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Neil deGrasse Tyson Outlines a Plan For Saving Earth From Asteroids
dsinc contributes a link to Neil deGrasse Tyson's short piece in Wired on how we could deal with the very real threat of killer asteroids, writing "In 2029 we'll be able to know whether, seven years later, Apophis will miss Earth or slam into the Pacific and create a tsunami that will devastate all the coastlines of the Pacific Rim." From the article: "Saving the planet requires commitment. First we have to catalogue every object whose orbit intersects Earth’s, then task our computers with carrying out the calculations necessary to predict a catastrophic collision hundreds or thousands of orbits into the future. Meanwhile, space missions would have to determine in great detail the structure and chemical composition of killer comets and asteroids."
It happened exactly when he stepped up and started talking about science and advocating the rare attitude of giving-a-shit.
"80% of life|success is showing up." -- Woody Allen
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His enthusiasm.
There are lots of other astronomers, last I checked the US graduates about 200 PhD's in astronomy and astrophysics a year, but the vast majority of them don't get excited at the mere notion of talking about science the way Dr Tyson does. Which is why he ended up doing science outreach at planetarium, which is why they put him on TV etc.
He is by no means the only, and probably not the best scientist in the world. But his enthusiasm and energy are infectious, most of the other scientists you talk to are more concerned with publishing their next paper or making sure they have enough money to pay their graduate students. If you look at his CV he hasn't published anything academic since 2008 (nor did I immediately find anything on google scholar that would indicate he's just lazy about updating his webpage, but admittedly I don't normally search for astrophysics), and the work he's published recently seems to more be him as part of the planetarium or american museum of natural history than personal research, and he doesn't appear to take on grad students. That sets him apart from probably 90% of the practicing astronomers, in that he is actually focused full time on science communication rather than doing science. That makes him rare in the field, he's reasonably good at it, and he happens to have been in the right place at the right time with proximity to TV shows to go from a good career as a directory and writer to a particularly good one as TV personality.
My undergrad is in theoretical physics, with most of that on optics and semiconductors, optics is largely 'laboratory astrophysics'. I find now several years after having finished my undergrad that I have a lot of trouble following most astrophysicists giving talks, because they're talking at a 4th year level, and seeing as how I'm a game developer and computer scientist these days that's far removed from understanding astrophysics. Dr. Tyson when he talks is able to mostly limit himself to first year intro to astronomy level, where people can actually understand what the hell he's talking about most of the time, finding people who can do that is unfortunately rather difficult.
There were no humans around a million years ago, what makes you think there will in a million?
Sentience.
And what makes you think we have the energy to sustain anything close to what we have enjoyed for the past 150 years ????
E = mc^2
Idiot.
Defeatist.
With the computing power, the n-body problem can be solved with sufficient precision for the purposes of detecting this particular threat. And it will give us enough fore-warning to do something to prevent it. Whether we can come to a consensus and actually do it is another issue.
Let me get this straight, in the same post you complain that we won't work together and fix the problem and then also chastise "socialism" - Do you think there is a private company who would be doing this save for the chains of government?
That is a very shortsighted attitude. An ignorant public is guaranteed to be hostile to funding pure research. Europe got the LHC while we left the SSSC half built and rotting in the ground. A major reason for it is the difference in regard for science and especially what science research leads to in the long term.
And as the public's scientific literacy degrades so to will our ability to come up new tech or even maintain what we have. It will be very easy to convince people ignorant of the methods and findings of science that all scientists are boondoggling eggheads who hate Jesus.
Scientists are supposedly intelligent, educated, and good at reasoning. Why they make a team sport of denegrating popularizers baffles me. Science needs freedom and funding to do it's work. Cheerleading for ignorance just so one can feel like he has a bigger brainpan than a "mere popularizer" is so stupid on multiple levels.
The technology isn't that hard really, it's the political will. Creating that technology and building things at the scale needed for success requires massive funding
But that's exactly why the technology is hard. Given unlimited sums of money, there are many scientific and technological endeavors that become technically feasible or even trivial: fusion power, Mars colonies, cancer cures, eliminating dependency on fossil fuels, etc. The problem is that we don't have unlimited sums of money, and we don't know in advance of any shortcuts of miraculous developments that would make something like interstellar travel affordable (let alone profitable).
Some actual numbers are required to really understand how far away we are. The best study of interstellar travel that I'm aware of is Project Daedalus from the 1970s. The hypothetical spacecraft - unmanned - would have been powered and propelled by D/He3 inertial confinement fusion, and would take 50 years to reach Barnard's Star, where it would release several probes. The fuel would be obtained by siphoning He3 out of Jupiter's atmosphere over a 20-year period. Estimated cost was $100 trillion. This is for an unmanned probe that would take most of a human lifetime to reach a very close star. To give you some perspective, the annual US budget is $3.6 trillion, and the entire global GNP is around $70 trillion. We do not actually know how to build most of this technology (although ICF may be almost within reach) - we only know that it is probably technically possible. More importantly, we do not know how we might build it cheaply.
I'm all for continuing research into nuclear fusion, new propulsion systems, industrial automation, exoplanets, etc. But the idea that we could have an interstellar spaceflight program if only we found the "political will" is utterly detached from reality. The problem isn't that people in general are stupid: the problem is that people don't want the government to redirect a massive portion of their economic output towards a project that we don't know how to build, won't be completed in their lifetime, and won't improve their lives on Earth. (And still wouldn't ensure the survival of the species, for that matter.) That's not stupidity, that's common sense.
The dinosaurs showed what happens when you don't invest in a space program. They had hundreds of millions of years to do so, yet they didn't bother (for obvious reasons), and then a giant asteroid wiped them out.
This comes up in every single thread on this topic, and the response is always the same: if we suffered a similar impact, Earth would still be a vastly more hospitable environment for humans than anywhere else that we know of, including Mars. It would undoubtedly result in mass extinction, and a large fraction of the human race would probably die from starvation, but we could still sustain millions (if not billions) of lives indefinitely, albeit at a greatly reduced standard of living. The dinosaurs died out because they lacked technology and food cultivation altogether.