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International Organization To Assess Earth Defense From Space Dangers
arisvega writes in with a story about an international organization that is trying to come up with options to save the planet from a large asteroid or comet collision. "NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision (PDF) path with our planet. The effort is being led from the German space agency's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and had its kick-off meeting this week. It will draw on expertise from across Europe, Russia and the US. It's a major EU-funded initiative that will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory experiments and new modelling work, and then try to come to some definitive positions. Industrial partners, which include the German, British and French divisions of the big Astrium space company, will consider the engineering architecture required to deflect one of these bodies out of our path."
We just need one more *orginization* to save us from typos and humanity is saved ...
Seriously. Fiction is ripe with way better names than that. Next time just swipe one! I'd feel much safer in the hands of the Earth Defense Force.
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New Avengers, assemble!!!
Failing that, we still have Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi, and Aerosmith.
"Orginization" (in the headline) should be spelled "Organization"
That's nothing. Look how they misspelled "Space Dragons".
They are looking at the issue from the wrong direction. We should not work for ways to destroy or deflect an asteroid. There are many other things that can cause catastrophic loss of life on this planet, from 'mega-volcanoes', nuclear war, epidemic diseases, and yes even -gasp- climate change.
Instead of moving the danger of our path, we should be moving ourselves off the path of danger. We need an off site backup for humanity at least, if not as much of the biosphere as we could manage. Eventually, something WILL destroy 99.9% of life on Earth. It has happened before and will again, whether 10 years or 10,000 years from now.
Silence is a state of mime.
Yep. And, early detection is most important. Waiting til the damned huge ass rock is a month away ensures that our best efforts will be worth shit. If we can get a team on the rock a year before impact, even a tiny deflection in it's course will work to avert disaster.
Of course, a nuke isn't necessary, if you get on the rock early enough. A few tons of thrust from a chemical rocket would be good enough. Or, a chemical bomb dropped down the well that you've drilled. Nukes are sexy, but not essential.
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The are presently reviewing a Space Defense System that consists of a miles long series of defensive shields protecting a rail-mounted missile platform with gaps between the shields creating launch apertures. The missile platform can be operated remotely, much in the same way as current UAV drones. However, there is no missile guidance control and the display is very pixelated with only 1-bit color depth. if you ask me, they'll need to vastly improve the graphics if they want to see this proposal get accepted.
I think the nuke idea came from Edward Teller, who was basically a pyromaniac given a government grant.
He was just jazzed to blow up things, and applying gigantic nuclear explosions to meteorites would have given him jack-off material for the rest of his life.
Of course I think he's dead now, so we can do something that a sane person would.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
While both scenarios are extremely improbable, I wonder what the odds are of being struck by an extinction level asteroid or comet vs being invaded or flat out destroyed by aliens.
On the one hand the likelihood of dino-killer-class impactor is pretty low (but non-zero), and on the other hand we've got zero evidence that there are aliens with the ability to get here at all. Hmm, won't worry too much about either then. The gripping hand is that the likelihood of a city-killer impactor is quite a lot higher: the last known one of that sort of scale was only around a century ago (and luckily hit Siberia, a long way from anywhere; a Tunguska-level hit to any modern city would be terrifying in the amount of destruction). It's also going to be a lot easier to deflect those smaller objects, provided we spot them early enough; with a decade's worth of heads up, we should be able to ensure total safety.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"