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How To Deflect an Asteroid With Today's Technology
Matt_dk writes "Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart is among an international group of people championing the need for the human race to prepare for what will certainly happen one day: an asteroid threat to Earth. Schweickart said the technology is available today to send a mission to an asteroid in an attempt to move it, or change its orbit so that an asteroid that threatens to hit Earth will pass by harmlessly. But what would such a mission entail?"
Speaking of the apocalypse: Of course doomsday predictions are always for a future date. It would be much more interesting if someone figured out a doomsday prediction for a date 3 years past. That would mean someone has to make a time machine to go back and warn them that the world is about to end. Knowing the world didn't end we could be certain that we will succeed in the time-travel mission.
This of course means that when the world does end it isn't our fault- it's the fault of the people from the future failing to post-predict the apocalypse and make a time machine to stop it.
My webcomic
The last 2 discovered asteroids that passed "close" (at least, closer than the moon, the last one was few days ago at 45k km) were found with very few days in advance. They weren't very big, but still could had done some big damage, and the early warning wasnt enough to even think on launching a ship, much less doing anything effective with it.
Early detection must be improved... that some of the asteroids that we know could take 15 years to get here and so give us enough time to prepare don't mean that some unknown or even known ones (if you want, because somehow changed its orbit) could be in its way here and detected when is already too late.