Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
How could you be so callous towards the massive loss of penguin life?! On Slashdot, no less!! You must be a Mac or *BSD fanboi. Or a Microsoft shill. Any truly free-thinking individual would obviously recommend somewhere else.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
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.
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.
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
Antarctica? That'd be one hell of a curve shot to whip it underneath the Earth and up! Don't you know from all of those SciFi shows that asteroids come in perfectly horizontal and that the whole universe is like a plate. That's why ships can't avoid each other by flying higher or on a different plane - because there is only one plane that everything flies along!
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?
If you could aim it towards eastern Antarctica, that might be ok - but I'd rather you didn't, as I'm currently living there!
Cartesian coordinates (0,0) on the axes of evil of course.
the USA would probably, in consultation with its NATO allies, and Russia, launch everything it had it.
If you mean nuke armed ICBMs, then let the words ring in your mind: inter continal ballistic missile.
Supposed we had a bomb (or a combination of several hundred bombs) that can deflect an asteroid about 1 million miles away (3 times the distacne of our moon) ... we had nothing to deliver those bombs over that distance.
Our missiles have enough power to run with their build in engines about 2000 km ... the rest of the trip they do in free fall, back to their destination on earth (that is why they a re called "ballistic") the total range of them is far below 20,000 km. In other words, they can not even make 10% of the distance to the moon.
So sending atomic bombs (which would be more or less useless against an asteroid anyway ... but that is a different story) is completely out of scope due to the lack of missiles/rockets/launch vehicles to deliver them.
With lack of vehicles I don't mean: we need to build a few, no I mean: we can't currently build anything like this! It is Sci Fi! To deflect an asteroid we need to meet it around the distance of Mars and have some (magical) device to do the actual deflecting.
That means we need the time to fly a vehicle so far, which is roughly 1 year to 3 years depending on technology and actual position of the asteroid and earth. That means we have to realize it will hit us about 10 years in advance, just to plan the travel of the vehicle.
As we all know how to travel that distance, land on the asteroid, stop its rotation perhaps, plant the deflecting device I leave the construction of the actual device as an exercise to the reader.
angel'o'spheree
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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
Per Lucifer's Hammer, learn to surf.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You are aware that local space IS pretty two dimensional, at least where it counts? Nearly all of the objects in the near solar system are on the ecliptic, so they generally WOULD come "straight in".
That being said, the earth IS tilted, and for about half the year the Antarctic is pointing "out".
Besides which, those penguin movies were starting to get pretty damned irritating.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
...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."
Keep in mind that a key duty of the US is to safely contain idiots such as yourself. Consider what would happen if you were let loose in a unprotected country like Finland or London. It'd be like the Black Death. They'd have Socialism in no time and the mass dying would suck. However, the US is immunized against your breed of idiocy, like a cask of highly radioactive material cared for by a horde of giant mutant ants.
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...
So sending atomic bombs (which would be more or less useless against an asteroid anyway ... but that is a different story)
It was my understanding that the radiation (heat and nuclear) from a blast near an asteroid would cause rapid ablation of the surface material, enough to change its trajectory. It might take several blasts to achieve a safe heading for the asteroid but it is possible.
I don't think actually attempting to 'blow up' an asteroid has ever been an option.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
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.
Your lack of confidence in the nuclear option is... misguided.
http://www.aere.iastate.edu/no_cache/events-seminars/article/article/2806/2506.html
When scientists talk about using nukes to move asteroids, they are usually talking about using the enormous heat and other radiation from the blast to ablate one side of the asteroid; this will cause the asteroid to move in the opposite direction (per newton's third law).
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
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.
(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.
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
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.