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NASA Can't Pay for Killer Asteroid Hunt
CGISecurity.com writes "NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding nearly all the asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth, but there isn't enough money to pay for the task so it won't get done. 'We know what to do, we just don't have the money,' said Simon 'Pete' Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center." But hey, it's just the potential end of the world, so nothing much to worry about there.
I'm a United States citizen.
... what's another billion? I mean, it's obvious NASA's not asking us to spend a significant amount of our income on "Asteroid Insurance."
I have paid ~$50-60 for a few smoke detector and pay maybe a dollar or two a year to maintain the batteries in them.
I make an average amount of income so $50 is nothing when a fire could take my life. I've seen other people's houses destroyed by fires but never mine. I don't know if we see other planets regularly destroyed by asteroids or impacts but if you can make a case for it, then this analogy may be apt.
I also know that walking down the street in Prince George's County might result in your death. So do I hire a body guard to protect me? No. Why? Because I don't have the money for that. If I were a billionaire, I would definitely look into it and probably hire a driver too. I see people robbed and killed on TV so, again, if you can point to examples where planets have been destroyed, this analogy is apt.
Considering the war in Iraq has cost me, the taxpayer, $300 billion and I'm not sure that that is increasing my safety
In my opinion, all NASA needs to do is present congress with a scientific statistic claim with percent confidence of global destruction. If we have craters on our planet & there are bones of things that shouldn't have died lying all around, I'm guessing they could place something like a 1% chance of a decent sized asteroid hitting us within a couple thousand years. Given that information, $1 billion may not seem like a bad idea considering most of us employ smoke detectors with even less risk of harm/loss to us.
My work here is dung.
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.
There is nothing we can do about it anyway.
Seems like a questionable assumption to me. There's quite a bit we could possibly do about it, if we knew long enough in advance. It's only if we only knew about it a few weeks or months in advance, that it would probably be a bend-over-and-pucker-up moment.
There is a whole lot of ingenuity (and a whole lot of explosives) spread across the globe as a whole; assuming that people got together and decided that the continued survival of the human species is a Good Idea, I suspect we could probably figure out a way to annihilate or deflect a rock, given enough lead time.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If the thing is small enough to destroy, money will be found. Yeah, we may have to tell Iraq "sorry" and stop all Social Security payments but we'll find a way.
If the thing is too big or too close and it's curtains for life as we know it, well, "eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Actually, NASA is already tracking objects >3,300 feet in diameter, but this would be to track all objects capable of doing "massive damage" to Earth.
My question is - why is it the job of the US to protect the world?
Wouldn't this be a UN issue?
See, hunting for killer asteroids requires money, that money can serve Congress better by buying votes through some "aid" program. NASA will continue to get the short end of the stick because we as American citizens keep putting back the same aristocracy that is allowing the US to fall behind the world in science.
NASA doesn't need to justify it, we the people need to justify ourselves by putting people more concerned about advancing this nation instead of advancing their own status.
That $300 billion tab in Iraq is meaningless in this conversation as NASA's budget would still be what it is. The money would have just vanished down some vote buying program that forever indebts us.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The explosion alone could have with the power of 100 million tons of dynamite, enough to devastate an entire state, such as Maryland, they said.
Maryland? Here in Texas, we call that a "county". Call me when you have something that can devastate a real state.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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."
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.
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!
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
Quota from Armageddon - "No offense General, but it's a big ass sky..."
The amount of people whom it will kill.
The capacity we have to do something about it.
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.
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.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Doesn't Halliburton do asteroid diversion?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
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
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.