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California Professors Unveil Proposal To Attack Asteroids With Lasers
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday's twin events with invading rocks from outer space — the close encounter with asteroid 2012 DA14, and the killer meteorite over Russia that was more than close — have brought the topic of defending mankind against killer asteroids back into the news. The Economist summarizes some of the ideas that have been bandied about, in a story that suggests Paul Simon's seventies hit "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover": Just push it aside, Clyde. Show it the nuke, Luke. Gravity tug, Doug. The new proposal is an earth orbiting, solar-powered array of laser guns called DE-STAR (Directed Energy Solar Targeting of AsteRoids) from two California-based professors, physicist Philip Lubin (UCSB) and industrial statistician Gary Hughes (Cal Polytechnic State). Lubin and Hughes say their system could be developed and deployed in a range of sizes depending on the size of the target: DE-STAR 2, about the size of the International Space Station (100 meters) could nudge comets and asteroids from their orbits, while DE-STAR 4 (100 times larger than ISS) could evaporate an asteroid 500 meters in diameter (10 times larger than 2012 DA14) in a year. Of course, this assumes that the critters could be spotted early enough for the lasers to do their work."
There was also a meteor that was seen from San Francisco
The Death Star
... fricking lasers? Would there be sharks?
Wouldn't it be much more efficient (and cheaper) to just use mirror arrays to focus the sunlight directly, rather than use expensive and inefficient solar panels to process the sunlight into a laser first?
Then, instead of sitting uselessly in space 99.999% of the time (or maybe 100%, even), they could focus sunlight onto ground-based power stations (or space-based, if we actually get mining operations going up there), and help pay for themselves.
It would also be a bit harder to weaponize. A DE(ath)-STAR in orbit? What could possibly go wrong?
Sorry for being a pessimist, but I'm old enough to remember Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
Consider a trillion dollar weapon of mass destruction in space.
It will never get through Congress.
There will be construction delays lasting a century.
Your enemies will be able to destroy it, cheaply.
Bright high school students will play with it.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Why attack asteroids with lasers? Aren't asteroids without lasers dangerous enough?
Ezekiel 23:20
The problem with asteroids are the ones that aren't spotted. The well-known large ones are easy to spot but suddenly a new one shows up and causes trouble.
The earlier you can see them the better - and early enough you may be able to at least do something about it by nudging the trajectory just a fraction to make it miss or hit something harmless. If possible - let it crash into the moon instead. Spectacular - but the risk to humanity is lower.
On the other hand - there are places here on Earth where an impact would solve some problems.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
As long as the project is funded by Californians, I say go for it. They don't seem to mind dismal-looking cost/benefit analyses
"His name was James Damore."
And how would you prevent these magical mirrors from moving away from the sunlight pressure?
You are right. We've never been hit by anything larger. We should definitely wait until something gets really, really close before we take any action.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This is where things get interesting.
The ability to direct kinetic weapons accurately from above is very likely to be of huge military importance in the future. I imagine that it's far easier to nudge an asteroid slightly so that 40 years hence it won't hit Earth than it would be to redirect it to target any particular spot on entry. Indeed, I imagine for any particular asteroid, there would only be so many places it could be forced to hit.
However, I cannot help but imagine that in multiple governments may start by working together with various satellite systems to push asteroids around. But decades into the future this may be a weird sort of arms race to see who can push the asteroid the most to get it to smack the enemy.
Well, you do realize that the proposals to "go live in space" is not about finding a safer place to live, right? The main reason to find other places to live is because it means that no single event can wipe out the whole species (more colloquially known as not having all eggs in one basket). If thinking that makes me a space nutter, well, I guess I'm okay with that.
I don't build my own roads. I don't have my own Department of Defense. I don't have my own power plant. There are lots of things that I depend on the government for. I'd suggest that tracking and intercepting dangerous objects in space is preferable to trying to live underground.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Let's keep things in perspective. There are no verified records of anyone being killed by a falling meteor, ever. There are some sketchy stories that can't be confirmed - but even if we believe all of them, the number is still pretty damn small.
Now consider all the wars, genocides, and random violence that humans have inflicted on each other.
They have a doomsday religion and believe in it fervently.
Only if you consider history, geology, paleontology, and math to be religion. Face it, those who are born always die. We will become extinct some day, probably either by our own hand or by our lack of action.
You, on the other hand, worship at the altar of ignorance. Or maybe under its bridge.
Free Martian Whores!
You're absolutely right, from a biological perspective. There have only been a handful of impacts that did any serious damage to the biosphere, but those mostly wiped out everything except for a few "lottery winners" low on the food chain. Humanity, well all mammals really, kind of won the last round when all the dominant animal life was killed off and "rodents" were able to inherit the Earth. However the asteroid that would destroy New York (city or state, your choice) isn't even worth mentioning on those scales, and humanity is occupying an ever larger portion of the surface. Just think of how much the damage would have cost had that Russian meteor blown out the windows in a major metropolitan area, and that one was downright tiny.
Plus, unlike the "war on terror" that has spent ~$1.5 Trillion to little effect beyond deposing some marginally related governments, a system that can deflect dangerous asteroids away from us also has considerable productive use as well: we could deflect valuable asteroids into near-Earth orbit, even capture them into stable Earth or Lunar orbits for processing. That is typically the oft-unspoken goal of most of these sorts of plans, but the big money all comes from the defense department, so that's how they get pitched. Science and economic development projects have to fight over the budgetary crumbs which couldn't feed a project like this. Even the Cold War "Star Wars" missile defense program was designed to double as an asteroid guidance system, or so I've heard.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If we could observe small objects to aim these things, we could also send people to bomb shelters/evacuate them that'd take a lot of the punch out of it and just brace for impact. For the really large objects then firing this laser at a dino-killer won't do anything anyway. From a WP article: "In 1998, NASA formally embraced the goal of finding and cataloging, by 2008, 90% of all near-Earth objects (NEOs) with diameters of 1 km or larger that could represent a collision risk to Earth. The 1 km diameter metric was chosen after considerable study indicated that an impact of an object smaller than 1 km could cause significant local or regional damage but is unlikely to cause a worldwide catastrophe."
So even at 100 times the ISS with a year of advance warning, it can only prevent a smaller regional disaster (1/2 diameter = 1/8th the volume and 1/8th the energy of a 1km asteroid). It is quite probably cheaper, simpler and more guaranteed to work to slowly evacuate that region over that year or to prepare necessary shelters and supplies to just wait it out. This is just stone, not nukes so there's no radiation damage, once the dust clears you're free to exit the shelters again and while crops and animals might be lost there's no long term poisoning of the water and food chain. In short, compared to all the other dangerous places choose to live with earthquakes and volcanos and whatnot with far more immediate danger this seems like a total waste of money and effort. Now dino-killers would be nice to have a defense against, but this is not it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The real threat is not from the occasional asteroid, but from swarms of small cometary rocks. Such swarms do not provide any single, easy target to spot and attempt to take out in advance.
They have struck before on a larger scale - with regularity - as documented e.g. by Clube and Napier. Much of their research focused on the long-past break-up of a very large comet and the periodic intersection of Earth's orbit with its remains - which has led to cometary showers, with their impact on societies in more ways than one, also leading among other things to religious developments - ideas of gods and their actions and judgments.
Historically, peoples have looked to their leaders to protect them from catastrophe - and when their leaders fail to do so, i.e. something happens that they simply cannot control, such as a rain of fireballs and meteorites exploding in the atmosphere, then a people will blame its leaders and get rid of them - often violently. This seems to be a basic feature of human psychology, one repeatedly seen in action throughout history.
Knowing this, the leaders have the need to reassure their people that they have things under control - historically, there have e.g. been systems of ritual and sacrifice. Nowadays, reassurances come in a different form: That the sky is watched, that major events only happen "once in a lifetime" (or, earlier, that such things simply couldn't happen - which was long the consensus), coupled with simplistic ideas of weapons and other solutions to take out the threat - solutions that will never be adequate if/when the time comes for real. People are only too happy to play along with such reassurances, to develop them and then to take them and run with them, since the alternative is not too pleasant - recognizing that there is no way to avert such disasters when they arrive.
A very recent book by a historian, "Comets and the Horns of Moses", discusses this whole subject, and much more connected to it. It goes into the history of cometary interaction with our planet - which has long seemed to follow cycles - and both how it has affected life on Earth and how humanity has responded to it - the social, cultural, and political dynamics involved, both in-between and during times of cometary disasters. Looking at the history and the present, it further goes into what seems likely to be coming up. I'd recommend it for the interested.
http://www.amazon.com/Comets-Horns-Moses-Laura-Knight-Jadczyk/dp/1897244835/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360956345&sr=8-1&keywords=comets+and+the+horns+of+moses
In the present time, one of several clues is the reported sightings collected by the American Meteor Society, which have increased roughly exponentially since 2005 - with 463 events on record for 2005, the increase accelerating year by year with 1628 for 2011 and then 2219 for 2012. Thus far this year - i.e. in one and a half month - there's been 322.
A problem has been detected and windows needs to shutdown to protect your satellite. Error 0x00002.
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
As long as the project is funded by Californians, I say go for it. They don't seem to mind dismal-looking cost/benefit analyses
One problem with California, is that many of the people that can do math have already left the state. When people vote for dumb policies, sensible people move elsewhere, leaving behind the dumb people to vote for even dumber dumber policies, causing even more sensible people to leave ....
I think Penn Jilette said it best.
"When you vote for the lesser of two evils you get ever-increasing evil."
"His name was James Damore."