Slashdot Mirror
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."
We need this Southern guy with three names to come up with a plan to drill into the asteroid . . . never mind!
If it was possible for an asteroid impact to cause a mass extinction, wouldn't it have happened already?
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"...
No, that would be Americans themselves...
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.
wake me up when they actually implement some of that socialism your referring to.
The dinosaurs say hello...
Oh wait, an asteroid impact caused their mass extinction.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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?
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.
Approximations :-)
Hey, it worked for the Voyager probes.
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.
So an exact solution does not exist, big deal. There are plenty of things we can calculate numerically with precision which is high in practice and arbitrary in theory.
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.
You realize of course that big rocks really do hit the earth from time to time. I'm not just talking about dinosaur killers and cataclismic events, but 'smaller' impacts too. In fact, there's a rather famous one that happened barely a hundred years ago. There aren't many places on left on dry land that an impact like that can occur without it causing massive devastation. And that's even ignoring the damage that could be done if an impact occurred in a large body of water; cartoonishly large tsunami's are a real, actual possibility.
But hey, keep worrying about the latest doom and gloom predictions. Not that there isn't anything to them, but people have been making them for hundreds of years and human civilization keeps ticking over somehow. I'm not even sure what you mean by "matters closer to home", the only thing I can think of is the kind of catastrophic climate change that no one really takes seriously anymore (and I don't mean a 2 meter rise in sea level, yes that would be devastating but not cataclysmic.)
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?
You are thinking Mars, the Moon, L-5 habitats as additional baskets? They will never be a robust a place for survival as the Earth, but I agree. Species survival is an imperative. And neither our Earth, nor solar system should be the sole home of H Sap.
T.Rex's last words were "What's that wooshing sound?"
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.
Personally, I'm dubious. 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, which means a couple guys in their garage can't do it themselves. Here's an Onion article that, while facetious, is pretty accurate. We humans, in groups, just aren't very intelligent, and are completely unable to work together to do necessary things to ensure our own survival. Generally, the only things that work well for us are things which a couple guys in their garage can do, and then after proving it, everyone else decides it's a good idea and jumps on the bandwagon. This is why things like smartphones have worked so well: it's not that hard for small groups of people to build such things and prove they work; then, once the masses see that they can talk to their dumb friends and play Angry Birds, they all want to buy one, making the whole thing highly profitable. There's no clear profit in building large spacecraft and traveling to Alpha Centauri, and once we have an Earth-killer hurtling towards us and it's clear we won't survive, it'll be too late to do anything to either avert the disaster or save the species. What's worse, we're too stupid to learn from history and from the failings of others, so we repeat their mistakes. 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. Now, we've advanced enough to where we've figured out that this happened to them, yet we still don't take the threat seriously. And unlike the dinosaurs, we don't have the excuse that we're too stupid to develop language, technology, civilization, or even spaceflight.
Personally, I think we're headed into another Dark Ages, where we'll lose most of our technology and go back to living in grass huts and fighting each other in Feudal wars using swords and shields. Maybe after another two thousand years or so, we'll have another technological revolution and develop spaceflight again, and discover that the old myths and legends about humans walking on the Moon were actually true, and that time develop a serious space program and travel to other stars. But if a killer asteroid strikes before then, we're doomed as a species.
I'm pretty sure that 15 years IS more than a decade, actually...
To paraphrase Foghorn Leghorn, "That is why we should keep Bruce Willis around for just such an emergency. "
I think it depends on which way the winds carry the ash. Seriously, Californians would be better off if they eliminated the power the east coasters have over them, and California (actually, the whole west coast) is where all of America's remaining technology is. Where do you think your smartphone, computer, etc. were all designed? Certainly not in Detroit, NYC, or DC. The east coast cities don't really produce anything of value, and in the case of NYC and DC, they do nothing but cause harm (from the banksters in NY and the politicians and lobbyists in DC).
One thing working in our favor is that an Earth-impacting asteroid will likely have an orbit that brings it into regular proximity with Earth, providing sequential opportunities to intercept or otherwise influence it before it hits. A rogue body hurtling down from the Kuiper Belt and just so happening to bull's-eye Earth is highly unlikely, even for asteroid impacts. So, on one of those close approaches we have a chance of intercepting it, then spending all of the next orbit deflecting it. If you had read the article, or any credible article on the subject, you would know this.
We can't even calculate all of the digits of pi! Whatever shall we do!
AHHHH!
If scientists were in charge we may have a chance at survival as a species. Unfortunately our country (USA) is run by a bunch of corrupt money grubbing idiots that still believe in creationist theory (god WILL protect us). What's worse is that we voted these fools into power.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Yes it is. Orbits, unlike the weather, are not chaotic.
An orbit is not chaotic. Solving two orbits (three bodies) is the exact problem that lead to the development of chaos theory.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Well, you're a basket case if you think anything resembling the "species" will still be around in cosmic time scales. There were no humans around a million years ago, what makes you think there will in a million?
You're right. So instead, let us not talk just about preserving the human species, but whatever species our descendants will become.
The enemies of Democracy are
It depends on what you count as human. Modern humans are generally thought to have been around for about 50,000 years, with anatomically similar ones (but without the same behaviour range) extending back 200,000 years. The first members of the homo genus appeared about 2.5 million years ago, so there were a lot of vaguely human-like things around a million years ago, but probably none that you'd invite over for tea. Wikipedia has a nice timeline.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Unfortunately our country (USA) is run by a bunch of intelligent, alpha sopciopaths, some of whom claim belief in creationist theory in order to get votes from the actual stupid people. What's worse is that we voted these fools into power because even by the primaries we have no choice except evil lizard A and evil lizard B.
FTFY. :-)
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.
Okay, you made your point earlier. You *really* don't like Tyson and are, for some reason, very, very bitter about/toward him. For whatever the reasons, of which you seem to disapprove, he's successful and famous and you're not; take a deep breath, get a drink and get over it.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I wonder what would happen if someone would start a Kickstarter project around this: "Save the Earth! Target funding: $1,000,000,000,000. The more you contribute, the greater the chance you will survive."
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Remember when the Republican party used to be sane? Today's Republicans are the gift that keeps on giving to the Onion writers.
Yes, 15 years usually is more then a decade ;-)
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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?
He's probably American. They haven't a fucking clue what socialism actually is. To them it's just a word that appeared in the English language during the 2008 US presidential election campaign when the bimbo-in-chief started bandying it around to refer to any Obama policy she didn't like.
the problem is we aren't working seriously on any of these things.
Actually, we are, but probably not with as large a budget as you (or I) would like. The National Ignition Facility isn't too dissimilar in concept from the Daedalus engine, and it may have a chance of generating surplus power. For the space elevator, we simply need much better materials, and there is an awful lot of research (public and private) in that area.
The timeline for this probably isn't decades, though - centuries would be more realistic. It's true that rapid unexpected advances in technology are possible, but it's also true that you can pour a massive amount of money into something and end up no further than you were before. (Case in point: the space shuttle.) Additionally, there is a real problem with scale - the advances in technology that you mention result from electronics becoming miniaturized and more efficient. But mega-projects like the LHC or ITER are still extremely expensive. Quite a bit of time and effort is required to make those helium-cooled superconducting magnets, and economies of scale don't seem to apply.
Just a few years ago a meteorite exploded over the eastern Mediterranean. If it had arrived two hours later Earth's rotation would have had it blowing up over the India/Pakistan border. What do you think the local reaction would have been to a multi-kiloton air blast anywhere in the area? To make matters worse, keep in mind that the Pakistani nukes aren't even under the control of the central government, but of the generals in charge of the area where they're deployed. A full-scale nuclear exchange between the two countries is very likely enough to trigger a Nuclear Winter event.
Do you understand now? It doesn't take a Chixlub-size asteroid to cause an extinction-level event any more.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I don't think the Space Shuttle is a good example of your point. The SS is a good example of a boondoggle and stupid requirements. The whole idea of having something that could go up in space, grab big payloads, and bring them back down to earth is something that just wasn't needed; it's much cheaper and easier to make something that launches mass into space, in a one-way trip (only the humans need to be returned safely).
To make the obligatory car analogy, it's like buying a giant 6-seat pickup truck (w/ long bed), plus a lift kit and giant chrome rims and tires, just to drive to work every day. It'll cost a fortune (in both initial and recurring costs), and not do a better job than a Prius. Sure, it might do a better job at rolling over cars in a show or something, but that's not what it's being used for.