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The Social Difficulty of Saving Earth From an Asteroid
mantis2009 writes "When it comes to stopping a cataclysmic Earth vs. asteroid event, social science and international political leaders have more difficult questions yet unanswered than physicists do, according to report delivered at this week's American Geophysical Union meeting. Wired has a discussion of an analysis authored by former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who worries that the international community is nowhere near ready to begin the complex and inevitably controversial task of deflecting an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Among the questions to be answered is whether to modify the Partial Test Ban Treaty to allow nuclear weapons in outer space. Another possibility to avoid the destruction of civilization would require the international community to choose an area on the globe where an asteroid might be 'aimed.' Who would decide which nations get placed in the asteroid's crosshairs?"
What's your least favorite country: Italy or France?
We have a probability-to-miss-an-asteroid-hit gap here...
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
If the constant arguing and bickering about what to do about global warming is anything to go by, they never will be ready.
As a teen I read lots of sci-fi, but then I grew up. One of the recurrent themes was the Earth was doomed for some reason so we'd all have to build a fleet of ships and go off and colonise another world. Even as a 13-year-old I was highly skeptical of those stories, not because of the technology or the distances or any of the practical difficulties, but because I knew that politics would never function to the point where a decision could have been reached, let alone acted upon.
If global warming is truly in need of a rapid, urgent and above all united effort to combat (and whether it is or not is your first argument, right there), then quite honestly, we're doomed. Perhaps one reason we've never detected an advanced civilisation out there is because they all go through this stage, or fail to.
Yes I'm sure if an asteroid threatens the world leaders will all sit down with their lawyers and fiddle while the Earth burns. What this author forgets is that if your survival is on the line people will generally do what they think needs to be done regardless of what the law, lawyers or anyone else may say. Just look at the US after the 11/9 attacks. The trick is to ensure that you have a leader who can listen to scientific advice and make the right decision based on that and not on what will win them the next election. However, since if they get it wrong there probably won't be another election, they should at least be well motivated!
It'll be an international, outerspace game of hot potato. I can guarantee you that if that asteroid is headed towards the US, we'll find a way to knock it off course. Then, say if it's headed towards Russia, I'm sure they'll try to pass it along to. Eventually, it'll be targeted towards an area that is either uninhabited, or too poor to play the game.
Who would decide which nations get placed in the asteroid's crosshairs?
The ones doing the job of deflection, naturally.
And there will another complicating factor - expect quite a bit of people actually working against the efforts, with their expectation of incoming Rupture/Ragnarok/punishment from gods/whatever. Especially if the impact site seems to target their "enemies", though probably also when it targets them..."punishment from allowing the world to fall"/etc.
Quite a bit of unrest generally, on top of what's already there. Escalation of conflicts. All while trying to launch something very sophisticated, quite delicate operation...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'm not a scientist and I realize that wherever it hits could cause a chain of reactions that affect the entire earth, but isn't the idea to reduce civilian casualties?
His argument seems to pretty grossly overestimate the extent to which international law and institutions are really law and institutions in the sense they are within countries, versus looser arrangements that, when push comes to shove, get overriden by realpolitik.
For example, he assumes that a single country (or, presumably, group of countries) can't just go and deflect an asteroid using nuclear weapons, because of the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Really? If it seemed like the best option, everyone would just stop and not do it for fear of violating the Test Ban Treaty? Surely someone, the US or China or Russia or whoever had the capacity to do so, would simply ignore the treaty. And it probably wouldn't even come to that, because a handful of powerful countries would hash out a backroom deal. This sort of thing happens all the time already. It violated international law to invade Kosovo, for example, but hey look, Kosovo got invaded, and now is de-facto independent of Serbia. Didn't seem to stop anyone.
Then he suggests something about bringing options to the UN General Assembly. Well, yes, if the General Assembly is your idea of international cooperation, then we're doomed, because nothing will get done. Fortunately, however, the General Assembly has no power, and doesn't really matter. Real decisions get made at the Security Council, which is more or less a formalization of the de-facto handful of powerful countries hashing out a backroom deal.
Mostly, it seems like he thinks that a major obstacle to deflecting asteroids is some sort of international apparatus that has never in practice been an obstacle to anything.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I wonder how may would argue that this is god's doing and that man shouldn't interfere with God's designs.
(And in turn I'd argue that it's a pretty weak god if man can alter its plans.)
Pick Alaska for the collision target.
... nobody care about any treaty anymore.
That astronaut phailed !
To quote a movie:
"and turn one dangerous falling object into many"...
Nuking the thing isn't at all sensible but it's all we can really do. It's like ants trying to spit at the shoe that's heading towards them though... chances are we'll make things worse but at that point, we're dead anyway. Worrying about an international treaty at that point is like worrying about the lawsuit when the mugger pulls out a gun.
The radiation is hardly a concern at all. More important is how the hell do you survive the 200-foot-high wave, even if it is just a one-off?
A conspicuous "global killer" hurtling towards us overcomes the basic psychological barriers which inhibit the acceptance of global warming as a genuine, urgent threat (and which currently our hobble cooperative efforts). It's a good deal harder to "deny" that a giant rock is going to strike the Earth than it is to disingenuously claim "the science isn't there" about the highly complex, scientifically abstract climate system.
-Can't be USA -- I'm writing this from there.
-Can't be Antartica -- We all love them Penguins
-Can't be the Artic -- Ditto for the polar bears
-Can't be France -- too obvious
-Can't be the Middle East -- Our oil comes from there.
-Can't be China -- We'd all die from the toxic dust cloud stirred up from the impact.
So, that pretty much leaves:
Quebec
I mean, sure, we all love Canada. Great comedy, good place for NFL up-and-coming players to practice (CFL for those who don't get it), and also home to many polar bears (See Antartic above).
But face it: even CANADA doesn't like Quebec!
I mean, what do they have? Good baseball? Nope. Good football team? Nope. Good comedy? Do Quebecois even HAVE comedy?
And best of all:
Quebec doesn't have UN veto power.
Problem solved!
Those who interpret this as an act of god will be the biggest threat. As recent history has demonstrated, people are willing to kill themselves and civilians in hope that their god's will be done and it may be impossible to insure that sabotage has not occurred in the construction of the super weapon that will be necessary.
I just realized I haven't seen a dupe on slashdot for months. Am I just not paying attention? -1, Offtopic
I believe Isaac Newton worked out the laws of motion and gravity three hundred years ago, and his equations have served astronomers well enough to correctly work out the orbits of every object in space that they could observe. Celestial mechanics is a mature branch of science, and it will doubtless work for determining whether an asteroid or comet that astronomers have observed will hit the earth. It worked well enough for predicting that Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was going to hit Jupiter in 1994. The real problem here is that one has to detect the object first, of course.
Why, the nearest available ocean of course, most likely the Pacific. Don't forget the earth's surface is mostly uninhabited, especially since 70% of it is covered in water. Sorry Polynesia...
Of course. "Sorry, we have a treaty against that, I guess we are all going to die - it's the law!". It's a very bizarre notion, utterly absurd. Of course, so is the notion that you actually want to nuke it, which is almost certainly not a good idea. Which Schwiekart also knows.
If it were something like "Disasteroid", I doubt that the world would come together to save the planet like they did there. What is more likely to happen is that the Big Powers That Be(TM) will just go ahead and launch their own independent planet-saving operations. And then something really bad would eventually happen. Like each of the pieces of the shattered asteroid would impact the Earth and shatter the planet anyway.
Right... Because the potential effect of a massive tsunami wiping out most of the cities cited along Pacific coastlines wouldn't have any significant impact at all on the global population, or one the economy through the loss of port facilities etc. Depending on the size, velocity and angle of impact the effects of an asteroid strike in an ocean could easily exceed the impact of an event like the Krakatoa eruption of 1883.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Why is there such a focus on asteroids? Do the USA need to justify their nuclear arsenal in the current post-cold-war situation? (yes, "Armageddon", I'm looking at you).
Asteroids are not rare, Asteroids capable of destroying humanity are. It is very unlikely that one will hit us in next 100 years, and after that, we'll probably have completely different means available for trying to avert incoming asteroids.
I'm not saying that research in this area is wrong, but it should be low priority and the risks must not be overestimated.
We already have something threatening human (and animal) existence on earth, it's called global warming. Unlike asteroids, it wont happen by chance, it is happening and will continue to happen, even if we cease to pollute right now (which we nevertheless should strive after to minimize effects by global warming). This is a much more serious threat to our existence than Asteroids.
I want the mineral rights. Please do kindly tell me when it's due to impact, though, so I can be sure to be on vacation at the time.
If you have your way, I'm finally gonna have to learn how to surf, dammit!
I do.
Next question?
Check out my novel.
cover it in goatse and the problem is solved
Wait, why is nuking it a bad idea? If you can break it up, the smaller pieces will burn up or make small craters. If you let a large one hit directly, it can cause nuclear winter. I'd rather take destruction of 20% of the surface in small craters than one large hit that blocks out the sun for 10 years (or however long it lasts).
Learn to love Alaska
If you're sitting on an asteroid, trying to save Earth, you'd have more than just social difficulties to consider... difficulties closer to the realm of the /. community.
Isn't the US already working on laser satellites that could be repurposed for deflecting an asteroid? Why even bother with nukes or international treaties? The US would just turn it around, let loose a few seconds of ridiculously powerful laser, and nobody has to even know.
Somalia. Their "head of state" doesn't even control its capital and no one recognizes the sovereignty of Somaliland; so guess what country doesn't get a say when the others vote to obliterate it via asteroid? Somalia.
If an asteroid were about to hit the earth, the USA would probably, in consultation with its NATO allies, and Russia, launch everything it had it. Anything else would really be just a matter of luck. The third world might get pissed off at not being included, but really, for something like this, the technological nations would just have to take a best shot at it.
This is my sig.
We have a VERY easy solution to this issue, that will likely win out: China is desperate that no taxes be done on CO2 emissions, esp. against theirs. But the solution, one that will pass WTO, is a tax by all nations on ALL goods (as in local and domestic) based on the CO2 from where the item and the primary sub-component come from. Ideally, it would have distance as well. That simple solution will force all nations and businesses to lower the CO2 without any chance of cheating.
The problem that we have here, is that every nation is trying to go along with the no tax issue, but that alone is causing the problems. So basically, our issue is that the format is wrong. The real problem here, is that nations and ppl have locked themselves mentally into this idea that we need to regulate this AND that Govs. will do this on their own nation. The simple fact is, that leads to cheating. EU started us down the wrong solution, but I think that a number of nations will head towards the slowly increasing tax approach.
So, does that translate to the issues that you speak of? Nope. The reason is that a large minority still question whether Global Warming is happening. They hear it in the papers, but the simple fact is, that scientists and ppl, in general, do not know exactly WHAT will happen. OTH, if they know that an asteroid is eminent, THEN they will mostly cooperate. I am sure that if the asteroid were headed towards the middle of America, countries like NK, Iran, and possibly China would object to any chance to deflect it. But the majority would be ok with sending it to the middle of the Pacific, or even to the poles, etc. We MIGHT get by with deflecting it to Canada, Sberia, or even Australia, all due to population density and possibility of gettin everybody out. But that is not likely.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Current single nukes probably wouldn't help much. What we need is more like the Earth-launched shuttles and linked multi-nukes in Stratos 4! Even that isn't fool-proof, though, and they did lose at least one city when it went wrong.
Look, a single large asteroid has a HIGH VOLUME to surface area. OTH, if you break it up into small asteroids, you will burn up a great deal of it in the atmosphere. Likewise, lets assume that you have a 50 mile asteroid that is broken into 10 pieces. The single one would have done the nasty to us, and the 10 MAY OR MAY NOT. IOW, break it apart.
And yea, you are dead on with the radiation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It doesn't quite work like that. anything that is big enough to be a threat... 1 impact, 1000 impacts, the same amount of energy gets released into the system -- that system being Earth. So, what's your goal here? Liquify a region of the crust, or heat the atmosphere to the point that everything on the surface is incinerated, or both?
... Mostly, it seems like he thinks that a major obstacle to deflecting asteroids is some sort of international apparatus that has never in practice been an obstacle to anything.
Doesn't that depend immensely on your highly context-sensitive definitions of almost any of those key words in your "never" claim? I'd think it's especially so for "apparatus","obstacle", && "anything".
Additionally, even assuming your seemingly unqualifiable claim correct does not *necessarily* imply "deflecting asteroids" (or any other comprehensibly critical endeavor to deserve global coordination) will remain practical for a single nation (or small group) to dispatch or mitigate effectively forever in the future. That will surely be determined by what we ascertain will be faced ahead && what dealt roles pertaining to successful handling of it lay ahead. In theory, all world leaders && populations could rally together with mind-bending efficiency if everyone knew a mistake would be devastating to all.
At least that's how it seems to me. Maybe you know unspeakably more on such matters though. I don't consider governments competent regarding myriad issues I find important throughout history, however I'm inclined to extend even them the courtesy of optimistic inclusion in prospective responsiveness to openly honest dialog, honorable planning, && decisively harmonized action if sufficiently much were at stake. Even today, there should exist some threshold of blatantly expected severity beyond which it'd be a globally reprehensible crime of negligence or indefensible cowardice to fail to unite in response to. I don't consider global catastrophe (via asteroid or otherwise) of such magnitude at all likely anytime soon, but I'm hopeful even in nested long-shots emerging to protect our living planet (&& hopefully all inhabitants too, if we support such efforts... && maybe even if we don't).
I think you may have come off as too smug && simplistic with your criticism, even though it makes sense, so I hoped presenting my opinions could help at least that here.
Shalom, =)
-PipStuart CPAN
Split one object into 10... each of which with 5% of the destructive potential due to higher surface area to volume ratio, causing more of it to burn up. And if it's far enough, half of the pieces won't even hurt the Earth at all.
is Bruce Willis up to the task?
PARRY! - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT9vBMhSn5U
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
So, step one: Kill all the politicians.
Well in the Uk Live near the Pennines and watch your house price soar - sod London let it drown.
Rationally speaking, Australia has the least population to land mass, with the largest room for error of any other nation. It has to go (of course, it won't matter, an impact that big would throw us into oblivion anyway).
I would say, for reasonable majority of Earth population today, it is of course US, no offense.
Except that the nuke has not just cut the rock up, it's also changed the velocities of many/most of those pieces.
Also it's not just about how much energy is added to the system, but how. One big hit focusing all that force on one small piece of the crust vs spread out over many places and the atmosphere and ocean with many pieces missing us entirely due the the change in their orbit.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Cartesian coordinates (0,0) on the axes of evil of course.
by causing more of it to burn up in the atmosphere you're just shifting the energy input from the Earth's crust to the atmosphere. The damage to the crust will be less or less in any one spot; but, the atmosphere will heat up more. You can end up incinerating everything on the surface that way.
Oddly enough the levels of CO2 are 50% higher than they have been in over a million years
Oddly enough, the levels of methane follow exactly the same pattern as CO2. Strange that no one is suggesting we kill all our cows ?
global warming because at first they deny it's happening
Please don't call it global warming when we have 12 inches of fucking snow in Paris. It's climate change now, didn't you get the memo ?
Sea food can poison you from the mercury but few want to change the causes
And yet here we are, still eating fish.
Hey nmg196, thanks for being the straight man (and to Armakuni for doing the punch line). But what's up with the moderator who gave you a flamebait mod. Shouldn't a knowledge of the Simpsons be a prerequisite for joining Slashdot? (I can forgive not knowing Southpark reference in the subject line).
Laws work fine when you know all variables.
Even apolo missions had to 'correct' the trajectory during the flight.
Even slight error in observation will turn large in few years.
Jupiter is quite large compared to earth, so error margin is larger.
Remember an asteroid that was going to hit Mars with around %1 probability?
Linux forever
silly.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
..., please, read the context before writing your post (the Anonymous Coward post to which I was replying...I was just pointing out that his claim about no similarities at all is invalid)
That said, angel'o'sphere:
a) the word asteroid never was precisely defined, but it is generally considered acceptable to use it for bodies above 10 m...certainly in the dozens or hundreds range. And anyways, yes, of course, I was referring to smaller impactors, those which are most likely to hit and the ones we have any hope of deflecting
b) that's...why I wrote..."(when it's possible)"... (regarding detection and time left for deflection; because we do have technology, more or less - certainly we can do gravitational tug)
c) read...the parent poster...
(regarding also the punch line of your post)
Well, I guess you're excused since for some ridiculous reason of all my posts this one got modded up...as Insightful even (WTF?)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Rusty Schweickart is not, in this instance, an ex-astronaut, he is the CEO of B612 Foundation, dedicated to promoting their gravity tractor design for asteroid deflection. This design solves the 'problems' which are here hung around the necks of politicians. B612 has been 'solving' these same problems in the same way for over 20 years now. The situations where this design fails are still the same also, most notably short notice. This is no objective analysis of solutions to social and other problems that might arise --- this is a sales job for one of several designs that would need to be developed in order to meet the many possible problems. Yet this and the other designs with potential business backing, do not present themselves are inadequate alone, a social problem itself, in that these 'experts' are not pounding home the truth that no one an tell ahead of time which of these would be needed and/or would work if tried, so several different esigns would be required to be available. Also, these are large scale interplanetary programs, with a good chance of technical failure preventing successful completion, thus making it necessary to have more than one of each design available. Figure the odds of getting funding for more than one copy of one design. Yeah, until the impact table comes out with our names on it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
All this talk makes me want to play a Deadlock.
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
Select a place not inhabited by humans. Ohio, perhaps.
President Chavez "socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/putting_our_economy_in_the_hands_of_chavez_fans What does that have to do with the technical problem of global warming? Absolutely nothing. For a better example of how everyone can cooperate see the battle against CFC emissions. That was a much more scientifically proven problem and thanks to the Montreal Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol is now a problem under control. It didn't devolve into "evil capitalists destroying the environment" and "lets destroy all air conditions and refrigerators". There was a problem, then a technical fix.
Per Lucifer's Hammer, learn to surf.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
When I was a kid, we were told smoking marijuana would cause birth defects.
When we realized how badly our parents lied to us, we spent the next couple of decades assuming everything they said was a lie.
Environmentalists are in the same boat now.
Environmentalism cleaned up my air and water, then went on to spin so many lies that an awful lot of people are mistrustful of them - and rightly so.
The tech is simply not there to support movement from theorizing about anti asteroid systems to developing them.
The risk analysis of such endeavors is a massive fail.
It's insane to propose multiple systems with little chance of effectiveness, but which are so expensive that engaging in them would throw us back to the Dark Ages in terms of quality of life.
There is no hard decision here.
It's an easy one, and we've already decided "No - not at this time - check back with us in a century or so."
...to save all of you ungrateful fucks from a planet killing asteroid. Would you like to thank us or try and penalize us. Remember we only sent ONE of our nukes up."
Our politics have been almost uniquely stupid recently. We've been meddling with other nations for a very long time, half our population is willfully ignorant to the point of rejecting evolution, we somehow think improving our healthcare system is immoral, one of our political parties is enthusiastically pro-torture, anti-science, and anti-reality while the other is hardly cohesive enough to be called a party, we think we're the best in the world while we do our very best to undermine the basics of civilization in the name of lassiez-faire. Just aim it for the middle of the bible belt in the US. The craziest of our crazies will even applaud it, because they're looking forward to punishment coming to the "sinful" nation.
At least it would be entertaining watching some yahoos talk about how it's immoral to use state power to deflect it, because... OH! Once there's a need, there's a market, and the market creates the invisible hand! And the invisible hand will swat that asteroid out of the sky. Yeah, it's the new religion, and watching them watch it smoosh them would at least give us a laugh while the impact slowly smothers the rest of us.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Actually we do kill the vast majority of our cows and then eat them. However their farts are not the source of problematic methane levels, that would be melting permafrost. The problem with cows is a land use issue not a flactuance issue. Melting permafrost releases vast quantities of methane, the reason methane and CO2 coincide in the geologoic record is because methane breaks down into CO2 and H2O in under 150yrs (150yrs is basically instantaneously on a gelogic scale)
The memo you speak of was posted in the 90's by "skeptics" who claimed that the term "global warming" was a conclusion rather than a phenomena.
I suggest you ease up on the mercury tainted fish, it's known to cause brain damage.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
One of the cardinal rules of Wikipedia is "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it."
If a nuclear test-ban treaty prevents you from saving the planet, ignore it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
you could mount a huge chemical based laser in space(or the moon) and zap the roid enough to move it off target
I imagine it'll depend on the politics and urgency of the time. But if the superpowers don't feel they'd get any mileage out of a open discussion or that there isn't time for such a discussion, then they won't do it. There will be a back room deal and they'll do whatever works. It really is that simple.
The US would just turn it around, let loose a few seconds of ridiculously powerful laser, and nobody has to even know.
The problem is that such a laser would be totally ineffective unless it were operated long before the collision and for a period of time far longer than seconds. Such a laser burst wouldn't deflect a fully loaded supertanker much less a small asteroid with around four thousand times the momentum and fifteen million times the energy.
Nuclear weapons in space are even more pointless than conventional explosives.
At best, a nuclear weapon fired at a ship would cause EM issues, wut a rock could care less. Nuclear is only devastating on earth due to chain reaction, and radiation damage to life. The actual explosive force is not impressive given the size and weight of the munition.
Conventional explosives could only be useful is 1) they work in a vacuum and 2) it could penetrate far enough to crack the roid before explosion.
No, we're looking at 2 scenarios: most likely, extreme kenetic impact (very fast moving bullet) or powered diversion (land a rocket on it and push).
Since we can't exaclty get 200 ton bullets in orbit, (and we'd need a lot of them to take care of fragments that might still be headed our way), we need lighter munitions that can self accelerate to very high speeds. These would be essentially useless to fire from orbit to the planet, but at ranges of a few light seconds they could be devastatingly effective. Mounting a rocket on an incoming roid is something FAR more difficult, and we're probably 100-150 years from the tech necessary (and we'd have the have a LONG warning, likely months or years).
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Based on the little information on Wikipedia about High-Altitude Nuclear Explosion or HANE it would seem that the eventual blast of the devices would make their back to Earth and cause other issues. It's not as easy as just launch, sit back and relax.
Even slight error in observation will turn large in few years.
You don't get how small the errors can be in celestial observations. A few measurements over a few days do not yield accurate results. Measurements over years yield really accurate projections of the trajectory of the asteroid decades and sometimes centuries in advance.
Remember an asteroid that was going to hit Mars with around %1 probability?
No I don't. But keep in mind that such an asteroid would have a 99% chance of not hitting Mars. So doesn't support your case one way or the other.
The main thing to keep in mind is that there are really only a few nations with the capability and money to address an asteroid impact threat--it doesn't matter what everyone else thinks. And you might not even need all of them, depending on who you get in a "coalition of the willing." The U.S., the E.U., and Japan are very close allies and that's more than half of the world's spacefaring capability right there.
In addition, nations work much more closely together on some issues than on others. Look at the intense international coordination in addressing the financial crisis. Look at the response to H1N1 (which turned out to be an over-response, but the severity was not known at the beginning). Scientists in particular cooperate very well over national borders, and orbital mechanics is much simpler to independently verify and communicate than global climate. Once people know where to look, any serious astronomer could independently confirm an impact trajectory.
The "old people have nothing to lose" argument gets trotted out all the time, but in practice most people get more conservative and cautious as they age, and have families they care about. Besides in a democracy if the public is alarmed then politicians will act regardless of what they think personally--or get voted out of office. No American president is going to sit on his (or her) hands as an asteroid strikes, because of some treaty.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Depends on the size of the asteroid, what body of water it hits, and how far it is from those ports. They are point sources for tsunami. That means energy tends to spread out, yielding wave heights as the inverse of distance from the impact. If the impact is powerful enough that it's vaporizing ocean floor, then that's not to matter much. But a much smaller ocean impact could cause little damage simply because it happens far away from any major population.
The planet is mostly water; why not drop it in the middle of the Pacific? A tsunami seems better than a dust cloud blocking out the sun because we put it down in the Sahara. Then we could try to detonate nuclear weapons around it to disperse the the wave, and post it on youtube. Because that would be crazy-awesome.
The idea of nuclear propulsion isn't actually insane, it's just that no one has explored it on account of international bans, also that it's hard to keep computer equipment functioning in the presence of a nuclear blast.
But if your goal is just to effect a huge change in an object's velocity, nukes would be very effective. And fragments are irrelevant, since even if the asteroid broke up momentarily, the point is to alter its trajectory, if a nuke went off with enough force to shatter it, it's likely none of the pieces would be headed for Earth.
The Shahara Desert? The assuming we could force it to anyhwere we want on earth with a reasonable degree of accuracy AND the incoming projectile was coming perpendicular to the equator. If it were coming somwhere from the top or bottom, (that maynot matter..) I dont have anything in Africa but I dont believe that a greater area exists in all the world with such a low population density. 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers) of desert. Ganted its inhabited by some, but it would be a lot easier to evac them then anywhere else on earth right? And who knows whith all the heat of the impact the sand would glaze over and we would ahve a massive glass quarry afterwards hehe
"When it comes to stopping a cataclysmic Earth vs." {anything}... We can't agree.
We're coming up on a perfect storm -
Used up more than half of all the oil in less than one generation.
With modern farming this planet can only support about 6.5 - 7 billion (where we are at now) and that's going to double.
Using all that oil has released all the primordial CO2 gases back in the atmosphere that took billions years to remove back in the atmosphere which will change the growing seasons and locations affecting both farming and likely negating the possibility of supporting a doubling of the population.
Pollution and over development has already destroyed fresh water resources for hundreds of millions - Spain is already shipping in fresh water from other countries. And half the population (current numbers) will not have access to fresh water in 50 years - but by that time the population will have almost doubled so those numbers are probably moot.
And this is only the "cold front" of the perfect storm that's coming - And they're worried about a friggin asteroid?! Frankly, IMHO, an asteroid is exactly what this planet needs right about now.
-[d]-
In the event of the detection of a death asteroid, I rather expect it immediately becomes a top military secret. It may be the USA, Russia, Europe, China, whomever working together or apart to stop the thing, but I don't imagine for a second this is going to be spending years of debate in Congress. And in fact, it would be in the public interest to not start shouting about the end of life as we know it on earth in ten years BEFORE the problem is actively being addressed.
-Dave Haynie
We're already here. No need to go to the asteroid. And if we nudge the planet a little further from the sun we solve global warming at the same time.
Ok, the issues with using a nuclear weapon are political, not social. Then again I'm more concerned about the physics of that solution.
As for dragging the asteroid so it will miss... the supposed social concern is that there will be times between when you start changing the path and when you've got it fully deflected, where it would (if you stop pushing) hit a place on Earth that it would not have hit before. Two things:
1) TFA mentions that you would start this mission decades before a possible impact. You wouldn't know for sure that it would impact yet. Much less would you know where the impact would occur. Hence, you wouldn't know where the "corridor of risk" would be. Nobody would have to choose which countries to "put at risk", because nobody would be able to make such a choice if they wanted to.
2) If the asteroid's initial trajectory is going to hit the Earth, then there's a 70% chance (roughly) that it will hit water. Even the people in any given country are probably at equal or less risk if the asteroid is momentarily pointed at their country's land mass, than if it is left to hit the ocean in their hemisphere. In other words, the "corridor of risk" wouldn't be at elevated risk - it would be at slightly less decreased risk than other locations on Earth.
It seems to me that if you want to drag the asteroid, picking the direction should be easy. Estimate its current trajectory as best you can. On the very unlikley chance that trajectory hits the center of the Earth, I guess you have to choose randomly; but in the vastly more likely case that it passes relatively near the center of the Earth (such that it would hit the Earth), wouldn't you drag it in the opposite direction (i.e. draw an arrow from the center of the earth to the line of the trajectory where it passes the center; push it the direction the arrow points)? Minimum energy and maximum chance of success...
Ask Bruce Willis. He knows nukes in space will do nothing unless you bury it WITHIN the asteroid!
Or we could practice on non-earth-threatening asteroids to hone our skills for this sort of thing when it really does become a crisis.
Don't do that!!!
I darn near had to buy another keyboard.
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
Considering the AoE of a large impact, any target located in the central Middle East would be an enormous boon to world peace and stability. No more "holy" cities and shrines to fight over. Imagine, world religion wiped out by an act of "God"!
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Park it in the grand canyon, soon to be the grander canyon, charge admission, profit
Ok here’s my plan:
We tell people of similar caliber (Bill O'reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, etc) that after a life dedicated to “promoting the greater good”, they are to be rewarded with a free gift of land on one of the uncharted islands in the south pacific.
We even go a step further and build houses and infrastructure for them to convince them it is a legit offer. Once they have settled in, we aim the asteroid at the island.
Two problems solved with one stone (no pun intended)!
Please calculate the mass & speed of an asteroid whose kinetic energy, converted entirely to heat, is equal to... let's say 1% of what the the earth receives from the sun in a day. Feel free to approximate wildly. Then let us know if there is reason to believe such an asteroid exists.
You forgot Africa, which on the NASA Apophis simulation is facing the asteroid as it comes at us. However if it misses Africa, it'll end up in the Atlantic and doom the US East coast and Caribbean.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Cease your concerns.
After all we all have leaders that are the people best qualified to make hard decisions based on all the rational evidence that is available.
It's not like they were picked for their charisma and ability to raise money from various people wanting special access.
And our wonderful legislatures, composed of the best minds available, who would immediately understand the "gravity" of the situation and pass the necessary laws to enable the populace to line up behind emergency programs while maintaining a functioning society.
It's not like they were picked for their charisma and ability to direct federal money to their districts.
In closing I would just like to say that our best and brightest would lead us through.
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
Actually I like the idea of an ocean impact. While there is an ass-load of people along any coast, the over-all effets are minimal. Yes, immense flooding and a billion people will die. But the important thing is the atmosphere will be loaded with water and will recover in days.
Meanwhile an impact on land would send dirt particles up, blocking light for weeks or months, killing plants, freezing the entire planet. We would have a much harder time (as a planet) surviving a land impact than a water one.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Treaties will be flat-out ignored if they get in the way. So Sayeth The Scared Voters.
Indeed, no politician would dream of even quickly officially undoing or altering said treaties for fear of looking like they view paperwork as more important than lives.
Secondly, as for where to aim it, any asteroid big enough to worry about, but small enough it could hit somewhere on Earth and not kill everyone, is a teeny, tiny size window. It should be trivially easy to turn it into rubble that mostly burns up, or effortlessly deflect it.
Remember that 1 mile per hour sideways (or slowed, or sped up) adds up to thousands of miles deviation over 6 months or several years. Even less is really all that's needed with enough time. And smallish asteroids, i.e. "less than a mountain" we are well within the technology to easily smash it to bits and send the pieces flying at much higher speed than that.
So whoever's doing this "social analysis" sounds himself like a physical scientist, and not a politician who knows how easily it would be to make this happen to "save the lives of millions of registered voters", to borrow from Ghostbusters.
For christ's sake, people, this year's US deficit for one year is $1.4 trillion , just based on hot air about scary the economy is, and you know those politicians have to be dragged kicking and screaming to spend money to get votes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
His argument seems to pretty grossly overestimate the extent to which international law and institutions are really law and institutions in the sense they are within countries, versus looser arrangements that, when push comes to shove, get overriden by realpolitik.
Hmm, when you put it that way international law sounds exactly like national law. Notice how no one has been tried for violating FISA, torturing detainees, etc.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
As for the question, where the deflected asteroid's gonna hit: not the US, Europe, Russia, or China.
(1) Rendezvous with the asteroid. Time is important, so this will probably require a nuclear rocket.
(2) Construct a really strong anchor point, probably using a net around the entire asteriod.
(3) Construct a space elevator connected to the anchor. The asteriod will have much weaker gravity and much higher rotational velocity than the earth, so an elevator there wouldn't have to be nearly as long or strong as here. The motion of the asteriod may not be simple (precession in addition to rotation), which means the elevator will pivot about the anchor point.
(4) Use the elevator to launch payloads (bags of rubble). This doesn't require any net energy: a payload beyond the stationary orbit radius will pull outward, and can be used to lift the next payload. Each launch gives the asteroid a nudge (by conservation of momentum). You can't choose the direction of the nudges arbitrarily - assuming simple rotation, they have to be in the plane of rotation. Approximately twice a year, payloads can be launched toward earth. That would be a good time to send construction workers back home.
IIRC the orbit of Mercury was not worked out completely satisfactorily until general relativity.
Actually cows release more methane from belching than they do from farting.
Err... WTF are you smoking? Just about every intelligence agency on the planet said before the Afghan campaign that invading Afghanistan would not yield a positive result
The point I was trying to make is that the US did not sit around wringing its hands and going "oh dear, we can't do anything because the lawyers would get in the way" even for something far less severe than an asteroid. I agree that some/most of what they did was not at all sensible - hence my second point about making sure that you have a sane leader.
It's like ants
ants with nukes
call me FOSS im the boss with the sauce and the source
It doesn't quite work like that. anything that is big enough to be a threat... 1 impact, 1000 impacts, the same amount of energy gets released into the system -- that system being Earth.
Who said the damage is caused by energy directly? The one that killed the dinosaurs [based on one theory, and we don't really know what happened] didn't kill much on impact, but threw particles in the air that blocked the sun. It was the blocked sun changing the climate and starving the plants that wiped out all large animals, not the energy from the impact. So I don't get the argument that it's the total system energy that matters. It seems irrelevant. There's some point where a single impact will throw enough junk into the air to cause a major problem. Below that, the impact won't have global impact. And if we get the largest chunk below that size, we will have prevented that problem. Now, if you want to concede that point and move on to another, that's fine. If you want to debate that point, that's fine. But to pretend that I'm saying something that's in any way related to the total amount of energy in the system being relevant, then we aren't talking about the same event.
So, what's your goal here? Liquify a region of the crust, or heat the atmosphere to the point that everything on the surface is incinerated, or both?
My goal is to determine what events will kill all (or almost all) the people on earth, and prevent them. Wanting to liquify crust or heat the atmosphere are apparently distractions brought up by you because you either don't understand what I'm saying or are being deliberately obtuse.
Learn to love Alaska
Not the green colored Martians, but the Chinese immigrant sort. This is fairly likely to happen in the next 200 years when they get sick of Terrestrials trying to run their business.
Since the likelihood of an Asteroid striking Earth goes up quite a bit when it's got a rocket guiding it in, yes, I'd say there's cause for prudent preparation.
Even a relatively small astroid hitting anywhere would be a major disaster for all people on Earth. This idea of choosing where to hit is just a distraction. If it hits it is a problem. The only solution is no hit. That actually isn't that hard if you're going to the trouble of doing anything at all.
True but the principle is the same regardless of the location of the orifice
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
For fun, lets use 99942 Apophis. It's orbital speed is 30.728 km/s. Now, I know it's the relative velocity that matters; and, the impact wouldn't be at this speed... For argument sake though, I'll use that velocity. Its mass based on the most recent estimates is 2.7x10^12 kg. The kinetic energy is therefor 2.5x10^21 J. Earth receives 174x10^15 J/s total (of which 30% is reflected, blah blah blah). That's 15x10^21 J/24h. So, the kinetic energy of 99942 Apophis, a 270 m diameter rocky NEA, is equivalent to 17% of the total energy received by Earth from the Sun in one day.
Now, a more realistic number for 99942 Apophis is based on the difference in orbital speeds, which is only 2.4x10^18 J, 3 orders of magnitude lower. This is 0.016 % of the energy received by the Earth each day. I'll stop now.
simple: just aim it at Africa. Solve poverty and overpopulation with one shot. Besides, given what Africa produces the economic impact to the world would be negligible.
undoing retarded mod. sorry.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Any American president can terminate ANY treaty unilaterally. Some treaties have a notification rule, so to be entirely compliant the other signatories would have to be notified. But so what?
Jimmy Carter terminated the defense treaty with Taiwan, unilaterally, and terminated three different treaties when he turned the Canal Zone over to Panama.
We are no where near ready to do something about an asteroid about to hit us. First off, we would get possibly less than a day's notice. Some that have nearly hit us recently we didn't even know about until it had passed us. Then lots of thought would have to be put on how to properly address the threat. Do nothing, if do something, what do we do? Who would do it? If it had to hit a continent, that would be Africa. Nothing significant is down there anyhow, it's almost all desert. In fact Saharan sand would probably be the best thing it could hit.. We may also get rid of a pirate problem.
If the constant arguing and bickering about what to do about global warming is anything to go by, they never will be ready. As a teen I read lots of sci-fi, but then I grew up. One of the recurrent themes was the Earth was doomed for some reason so we'd all have to build a fleet of ships and go off and colonise another world. Even as a 13-year-old I was highly skeptical of those stories, not because of the technology or the distances or any of the practical difficulties, but because I knew that politics would never function to the point where a decision could have been reached, let alone acted upon. If global warming is truly in need of a rapid, urgent and above all united effort to combat (and whether it is or not is your first argument, right there), then quite honestly, we're doomed. Perhaps one reason we've never detected an advanced civilisation out there is because they all go through this stage, or fail to.
Sir Arthur C.Clarke wrote a book in conjunction Sir Patrick Moore regarding this matter and it was done in the name of helping the tsunami people, and you will remember that fateful day which we are close to. May I remind you that speculation regarding an Astroid hitting Earth is all to real. If you think for one moment you can take everything for granted, you are mistaken and we have already had a few near misses recently, whereby the publicity was gagged to not create a panic. Nasa never saw this coming either. as it was a Ultra Violet and Dark in space. I urge people to read more rather than being judgemental on this subject.
All cows eat grass!
Waiter covers 70% of the Earth's surface. Now, if we exclude areas that would cause catastrophic flooding the number gets smaller, but I'll bet we could find someplace out in the middle of the ocean to deflect it.
The energy transfer to the biosphere is ultimately what does the most damage. Sea strikes are significantly more damaging than land strikes even when you ignore the tsunamis because the energy gets converted into vaporized water which condenses out across the globe. There would be months of continuous rain and failure of almost all crops. With land strikes, a significant amount of the impact energy can radiate directly back into space and the damage is more localized. If the asteroid is broken up but the remains still enter the atmosphere, the energy transfer just becomes more efficient.
Even slight error in observation will turn large in few years.
You don't get how small the errors can be in celestial observations. A few measurements over a few days do not yield accurate results. Measurements over years yield really accurate projections of the trajectory of the asteroid decades and sometimes centuries in advance.
Remember an asteroid that was going to hit Mars with around %1 probability?
No I don't. But keep in mind that such an asteroid would have a 99% chance of not hitting Mars. So doesn't support your case one way or the other.
It does, because this shows that orbit calculations aren't that accurate.
However, you probably are right that few years of observation can give accurate results.
Linux forever
If we have the ability to choose an impact site, why not Tunguska again? Seems like the world did fine after the last time something hit there.