashdot that boiled down to "But hey, it's just the potential end of the world, so nothing much to worry about there." And shows that NASA is no longer looking for "asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth,".

So I imeadietly thought, Wow. That guy was right. Science has turned into anything for money including scamming it when neccesary. Then I com accross someone giving pointers to effect even more people.

I think over overanalyze is appropriate at this stage. The conversation was sparked by some Global warming telemarketing call that was likly a scam in it's self. Someone called my friend asking them to donate ("make a pledge to save the world") to some government sponsored study that was going to fix global warming so your kids will have a tomarrow. When he asked if it is government sponsored then why were they asking for donations. Of course the answer was because Bush didn't care about our future and only gave them the money to have a fund raiser. Ok, bells and wistles going all ovr the place here. It was almost like those police association calls that pretent to claim you don't support the police if you don't give and they will remeber it next time your pulled over.

But My friend said he didn't have any money and this guy on the other side went off with the guilt trip. "You mean your too greedy to to save the world for your children?". And several other things.

So of course after hearing about it and having an hour long discusion convincing this guy that it was a scam by some crook and not the global warming crowd itself, I see the exact same thing here. Is this coincidence? Or is this isolated. Or does it actualy appear to be that some are doing this "Scare the money from them" tactic. And how can we trust the others now? And when I question this, his answer was basicly "so".

Re:A word from the mutant...

[ArsenneLupin]

some Global warming telemarketing call that was likly a scam in it's self. Fraudsters use all kinds of "good" causes to extract money from the gullible. That doesn't mean that global warming itself is a scam. Only that this particular call (probably) was. Piece of advice: don't hand out any account details, but ask for details about them (name, website, past projects, etc.). Then look them up, ask around, and if they do seem legit, only then donate something to them by initiating the transfer yourself, rather than by handing them the "root password" to your bank account.

And how can we trust the others now? Fraudsters use all areas of life, not just charities, to defraud the public?

• Stock scams? => so you no longer invest your savings but spend everything right away?
• Fake profiles on Gayromeo used to lure naive blind daters into a trap => so you stay in the closet until the end of your life?
• Cheap-but-fake medication over the internet? => so you'd die rather than take some pills?
• Rich multinational companies selling buggy and insecure OSes => so you don't use computers at all?
• "Urgent" messages on your answering machine, trying to con you into calling premium-rate numbers in the Dutch Antilles => so you won't return any urgent call, even if the calling number is obviously local and genuine?
• Fly-by-night companies collapsing in an accounting scandal, leaving their employees unpaid and/or without pension => so you prefer to stay unemployed and survive on dole?
• Spoiled food sold as fresh => so you prefer not to eat anything at all and starve to death?

Ok, fraud and scams are in all areas of life. But that doesn't mean you should stop to live. Just be a little bit more careful who you deal with, and you should be fine.

this guy on the other side went off with the guilt trip. "You mean your too greedy to to save the world for your children?". Tell-tale sign of fraud. A genuine charity would have no problem giving its donors details and time to think the deal over.

Re:A word from the mutant...

[sumdumass]

We all asumed it was a scam. But the parralells were so close on this.

BTW, My favorite way to weed out something like this is to ask them to mail the information to me with their name and I will check it out before sending anything. A good majority of times, they will not do it and that will be the last you will hear from them. I triped one guy up by saying "I gave at the office" and he replied "but we didn't call your office"

Fraudsters use all areas of life, not just charities, to defraud the public?

Ok, fraud and scams are in all areas of life. But that doesn't mean you should stop to live. Just be a little bit more careful who you deal with, and you should be fine.

Well, I see were you going here. But my intention was how can we trust branches of science when hey do the doom and gloom for profit. I mean, How much difference is there in these people trying to scam my friend compared to the world is going to end if you don't give these grants to study this being presented to the governments. Judging from this NASA story, it might be closer to reality then we think. Something might get made up or exagerated just to get funding.

Can we trust some of these science groups to not be a well run and organized scam? Stick with me kid and you'll be rich.

Re:A word from the mutant...

[ArsenneLupin]

BTW, My favorite way to weed out something like this is to ask them to mail the information to me with their name and I will check it out before sending anything. A good majority of times, they will not do it and that will be the last you will hear from them. Good method. I usually try to get relevant data on the phone (which I'll then be able to use to google around to find comments of other people whether they are legit or not). Saves them postage in case they are legitimate.

I triped one guy up by saying "I gave at the office" and he replied "but we didn't call your office" Hehe. But the answer is not necessarily suspicious: if they are in the habit of not calling any business, they can still know that they didn't call your office, even if you didn't tell them where you work.

Well, I see were you going here. But my intention was how can we trust branches of science when hey do the doom and gloom for profit. Blame it on the funding institutions. If funding institutions don't support projects whose grant applications aren't loaded with irrelevant buzzwords, then don't be astonished if all grant applications end up being filled with such buzzwords. Same with doom and gloom. If this "sells", expect even the honest scientists to start doing it.

If those people deciding on where grant money goes were actually knowledgeable in the field, and judge a paper on its merit, we would see far less bullshit. And everybody, including the scientists, would be much happier about it. But, in the current situation, scientists unfortunately have to play that game to survive.

I mean, How much difference is there in these people trying to scam my friend compared to the world is going to end if you don't give these grants to study this being presented to the governments. Judging from this NASA story, it might be closer to reality then we think. The scam that your boyfriend didn't fall for was not that global warming might lead to gloom. No, it was that the money collected was never going to help fight global warming. Likewise, if these "police or firefighters' charities" call, the problem is not that police (or firefighters) are a scam. The problem is that police would only get a token amount, whereas all the rest gets pocketed by the scammers.

Something might get made up or exagerated just to get funding. Probably not made up, but only exagerated. Or possibly not even exagerated, but blown up out of proportion by a sensationalist journalist (i.e. third party).

Can we trust some of these science groups to not be a well run and organized scam? Stick with me kid and you'll be rich. NASA a scam? Can I have some of what you are smoking?

Re:A word from the mutant...

[sumdumass]

Hehe. But the answer is not necessarily suspicious: if they are in the habit of not calling any business, they can still know that they didn't call your office, even if you didn't tell them where you work.

Ok I see your point.

Blame it on the funding institutions. If funding institutions don't support projects whose grant applications aren't loaded with irrelevant buzzwords, then don't be astonished if all grant applications end up being filled with such buzzwords. Same with doom and gloom. If this "sells", expect even the honest scientists to start doing it.

If those people deciding on where grant money goes were actually knowledgeable in the field, and judge a paper on its merit, we would see far less bullshit. And everybody, including the scientists, would be much happier about it. But, in the current situation, scientists unfortunately have to play that game to survive.

I don't know. if it is a neccesary evil then something definatly needs to be done to fix it. I'm not sure that people knowledgeable in the area is the answer though. I have been having some discusions with a guy who belives the sun cannot be the cause of global warming because the current good book say's it isn't. And all this was sparked by people saying they current good book isn't figuring the data on it corectly. It is entirly possible you would get some religious pandoring to the way things are instead of letting science work it out.

The scam that your boyfriend didn't fall for was not that global warming might lead to gloom. No, it was that the money collected was never going to help fight global warming. Likewise, if these "police or firefighters' charities" call, the problem is not that police (or firefighters) are a scam. The problem is that police would only get a token amount, whereas all the rest gets pocketed by the scammers.

I have done some checking into them in the past. They are usualy as you say, the police get a token amount and they pocket the rest. But Strangly, most of them are supporting out of state police groups. But they don't tell you this well calling. And BTW- the boyfriend was just that, a friend who is a boy. ;)

NASA a scam? Can I have some of what you are smoking?

I'm not smoking anything you cannot buy at the store. Although I will admit the fresh fish like salmon and trout is better then the old stuff i buy at the store.

But NASA in it's self, likley not a scam. The direction they want to go into? the way they are spending the money they get? I just don't know.

Re:A word from the mutant...

[ArsenneLupin]

I don't know. if it is a neccesary evil then something definatly needs to be done to fix it. Yes, I completely agree with you. Something needs to be done. Like grant evaluators actually making a good faith effort at understanding the papers that they are attempting to judge...

I'm not sure that people knowledgeable in the area is the answer though. If you know that you are being judged by idiots, nobody can blame you for pandering to idiots...

And BTW- the boyfriend was just that, a friend who is a boy. ;) hehe. I somewhat imagined that. But playful me likes to tease people, hihi ;-) Sorry, sometimes it is hard to resist grabbing obvious hooks...

Re:A word from the mutant...

[sumdumass]

Yes, I completely agree with you. Something needs to be done. Like grant evaluators actually making a good faith effort at understanding the papers that they are attempting to judge... I'm thinking this might create more problems. Problems like the over whelming concensus says' "whatever" Yet we are still spending mooney to study only what the concensus says. If the consensus says something then why isn't the money going to study other interactions. And I'm trying real hard to aviod global warming and the overwhelming rejection of anything that says the anything contrary or oposite of the consensus.

hehe. I somewhat imagined that. But playful me likes to tease people, hihi ;-) Sorry, sometimes it is hard to resist grabbing obvious hooks...

I figured as much. Being playfull somwhat takes away from all the negetive that conversations here can have. It is a welcomed change.

Need to find difficult-to-find asteroids

[lightning detector]

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)

Then we must shoot them down!

[siriuskase]

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.

Huh?

[Soiden]

What a silly way to say 'we can't do anything'. Please, start thinking a way to do it, but cheaper.

Re:Earth-science priorities vs. Republicans on Mar

[billstewart]

Oh, we absolutely ought to work on getting off the planet and out of the solar system before the sun blows up or a random asteroid hits us. But we've got some slack time before that happens, and if we're only going to spend a certain amount of money and (more importantly) a certain amount of bright scientists' and engineers' lifetimes working on space issues, it's much more efficient to use them first on space programs that do earth science (so we don't screw up the planet and die out before we can do the really hard problems of significant solar system or interstellar colonization, plus it may help keep the economy in better shape so there's more money to spend on space), and on programs that pay attention to asteroids and how to detect them and keep them from hitting us (again, so we don't get wiped out before we get out of here.)

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.