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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?
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.
"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"
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 vis a vis terrorism, and every intelligence agency AND the IAEA said that Iraq had no WMDs. Both have been proved true.
If going by the 9/11 reaction is how you measure the response by Earth's leaders, then I expect the US to respond to a potential asteroid hit on Earth by contracting some politically tied corporation to manufacture umbrellas.
I hate printers.
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
-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.
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!
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!
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
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."