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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."
Changing the wind patterns just slightly, enough to disturb the Earth's orbit and resulting in us being hit be an asteroid.
But we're going to need another basket if we want to survive as a species.
Do we need to waste precious energy we don't have on this sort of dribble?
Aside from the fact that it has a miniscule chance of hitting us, I think many people in the US (I can't speak for other nations) are thinking that even if there was a high danger, that space technology will have advanced enough by then for us to easily deal with it. "Kick it down the road to the next administration," goes the unofficial position of the politicians. "We've got socialism to implement & votes to buy." That attitude will ensure no advances occur.
We need this Southern guy with three names to come up with a plan to drill into the asteroid . . . never mind!
When exactly did Neil deGrasse Tyson become the world's official representative on all things astronomical? Was it the the pluto thing? It's just really weird that every media outlet seems to go to him for everything these days. He's really articulate and informed, but so are a lot of people. I don't get it.
Let me guess, he wants to reclassify Earth as a "Non-Asteroid-Attracting Planetoid" in the hopes of fooling the asteroids.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
An asteroid calculated to miss for 1000 orbits can have its orbit gravitationally altered by a close pass with another small but significant mass object in the Kuiper Belt.
At that point, the next pass by Earth may not be "by Earth"...
Ever notice how the news makes sure to refer to any psychopathic killer by three names?
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a lowdown sidewinder that shot Pluto in the back just to watch it die.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
1 - catalogue all the asteroids likely to pass by earth
2 - analyse their composition
3 - determine which can have their orbit modified so as to be placed in orbit around earth for an energy effort low enough that one will come out ahead either using the asteroid for material in orbit (to construct space stations / satellites, the probe to explore the next asteroid &c.) or have ore valuable enough to be worth returning to earth
4 - profit!
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
If the US takes this on, I would surmise it would fall under NASA's umbrella. With their funding being cut, though (total of $17.7 Billion for 2012*) I don't see a lot of excess to whittle off for exploring options. Most likely the military will absorb the cost, but don't expect to see "kinder and gentler" on their option list.
[*] - http://io9.com/5885042/how-will-the-white-houses-brutal-budget-cuts-affect-nasa
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This is why you should have children. We need more brains, more people thinking about big problems and they need lots of people supporting them to think about these big problems like how to protect this rock and how to get some of our populace off this rock to other rocks. Without this we face near certain extinction. Breed. Read to your children. Teach them to love learning. Teach them to work hard. The rest will follow.
3-body problem --> non-linear feedback --> mathematical chaos --> must simulate, but very sensitive to initial conditions. There is a lot of matter in our solar system for which the orbits are not known. ==> I don't believe 'hundreds of orbits in the future'.
A triangular space ship with vector blasters!!! It worked in the 20th century and it should work in the 21st century!!!
Couldn't Tyson just move all of us to his home planet prior to the asteroid hitting earth? Or is the environment of his home planet inhospitable to earthlings?
I've seen this guy's face and name pop up so much this last month, its reminding me of Andy Worhol's most famous quote.
He's a cool guy and all, but it now feels like he's a William Morris client.
I was hoping for 3 robots piloted by young cute girls in skin tight outfits...
It's worse even than that.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I really don't care what Neil deGrasse Tyson advocates. Is this really about saving the Earth or just about getting him more publicity? He is the only "astronomer" to be credited with the discovery of negative one planets. Join the campaign to get deGrasse Tyson demoted from "astronomer" to "dwarf astronomer".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Yes this is indeed the need of the hour! Save Earth from asteroids! How about we stop this paranoia and focus on matters closer to home, or what will be left in a few short decades will not only not be worth saving, it would well deserve obliteration by an asteroid or two!
Headline is hyperbolic. Astroid sized impacts aren't going to destroy Earth. It'll be fine. It's the humans for which we need to be concerned.
The republicans will scorn the theory, deny the evidence, publicly attack the scientists who produced it, and insist on doing nothing.
Isn't he the one that killed the planet Pluto?
I thought even the smallest nudge can totally change the trajectory of crap in space.
Can't we just fire off something to nudge it slightly at a different angle?
Evidence for Younger Dryas impact: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/01/1110614109.abstract
Note that the YD debris layer covers 10% of the Earth. It is hypothesized it was caused by a comet which broke up some time before hitting Earth, so created a large number of smaller craters rather than one big one.
Given the way the past generations have treated the future ones, there won't be enough time between figuring out the threat and putting together an adequate response in time.
Past performances prove that any previous generation has no qualms at all about making the future generations pay for their own spending and not the other way around, all this is done while paying plenty of lip service to the proverbial 'children'.
You can't handle the truth.
He does seem to be going on about this issue a bit lately.
What are you not telling us, Neil?
He is right, we know too little about asteroids today to be able to predict a collision, let alone think of deflection. Before trying to come up with a plan to deflect one, we need to study them much more.
3 - determine which can have their orbit modified so as to be placed in orbit around earth
4 - Oops!
His plan...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Anyone that read Lucifer's Hammer knows that asterioids and comets bounce around in their orbit too much to make anything other than a reasonable guess till they are too close to do anything other than hide The Way Things Work in your septic tank. For those unaware - it's written by Larry Niven and David Pournelle
No wonder they named a Jr High School after this guy.
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
The earth doesn't need saving from asteroids, it's survived asteroid impacts for 4 billion years. Humans are what we need to save from asteroid impacts and the simplest solution to this problem seems to me to be to move off of objects that routinely get struck by asteroids (the earth) and onto something a tad bit more maneuverable (like an asteroid)
T.Rex's last words were "What's that wooshing sound?"
The USAF is looking around for a new bomb big enough to bust those wacky Iranian Nuclear Factory Bunkers. Maybe an Asteroid might be up to the job.
You would just need to catch it, and toss it in the right direction. This shouldn't be a problem for the current state of technology.
Probably.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I mean, come on, after the Earth has collided with an errant asteroid and all life on it has been fried, would you really care that the space aliens are laughing at you? If people are not moved by "You are all going to die!" they are not likely to be persuaded by, "Space aliens would laugh at you!".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I am tired of hearing about this guy. He is on reddit and on slashdot brought by legion of moronic fanboys.
All he says are generalities pondering to the crowd of scientific diletants and irrational atheists.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
That ain't gonna cut it. Even if the nuke blows up the asteroid, its center of mass will continue on the original trajectory. All the chunks that were displaced in the tangential (to the trajectory at the moment of explosion) will hit the earth. Only the chunks displaced in the normal direction has some chance of missing the earth. Again given the size of the Earth's gravitational well, it would only delay the impact by a few thousand years. So nuking the asteroid is likely to nip in the bud any nascent life form emerging after the apocalyptic impact.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
System alert: Watch out, we've got a bad asteroid over here!
And the outcome will be? We will know the precise hour when we die.
How do we stop an asteroid anyway? I've heard proposals of nuking the asteroids, but I don't see how we will intercept an asteroid with enough nukes early enough to deflect the asteroid. I don't suppose a nuke would be much better than simply hitting the asteroid with a high momentum slug and hope to change the trajectory sufficiently. How will we accelerate such a slug and set it on an intercept course with the asteroid?
Just like clockwork every year the stories abound about meteors/comets/space junk colliding with earth and sealing our fate. Then we hear from bacteriologists that some primordial ooze will threaten to overtake the planet. And on and on and on......... Working in medicine I see this everyday; a constant lobbying for $$$. Cancer vs. heart disease vs. neuro diseases, yada yada yada. I'm not saying that these concerns are without validity, just that this is simply the tried and true method for garnering public support for increased funding.
Even though its good to plan for precuations and deflection efforts, the fact is, humans could survive a Chicxulub sized impact fairly easy, it is completely survivable here on earth. Unlike dinosaurs humans can store away enough food to get through a long period of time without sunlight, and store a seed bank supply containing huge stores of all seeds from food plants and livestock to repopulate and restore agriculture afterward, and libraries filled with the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Unless, we include the entire population of these efforts so the entire population stores away huge amounts of freeze dried and preserved food, the survival facility would have to be secret and heavily protected from the riots and chaos that would ensue in a asteroid winter. There would be many of these facilities located in top secret all over the planet so even if one was destroyed by the impact there would still be others. The people participating in them would have to live nearby and would have to go underground at a moments notice. Some of them would have to be located near fertile, farmable areas for recovery long after the strike. They would be far underground and bult to withstand wildfires, huge winds, earthquakes and all the other stuff that could happen. They would be protected from tsunami, located inland and so on and from any other conceivable disaster.
All of this could allow humanity to survive on earth even easier and with less trouble than on mars. It is actually easier to survive here on earth after an asteroid than it would be on mars.
Wouldn't the significant increase in surface area / volume ration cause a far lower mass to actually hit earth?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Well, if your bomb is strong enough, you can blow it enough for the center of mass to become irrelevant, as all debris will fly away from it. If it isn't that strong, you can still ensure you blow it into small enough pieces that it's surface to mass ratio is big enough for them to not survive reentry.
But the best option is probably just to propel the thing, you are right.
Rethinking email
Neil de Grasse Tyson is also in the news for being the proud (?) author of the only modification to be suggested and approved for inclusion in the new version of Titanic:3D - theres a mention here
the ultimate wave defense game
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
I read the title as 'a plan to save earth from assholes'. I'd be more interested to hear his answer on that one.
They can't even calculate it's trajectory close enough to determine if it will hit one on of the few key windows in 17 years that might put it on a collision course in another 7 years. Why should I think the projection out 24 years from now (appx) will actually hit a target only a few thousand miles across and in a window of less than half a day with that level of imprecision?
I think either he's been watching too many Hollywood films, or the reporter didn't correctly quote the statement.
I think Heinlein wrote about a mining rig/linear accelerator once, but I've never heard about it since.
The idea is to fly a mining rig to an asteroid and land it there. The mining rig would be nuclear powered and use a laser or mechanical tool to grind up bits of the asteroid, which it would then fire through a longish magnetic accelerator, acting as a propellant. This would be used to then steer the asteroid to where we want it--deep space/the sun/jupiter for disposal or into a stable near earth orbit for harvesting.
The thrust generated by firing bits of iron rich alloy out the back would be small, but the duration could be decades. If the asteroid is spinning, a computer could control the timing of the release to effectively steer the asteroid.
The Way Things Work was written by David Macaulay , NOT Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle .
And if you're caching books in your septic tank for the benefit of future generations, you really should be including a copy of the Motel of Mysteries.
That's irrelevant: the US already has bombs plenty big enough to bust those Iranian nuclear factory bunkers; the only problem is that they're nuclear themselves. What the USAF is looking for is a really big conventional bomb, because it's not politically feasible to start dropping megatons of hypocrisy on the Iranians.
With an asteroid, on the other hand, there's no problem using a nuke.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I wouldnt bother - no matter how many safe guards science put into place to ensure at least some of the race survived, the first words the surviors will utter staggering out their shelter will be 'Thank God!'
I never heard of Neil deGrasse Tyson's (thank goodness for cut and paste), was he in Armageddon? I am glad he had found a way to take his movie background and create a solution that works.
no comment
I came up with a drinking game where you take a drink every time there was a scientific inaccuracy in "Armaggeddon" but I would always pass out drunk by the end of the opening credits.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Predicting asteroid collisions that far in the future is not easy. The limitation is not compute power, but data accuracy. Small uncertainties in position and speed are magnified exponentially every time the body passes close to a planet or moon. Small uncertainties in the gravitational field of the other bodies (e.g. comets, unseen asteroids) and in the solar wind has a similar effect. So if measurement technology improves one digit every X years one expects that forecasting range will increase at a constant rate at best (i.e. every X years we can predict a collision with extra Y months in advance).
But wouldn't that take away funding from Global Warming research and Green Projects?
Worked against those evil commie nukes and there is nothing more powerful than evil commie nukes.
sounds more like the media whore physicist full employment act to me.
Near Earth Asteroid collision predictions are relatively straightforward and processes for mitigation are being worked on. That issue is almost too easy and we'll know years if not decades in advance if a relatively large asteroid is a threat. The threat from a large comet approaching the inner solar system is a different issue and one that doesn't lend itself to easy prediction and mitigation. We might have several months to plan for deflection/destruction of a large comet swooping in from the Oort Cloud. Remember those blotches in Jupiter's clouds from Shoemaker-Levy 9? They were produced by cometary fragments.
Well, the guy who almost single-handedly caused Pluto to be relegated to Minor Planet status should know a thing or two about planetary destruction...
first you need to decide precisely how you are going to defend.. then you build the catalog of threats... for two reasons
1- locating everything does JACK for you if you can't stop anything yet, if you can see it- but do nothing- it sucks.
if you can deal with it, and miss seeing it-- it sucks, but at least with the latter you have a better chance of success 100% kill ratio on 10% of objects as located is better than 0% kill ration on 100% known objects
2- knowing the method defines how encompassing your catalog of astral bodies have to be..
if the method selected allows for getting meteors within mars orbit and moving at 1/10th lightspeed or so,-- that's all you gotta look for.
if the method available requires having months advance notice (launch per interception, ship per interception, and sending up oil drillers with nukes) we gotta look farther out for more lead time
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
He mentions the date as Friday the 13th, April 2029. When the date is about 18 years from now, what was the need for mentioning that 13th is a Friday. Now instead of focusing on science, there will be a bunch of people who focus on Friday the 13th.
|On Friday the 13th, April 2029, it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
I was thinking the "other killer asteroid movie" with Billy Bob Thornton in it. Get it, Southern guy with 3 names? Neil deGrasse Tyson has 3 names? OK, Dr. Tyson is a black Northerner and Mr. Thornton is a white Southerner? Oh, heck, you are right, joke is way overused and no longer funny,