UK Govt Plans To Set Up 'Armageddon' Centre

Scott Manley writes "According to the Sunday Times, and the BBC the UK government is putting together a task force to advise the government on Extraterrestrial hazards. Professor Mark Bailey has been campaigning for this for a long time - and it seems timely for such a thing after his staff at Armagh Observatory made the first accurate prediction of a meteor shower. "

Comments

An actual _good_ use of tax dollars

[xtal]

Finally, governments that might actually, maybe, get it :). It strikes me that this is something that the United Nations should fund, as the implications and benefits of any work into researching Near Earth Objects. JPL is associated with some work into this: Check out the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program (NEAT).

Some people think of this as a waste of money, but we are the first species to get to the point where we can prevent our own (eventual) cosmic reset button from being set.

One way to look at it is a great big life insurance program for Human Civilization - the payments aren't high, the work can be largely automated, and if the program ever pays off, there is no way to measure the value of the endeavor! :)

Too bad the US wouldn't shovel some more bucks into NEAT, but, we'll see what international competition can do.

Kudos..

It's a daft idea

[ralphclark]

With our present technology there's little we could do to deflect a projectile of sizable momentum. After all, how much money did the US spend on Star Wars? And with so little to show for it in the end.

We ought to spend the money on manned space exploration of the solar system. That way we get access to the asteroid belt's natural resources, which we need in order to construct the massive equipment we'd need to both monitor and protect against incursions from that same asteroid belt.

Besides, it would be a blast.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

You misunderstand chaos.

[Tau Zero]

But monitoring the asteroids when they are in the asteroid belt will do no good whatsoever. They are all in chaotic orbits, so current observations don't allow us to predict their future paths.

Yes we can. The property of chaotic behavior is that the long-term effect of infinitesimal perturbations grows rapidly over time. Note, long-term effect. Just because an orbit cannot be projected reliably for a million years doesn't support your conclusion. We can do a perfectly adequate job of seeing where these rocks will be over 20 years or so, and that's more than sufficient warning.
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