Right but worrying doesn't solve any problems. Do we have any feasible mechanisms for preventing a catastrophic event from occurring within a reasonable time span? I don't believe I saw any proposed in the thread but if there are some I apologize for overlooking them.
It's kind of like looking out for gamma ray burst. Fun and informative but ultimately worthless.
The general opinion is that if we spot an object on a collision course with 1-2 decades advance warning, then we have enough time to do something about it. Since most of the NEOs which "might hit" tend to have impact durations of 70-80 years, I'd say this is a worthwhile endeavor, especially since such a threat would probably mobilize economies like the US to do an Apollo style program to prevent their annihilation.
Nothing like a giant external threat to get everyone focussed.
You guys who are saying that "Well, we have no way to deal with the big asteroids, so why bother to see if they are coming?"
There are two scenarios here, assuming an NEO is heading our way:
Scenario A: Detect the NEO, spend the next 10-20 years frantically pouring all our time and energy into figuring out a way to displace the NEO, or somehow survive it's impact. We may all live, or maybe only some of us may live, but maybe we will all die. But, atleast we will see it coming so we can go out in style.
Scenario B: Fail to detect the NEO, we all die in our sleep.
Scenario B: Fail to detect the NEO, we all die in our sleep.
You picked the boring death scenario. I prefer "impact heats the atmosphere enough above the site that a 24 hour firestorm circles then entire planet as the Earth rotates, followed by a global winter from dust and smoke from the devastation. Mankind slowly withers as all plant life dies out and eventually all animal life. As I starve to death I manage to yell "fuck Greenpeace!" knowing that a suitable number of nuclear reactors might have allowed us to survive the winter and into the silent spring."
Well I suppose a better question would be, how much does this lower the probability of a collision? It's to my understanding that complete monitoring of space would be next to impossible or such a large endeavor that the budgets would be insurmountable. So, how much space are we actually going to be able to cover with this budget increase?
You guys who are saying that "Well, we have no way to deal with the big asteroids, so why bother to see if they are coming?"
There are two scenarios here, assuming an NEO is heading our way:
Scenario A: Detect the NEO, spend the next 10-20 years frantically pouring all our time and energy into figuring out a way to displace the NEO, or somehow survive it's impact. We may all live, or maybe only some of us may live, but maybe we will all die. But, atleast we will see it coming so we can go out in style.
Scenario B: Fail to detect the NEO, we all die in our sleep.
Do you know how much chaos people would cause if they knew an asteroid was coming to wipe out the Earth? It would be a terrible terrible society to live in for 5 to 10 years prior to our imminent destruction. I'd take the peaceful sleeping option anyday.
I'm on the second colony ship off this rock.
(The first one will fail horribly)
No, the first one will make it. The second will be caught up in the unnecessarily large and nonsensical explosion.
The first one will make it to the destination, but then they will die from exposure to unknown pathogens and medical science will subsequently discover the cure and talk about how they studied the bodies of the first colonists and the genetic advantages the survivors had in order to make a vaccine.
You guys who are saying that "Well, we have no way to deal with the big asteroids, so why bother to see if they are coming?"
There are two scenarios here, assuming an NEO is heading our way:
Scenario A: Detect the NEO, spend the next 10-20 years frantically pouring all our time and energy into figuring out a way to displace the NEO, or somehow survive it's impact. We may all live, or maybe only some of us may live, but maybe we will all die. But, atleast we will see it coming so we can go out in style.
Scenario B: Fail to detect the NEO, we all die in our sleep.
But we sleep soundly with Scenario B, right?
I'd like to believe better of humanity, but somehow I doubt that Scenario A would go off like that. Instead, I picture 15 years of "Hell no don't raise my taxes for no damned space rock" while the more intelligent minority stands there with a O_o expression after having been outvoted on any program that might have helped save the planet. This is then followed by 5 years of religious insanity, mob rule and riotting while the government sits too mired in it's own waste products to do anything but flail about ineffectually.
You guys who are saying that "Well, we have no way to deal with the big asteroids, so why bother to see if they are coming?"
There are two scenarios here, assuming an NEO is heading our way:
Scenario A: Detect the NEO, spend the next 10-20 years frantically pouring all our time and energy into figuring out a way to displace the NEO, or somehow survive it's impact. We may all live, or maybe only some of us may live, but maybe we will all die. But, atleast we will see it coming so we can go out in style.
Scenario B: Fail to detect the NEO, we all die in our sleep.
But we sleep soundly with Scenario B, right?
I'd like to believe better of humanity, but somehow I doubt that Scenario A would go off like that. Instead, I picture 15 years of "Hell no don't raise my taxes for no damned space rock" while the more intelligent minority stands there with a O_o expression after having been outvoted on any program that might have helped save the planet. This is then followed by 5 years of religious insanity, mob rule and riotting while the government sits too mired in it's own waste products to do anything but flail about ineffectually.
Apollo program. You wouldn't have thought it would work. It will never be repeated. However it happened because "the russians are coming!" i.e. imminent death at any time.
I think we could have a sound redux. Plus who doesn't want to fire off some nukes?
But the Russians where an imminent threat. They were there. Mere hours away at supersonic speeds.
In this situation, people pull together. But telling people "Hey, in 20 years a rock has a good 50/50 chance of wiping us all off the face of the planet" isn't likely to motivate them to form the kind of unified front that would be required to make another Apollo program viable.
You guys who are saying that "Well, we have no way to deal with the big asteroids, so why bother to see if they are coming?"
There are two scenarios here, assuming an NEO is heading our way:
Scenario A: Detect the NEO, spend the next 10-20 years frantically pouring all our time and energy into figuring out a way to displace the NEO, or somehow survive it's impact. We may all live, or maybe only some of us may live, but maybe we will all die. But, atleast we will see it coming so we can go out in style.
Scenario B: Fail to detect the NEO, we all die in our sleep.
No, I am saying that considering the chances of a space rock - one big enough to cause a calamity - hitting the Earth are infinitesimally small, it makes more sense to focus our money, time, and effort to work on other problems. You know, problems that are real, problems that are hurting and killing people now.
I mean this whole thing is like paying millions of dollars to convert your shitty '85 Honda Civic to a submergeable so that you can survive a tsunami.
But hey, if you live in constant paranoia, everything will seem like a worthwhile investment.
--
In any case, I see this whole thing as an excuse to increase NASA's funding. It was only a few months ago that NASA said China will most likely beat the US to the Moon this second time around. Obviously we can't have that, yet at the same time we can't openly say we're increasing NASA's funding to compete with China because recognizing a rival would only lend them credence.
Instead I fully expect NASA's funding to be increased on grounds of "hey, let's detect killer asteroids" and then that money being slowly funneled toward other projects over the months.
I mean this whole thing is like paying millions of dollars to convert your shitty '85 Honda Civic to a submergeable so that you can survive a tsunami.
Hey look, a completely irrelevant analogy!
The point of the analogy is not its relevance, but nice try!
No, the point of an analogy is to try and easily explain a situation but it has to bear some relation to the situation at hand. This does not, because you manage to grossly misrepresent the scale of expenditure, the scale of benefits, and the fact that any detailed technological program involving tracking the motion of large numbers of orbital or celestial bodies actually has more immediate uses then just "what if we die" and OH YEAH - if we lose once, we may very well lose it all.
The more apt analogy is building a network of seismic sensors to detect tsunami's, which has some other scientific uses.
I mean this whole thing is like paying millions of dollars to convert your shitty '85 Honda Civic to a submergeable so that you can survive a tsunami.
Hey look, a completely irrelevant analogy!
The point of the analogy is not its relevance, but nice try!
No, the point of an analogy is to try and easily explain a situation but it has to bear some relation to the situation at hand. This does not, because you manage to grossly misrepresent the scale of expenditure, the scale of benefits, and the fact that any detailed technological program involving tracking the motion of large numbers of orbital or celestial bodies actually has more immediate uses then just "what if we die" and OH YEAH - if we lose once, we may very well lose it all.
The more apt analogy is building a network of seismic sensors to detect tsunami's, which has some other scientific uses.
The point of the analogy is that you are spending vast amounts of money to foresee - but not prevent - threats with likelihood-of-realization factors close to zero.
What other immediate uses are there, besides protecting satellites from orbital debris? Because that by itself still does not justify the costs; sure, you can detect the debris, but you still won't be able to prevent it from damaging satellites.
Like I said, even if we detect an NEO in collision course with Earth, the best we can do is try to figure out where it will hit, and evacuate the area. We don't and we most likely won't have the technology to prevent the collision. If the meteor is small enough that we can divert its course, then it probably isn't big enough to cause too serious of a damage anyway, so again it doesn't justify the costs.
What other immediate uses are there, besides protecting satellites from orbital debris? Because that by itself still does not justify the costs; sure, you can detect the debris, but you still won't be able to prevent it from damaging satellites.
Satellites have orbital thrusters which can be used to move them out of the path of collisions or debris, or prompt specific missions to remove debris heading for vital satellites like say, the global positioning system or various communications. It also means that orbital paths which cannot be used because of debris can be identified in advance.
Like I said, even if we detect an NEO in collision course with Earth, the best we can do is try to figure out where it will hit, and evacuate the area. We don't and we most likely won't have the technology to prevent the collision. If the meteor is small enough that we can divert its course, then it probably isn't big enough to cause too serious of a damage anyway, so again it doesn't justify the costs.
And here you show that you know exactly dick all about astrophysics and are simply picking the rather scarily more popular "no giev money to <nebulous endeavour 138>"
EDIT: Furthermore, most NEOs on potentially colliding courses are detected somewhere between 10-80 years in advance of when they could hit the Earth, yielding enough time to build and deploy a probe on an intercept course (which has been done - deliberately smashing into a comet with a probe to analyze a dust cloud was recently undertaken). But of course, I suppose your philosophy has the benefit of being self-fulfilling - if we never see a threat coming, then we're at no real risk of discovering we do in fact have the technology to avert the damage.
Although there have been a few false alarms, a number of asteroids are definitely known to be threats to the Earth. Asteroid (29075) 1950 DA was lost after its discovery in 1950 since not enough observations were made to allow plotting its orbit, and then rediscovered on December 31, 2000. The chance it will impact Earth on March 16, 2880 during its close approach has been estimated as 1 in 300. This chance of impact for such a large object is roughly 50% greater than that for all other such objects combined between now and 2880.[19] It has a diameter of about a kilometer.
So you know, when we do actually see these things there's usually a decent lead time on them. But looking for them tends to help.
EDIT 3:
On March 18, 2004, LINEAR announced a 30 meter asteroid 2004 FH which would pass the Earth that day at only 42,600 km (26,500 miles), about one-tenth the distance to the moon, and the closest miss ever noticed. They estimated that similar sized asteroids come as close about every two years.[21]
What other immediate uses are there, besides protecting satellites from orbital debris? Because that by itself still does not justify the costs; sure, you can detect the debris, but you still won't be able to prevent it from damaging satellites.
Satellites have orbital thrusters which can be used to move them out of the path of collisions or debris, or prompt specific missions to remove debris heading for vital satellites like say, the global positioning system or various communications. It also means that orbital paths which cannot be used because of debris can be identified in advance.
Like I said, even if we detect an NEO in collision course with Earth, the best we can do is try to figure out where it will hit, and evacuate the area. We don't and we most likely won't have the technology to prevent the collision. If the meteor is small enough that we can divert its course, then it probably isn't big enough to cause too serious of a damage anyway, so again it doesn't justify the costs.
And hear you show that you know exactly dick all about astrophysics and are simply picking the rather scarily more popular "no giev money to <nebulous endeavour 138>"
I know exactly dick about astrophysics, you know exactly about risk management and cost/benefit analysis.
I suppose we are quite even.
Look, I know that the prospect of providing funding for space projects and such gives a massive boner to people - after all, we're all geeks and nerds here, we like daydreaming about such things, the wonderful wonderful possibilities - but you have to be realistic and practical. Would you rather give the funds to this project, or to improving things like education, healthcare, cancer/HIV research, things like that?
It's a matter of priorities. I understand that the ability to detect NEOs is not exactly unimportant - although it is pretty down there, considering the actual risk and the benefits, or rather, their lacks thereof - but it should not take precedence over problems that exist in the present.
Yeah, except that's a dick move in the argument. How much money are you going to give to AIDS? Should we also shut down CERN? How about AI research? How exactly are you going to determine what's "valuable" ?
This is why your argument is bullshit. You are deriding one program, without being able to actually indicate another program with clear results and why funding from one should be diverted. LINEAR is already in operation and, pulling their totals from their web site:
Observations to MPC 12,563,577
Asteroid Detections 3,049,149
New Designations 211,849
Confirmed NEOs 1622
Confirmed Comets 142
That covers 1996 - 2004. I can't find figures on cost but the estimate cost of a mapping program ranges from USD$31 million - $USD 417 million for a 7 to 20 year program, so let's figure at the upper end USD$20 million per year.
Now of course, those totals there aren't just NEO detection they're tracking and cataloging of other objects which may be of astronomical interest or targets for future probe missions, as well as representing a sizable process of R&D on our methods for the detection of such, which is of course knowledge applicable to other areas of astronomy.
Scenario B: Fail to detect the NEO, we all die in our sleep.
You picked the boring death scenario. I prefer "impact heats the atmosphere enough above the site that a 24 hour firestorm circles then entire planet as the Earth rotates, followed by a global winter from dust and smoke from the devastation. Mankind slowly withers as all plant life dies out and eventually all animal life. As I starve to death I manage to yell "fuck Greenpeace!" knowing that a suitable number of nuclear reactors might have allowed us to survive the winter and into the silent spring."
Bingo. If the world ends secondary to NEO impact, it's not going to be as nifty as dying in our sleep.
Why are people saying the chance is infinitesmally small?
Just because it hasn't happened for a long time, doesn't mean that.
I mean, I'm going to eat a chicken gratin while typing this message on Penny Arcade, wearing my green jumper, while my wife watches comedy on the sofa wrapped in a blanket. That's never happened before ever (to me), but the chance isn't infinitesmally small.
If you want to know the actual chance, ask a scientist. Don't just go 'it's never happened before, so there's no chance'.
Why are people saying the chance is infinitesmally small?
It's infinitesimally small because at any one point in time, the chance of being hit by a NEO is 0. However, if you take the summation of chances across a longer period of time, the chances are much higher. The comet may not hit tomorrow, or next week, or the third friday a million years from now, but it is likely that one will hit within the next million years, hell, maybe even the next 50 years.
You know, problems that are real, problems that are hurting and killing people now.
The problem with those problems is that they are unsolvable. At least this NEO problem can be solved in polynomial time. Frankly, I think we'd see a lot more returns in our investment by giving funding to NASA than shitty little "health-care" or "keep gangs off the street" organizations or whatever the fuck you had in mind.
You know, problems that are real, problems that are hurting and killing people now.
The problem with those problems is that they are unsolvable. At least this NEO problem can be solved in polynomial time. Frankly, I think we'd see a lot more returns in our investment by giving funding to NASA than shitty little "health-care" or "keep gangs off the street" organizations or whatever the fuck you had in mind.
Well, the actual point I was making was that you can't deride a very specific program without a clear alternative in mind. This isn't "we should explore space" this is "we need 3 meter telescopes with hi-res CCDs to scan the night sky at key locations in the hemisphere and catalog as many NEOs as is possible, it will cost this much to run"
I like how everyone assumes that if we detect a NEO that suddenly we (western world, or even all of Earth) will suddenly be able to agree on how to pool our resources to best avert disaster.
There will be tons of bickering on who gets all the money for developing the solution, then lots more bickering on who gets to produce or manufacture the technology once it is developed. We are talking Trillions of dollars for the winning bidder.
Even beyond that, everyone can agree that if all of the polar ice caps melt, or if the north atlantic current stops flowing, that it will easily produce the largest catastrophic events that the civilized world has ever known. But can you get countries or even scientists to agree on how to even prove / disprove this? Let alone agree on the timeline and how to prevent it?
I figure if a NEO is found that is large enough to cause significant damage, that there will be scientists and government agencies making counter claims that it will actually miss us, or that the damage will not be as bad as predicted. All trying to get us to go back to our consumerist lives.
I like how everyone assumes that if we detect a NEO that suddenly we (western world, or even all of Earth) will suddenly be able to agree on how to pool our resources to best avert disaster.
There will be tons of bickering on who gets all the money for developing the solution, then lots more bickering on who gets to produce or manufacture the technology once it is developed. We are talking Trillions of dollars for the winning bidder.
Even beyond that, everyone can agree that if all of the polar ice caps melt, or if the north atlantic current stops flowing, that it will easily produce the largest catastrophic events that the civilized world has ever known. But can you get countries or even scientists to agree on how to even prove / disprove this? Let alone agree on the timeline and how to prevent it?
I figure if a NEO is found that is large enough to cause significant damage, that there will be scientists and government agencies making counter claims that it will actually miss us, or that the damage will not be as bad as predicted. All trying to get us to go back to our consumerist lives.
They'd have to be very stupid scientists, or ones with personal planets.
I think people tend to underestimate the public's ability to get their act together when a non-obvious disaster is imminent. How long did it take after CFCs were linked to ozone depletion for people to stop using them? Less than ten years?
I like how everyone assumes that if we detect a NEO that suddenly we (western world, or even all of Earth) will suddenly be able to agree on how to pool our resources to best avert disaster.
There will be tons of bickering on who gets all the money for developing the solution, then lots more bickering on who gets to produce or manufacture the technology once it is developed. We are talking Trillions of dollars for the winning bidder.
Even beyond that, everyone can agree that if all of the polar ice caps melt, or if the north atlantic current stops flowing, that it will easily produce the largest catastrophic events that the civilized world has ever known. But can you get countries or even scientists to agree on how to even prove / disprove this? Let alone agree on the timeline and how to prevent it?
I figure if a NEO is found that is large enough to cause significant damage, that there will be scientists and government agencies making counter claims that it will actually miss us, or that the damage will not be as bad as predicted. All trying to get us to go back to our consumerist lives.
But see, understanding Global Warming requires a basic grasp of environmental science.
Understanding a big fucking rock from space crashing into us and sending us to the Game Over screen does not require anything other than a reptilian brain.
Current education ain't going to be worth shit if we get smacked with a big fucking rock.
Look, the thing is, even if we see the thing coming, we don't have any feasible technology to stop it from hitting us anyway.
The chances of a big rock hitting Earth and causing global calamity are incredibly low to the point of "virtually non-existent". The worst case scenario that has any meaningful possibility of happening is a local disaster, as in the case of Apophis. In such a case, I don't see why our money should not be spent toward averting other local disasters, such as floods, storms, or even things like epidemics. Proactively trying to prevent such disasters not only costs much less, it saves more lives (because such disasters occur on a much more frequent basis than killer meteors), it is also actually feasible.
You are calling the possible impact of Apophis a "local distaster"? A quick wikipedia check shows that the thing is 2x10^10kg. That is not a local disaster right there. NASA estimated a release of energy around 800 megatons if that thing hit Earth. There are not many places on the planet where that thing could land and not cause big problems for someone, or the entire world.
Our NEO tracking capacity is utterly pathetic, there could be a rock the size of texas about to hit us next tuesday and we'd have about a 1% chance of knowing that it was going to happen.
A collision with an asteroid of city destroying size within the next century or so is not just possible, it is likely. There are billions, if not trillions of potentially dangerous rocks up there and we need to start cataloging them. Electricitylikesme is correct, we do have the technology to stop one given enough warning (a tiny little impact would do it a few dozen years in advance) but at the moment we wouldn't get any warning.
Asteroid collisions and supervolcanoes will eventually destroy our civilization on this planet, current technology can do nothing to prevent the volcanoes, so we'd best improve our odds a little bit by dealing with the asteroids. Since we can get a good start on the asteroids with the construction of a few nice big telescopes (which would have inestimable scientific value beyond simply observing asteroid orbits) dedicated to it I dont think there is a good reason not to do so.
So your saying a politician would not pay off a group of "scientists" to say that the rock is actually not going to hit the earth, or is going to hit it in a way that wont affect his constituants. Thus avoiding an ugly and unpopular large tax hike that is guarenteed to get him voted out next election regardless of whether it was his fault the tax hike was necessary?
Your saying that say an organization such as the UN formed to organize international planning regarding how to prevent or avert said disaster, that there wouldnt be member nations veto'ing any plans that spent the $Trillions if they gave economic advantage to a rival country?
An analogy would be: Genocide is a horrible horrible thing, and countries would band together to stop it or prevent it from occuring. Except in Darfur, because you know... its different there.
Note: Said politician will most likely still sleep soundly knowing that even though he isnt paying for it, another Country or group will pick up the tab to keep him and his family safe from the disaster.
Also: I agree, more tracking should be done, but I dont see why it should fall entirely on the US to pay for this. I would prefer to see a more global initiative.
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Gabriel_Pitt(effective against Russian warships)Registered Userregular
edited November 2007
The earlier a NEO is detected, the easier it is to divert to keep from hitting us, a task that is well within our technological capability. A space rock doesn't have to be the size of Texas to fuck the whole planet up, and it doesn't have to be blown to gravel to save us all. If nothing else, just get a solid rocket booster into orbit, load it up with fuel, and calculate the speed and course needed to alter it's course just enough so that it no longer passes through the danger zone.
It makes a whole lot more sense than, 'oh noes! why bother with early warning ground monitoring equipment when there's no way to stop teh earthquakes!'
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
Note: Said politician will most likely still sleep soundly knowing that even though he isnt paying for it, another Country or group will pick up the tab to keep him and his family safe from the disaster.
Also: I agree, more tracking should be done, but I dont see why it should fall entirely on the US to pay for this. I would prefer to see a more global initiative.
To some degree it's because we can. You need alot of telescopes pointed at the night sky. You need tons of astrophysics and astronomy students in need of something to do. And you need cash. Many countries have two of the three, but only a very few have three of the three. And in the long run it's a benfit for us. Just think of how many scientists we'll pick up from other countries. Hell, if they can improve the state of the art in data mining, that alone would allow business to become more profitable. Money on pure R&D pays off in the end, and would you rather the center for that R&D be here or in the EU?
The ESA is great but they lack experance with putting large payloads into space. And given that the EU tends towards paralysis with large scale decision making...that would be tough for them.
Could someone explain to me why it would be so hard to push a NEO off course?
I mean, we can calculate that Apophis, if it hits a precise 400 meter keyhole in 2029, will be affected by gravity such that it will return and strike the earth on April 13, 2036. That's pretty fucking precise.
Why can't we design a missile that hits the thing, attaches to it, and starts thrusting to push it off course?
Note: Said politician will most likely still sleep soundly knowing that even though he isnt paying for it, another Country or group will pick up the tab to keep him and his family safe from the disaster.
Also: I agree, more tracking should be done, but I dont see why it should fall entirely on the US to pay for this. I would prefer to see a more global initiative.
Dude...you're not understanding the difference between this and global warming. One is a hazy ill-defined problem with a complicated and lifestyle altering "maybe" solution. The other is a giant fireball smashing into the planet and setting off a global firestorm / obliterating most of the cities on someone's coast (chances are we won't know who for a good long while).
And, best of all, it's in space. Space can be fixed by exactly 3 nations - the US, Russia and the Chinese, with smaller nations aerospace basically able to defer to those 3.
In practice, everyone will turn to the Americans to fix this, because they still represent the most advanced knowledge of space travel in the world. However, like you said, this is actually a several trillion dollar effort so in fact - I think, contrary - that everyone would pile in on getting involved. It's obvious enough that people, generally, can support committees and direct decisions. It's long term enough that we have a lot of time to figure out our answer, but because it's so important you also can easily attract multi-lateral funding since who wants to bear the diplomatic burden of not wanting to save the world and simultaneously actually will be really badly affected if they don't. As a major point, their are a number of multinational efforts like ITER and the LHC with far less obvious benefits which nonetheless succeed in attracting multi-national funding on the scale of several billion dollars anyway. They're slow, but they get there and they're not urgent or life threatening.
But - all of this is kind of tertiary to the tracking issue. Whether or not we can solve the problem is a question people are mostly speculating on through either their optimism or pessimism with the world at the time. It has no definite answers, and the suggestion is of course that there are some approaches we could implement. But we'll never know if we can solve the hurdle without an appropriate tracking program and yes the US should not be the only ones to pay for it. Scientists in Australia are currently working on a southern-hemisphere version of the LINEAR program, following it's success - I think this is a good investment both in long term payoffs and building the skillset and interests here.
I am generally of the opinion that the fact we have survived without a calamity extermination our present civilization for the last few thousand years should not be used as an argument to take absolutely no preventative measures against those calamities we can avoid. And ironically, this means I do rank asteroid tracking above curing AIDs - because a 1000 years of social improvements is going to be worth jackshit if we can't protect ourselves from a random hammerblow from the heavens.
Could someone explain to me why it would be so hard to push a NEO off course?
I mean, we can calculate that Apophis, if it hits a precise 400 meter keyhole in 2029, will be affected by gravity such that it will return and strike the earth on April 13, 2036. That's pretty fucking precise.
Why can't we design a missile that hits the thing, attaches to it, and starts thrusting to push it off course?
Well, just getting a probe to an asteroid or comet is actually rather tricky, its only been done a couple times before. And if you were going to alter the course of this thing you would need a fairly massive payload in order to do so. Basically it would probably have to be quite a bit bigger than anything humans have ever sent out of low earth orbit, which is difficult and expensive.
The closer the thing is, the harder you have the push it, and so the bigger the payload you need. But detecting this stuff far out is difficult, and the infrastructure to do so reliably is not in place. And even if you did find such a thing, that means that your probe has to go that much further and be that much more precise in order to get to it in the first place.
Plus, the question of how to actually deflect one of these things is not an easy one. Oh, well, just land a rocket on it, and push, right? Well, aside from being difficult, that may not even work. The composition of asteroids and comets is not very well known, nor is their overall structure. There is speculation that some of these may be little more than balls of gravel, held together very weakly by gravity. An attempt to push this out of the way or blow it up might just break it into smaller peices**.
So basically, a lot more research has to be done. A far better detection system is needed, we need practice with getting probes that can actually land on these objects, we need more information about the objects themselves, and we need bigger infrastructure stuff for getting these potentially large vessels into space.
** There is a common misconception, that has been mentioned in this thread a few times already, that breaking up a meteor into pieces will simply cause it to burn up and not be a worry. While half true, this doesn't lower the risk by any large amount. A pile of gravel hitting the earth would be about as bad as a solid rock of the same size hitting the earth. Why? Just think about it in terms of energy. Sure, the gravel will burn up. But, hey, its burning up in our atmosphere. Isn't that kinda... hot? Yes, yes it is. Notably, the Tungesta event is an example of something that caused widespread damage, but did not actually hit the ground. This pile of gravel would burn up (a bunch would probably still reach the ground, depending on the average size of its constituent particles), but this big mass of stuff burning up could cause the air to become rapidly heated, which would cause a shock wave, which would knock shit over. Plus this would add large amounts of dust directly into the atmosphere, possibly altering global climate.
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It's kind of like looking out for gamma ray burst. Fun and informative but ultimately worthless.
Nothing like a giant external threat to get everyone focussed.
There are two scenarios here, assuming an NEO is heading our way:
Scenario A: Detect the NEO, spend the next 10-20 years frantically pouring all our time and energy into figuring out a way to displace the NEO, or somehow survive it's impact. We may all live, or maybe only some of us may live, but maybe we will all die. But, atleast we will see it coming so we can go out in style.
Scenario B: Fail to detect the NEO, we all die in our sleep.
You picked the boring death scenario. I prefer "impact heats the atmosphere enough above the site that a 24 hour firestorm circles then entire planet as the Earth rotates, followed by a global winter from dust and smoke from the devastation. Mankind slowly withers as all plant life dies out and eventually all animal life. As I starve to death I manage to yell "fuck Greenpeace!" knowing that a suitable number of nuclear reactors might have allowed us to survive the winter and into the silent spring."
No, the first one will make it. The second will be caught up in the unnecessarily large and nonsensical explosion.
I'd like to believe better of humanity, but somehow I doubt that Scenario A would go off like that. Instead, I picture 15 years of "Hell no don't raise my taxes for no damned space rock" while the more intelligent minority stands there with a O_o expression after having been outvoted on any program that might have helped save the planet. This is then followed by 5 years of religious insanity, mob rule and riotting while the government sits too mired in it's own waste products to do anything but flail about ineffectually.
Apollo program. You wouldn't have thought it would work. It will never be repeated. However it happened because "the russians are coming!" i.e. imminent death at any time.
I think we could have a sound redux. Plus who doesn't want to fire off some nukes?
In this situation, people pull together. But telling people "Hey, in 20 years a rock has a good 50/50 chance of wiping us all off the face of the planet" isn't likely to motivate them to form the kind of unified front that would be required to make another Apollo program viable.
No, I am saying that considering the chances of a space rock - one big enough to cause a calamity - hitting the Earth are infinitesimally small, it makes more sense to focus our money, time, and effort to work on other problems. You know, problems that are real, problems that are hurting and killing people now.
I mean this whole thing is like paying millions of dollars to convert your shitty '85 Honda Civic to a submergeable so that you can survive a tsunami.
But hey, if you live in constant paranoia, everything will seem like a worthwhile investment.
--
In any case, I see this whole thing as an excuse to increase NASA's funding. It was only a few months ago that NASA said China will most likely beat the US to the Moon this second time around. Obviously we can't have that, yet at the same time we can't openly say we're increasing NASA's funding to compete with China because recognizing a rival would only lend them credence.
Instead I fully expect NASA's funding to be increased on grounds of "hey, let's detect killer asteroids" and then that money being slowly funneled toward other projects over the months.
Hey look, a completely irrelevant analogy!
The point of the analogy is not its relevance, but nice try!
The more apt analogy is building a network of seismic sensors to detect tsunami's, which has some other scientific uses.
The point of the analogy is that you are spending vast amounts of money to foresee - but not prevent - threats with likelihood-of-realization factors close to zero.
What other immediate uses are there, besides protecting satellites from orbital debris? Because that by itself still does not justify the costs; sure, you can detect the debris, but you still won't be able to prevent it from damaging satellites.
Like I said, even if we detect an NEO in collision course with Earth, the best we can do is try to figure out where it will hit, and evacuate the area. We don't and we most likely won't have the technology to prevent the collision. If the meteor is small enough that we can divert its course, then it probably isn't big enough to cause too serious of a damage anyway, so again it doesn't justify the costs.
And here you show that you know exactly dick all about astrophysics and are simply picking the rather scarily more popular "no giev money to <nebulous endeavour 138>"
EDIT: Furthermore, most NEOs on potentially colliding courses are detected somewhere between 10-80 years in advance of when they could hit the Earth, yielding enough time to build and deploy a probe on an intercept course (which has been done - deliberately smashing into a comet with a probe to analyze a dust cloud was recently undertaken). But of course, I suppose your philosophy has the benefit of being self-fulfilling - if we never see a threat coming, then we're at no real risk of discovering we do in fact have the technology to avert the damage.
EDIT 2:
So you know, when we do actually see these things there's usually a decent lead time on them. But looking for them tends to help.
EDIT 3:
This is why your argument is bullshit. You are deriding one program, without being able to actually indicate another program with clear results and why funding from one should be diverted. LINEAR is already in operation and, pulling their totals from their web site:
Observations to MPC 12,563,577
Asteroid Detections 3,049,149
New Designations 211,849
Confirmed NEOs 1622
Confirmed Comets 142
That covers 1996 - 2004. I can't find figures on cost but the estimate cost of a mapping program ranges from USD$31 million - $USD 417 million for a 7 to 20 year program, so let's figure at the upper end USD$20 million per year.
Now of course, those totals there aren't just NEO detection they're tracking and cataloging of other objects which may be of astronomical interest or targets for future probe missions, as well as representing a sizable process of R&D on our methods for the detection of such, which is of course knowledge applicable to other areas of astronomy.
Bingo. If the world ends secondary to NEO impact, it's not going to be as nifty as dying in our sleep.
All the PAers had better pool our funds and buy that underground missile base while we can.
There's still time. We can prepare!
Just because it hasn't happened for a long time, doesn't mean that.
I mean, I'm going to eat a chicken gratin while typing this message on Penny Arcade, wearing my green jumper, while my wife watches comedy on the sofa wrapped in a blanket. That's never happened before ever (to me), but the chance isn't infinitesmally small.
If you want to know the actual chance, ask a scientist. Don't just go 'it's never happened before, so there's no chance'.
It's infinitesimally small because at any one point in time, the chance of being hit by a NEO is 0. However, if you take the summation of chances across a longer period of time, the chances are much higher. The comet may not hit tomorrow, or next week, or the third friday a million years from now, but it is likely that one will hit within the next million years, hell, maybe even the next 50 years.
The problem with those problems is that they are unsolvable. At least this NEO problem can be solved in polynomial time. Frankly, I think we'd see a lot more returns in our investment by giving funding to NASA than shitty little "health-care" or "keep gangs off the street" organizations or whatever the fuck you had in mind.
Well, the actual point I was making was that you can't deride a very specific program without a clear alternative in mind. This isn't "we should explore space" this is "we need 3 meter telescopes with hi-res CCDs to scan the night sky at key locations in the hemisphere and catalog as many NEOs as is possible, it will cost this much to run"
There will be tons of bickering on who gets all the money for developing the solution, then lots more bickering on who gets to produce or manufacture the technology once it is developed. We are talking Trillions of dollars for the winning bidder.
Even beyond that, everyone can agree that if all of the polar ice caps melt, or if the north atlantic current stops flowing, that it will easily produce the largest catastrophic events that the civilized world has ever known. But can you get countries or even scientists to agree on how to even prove / disprove this? Let alone agree on the timeline and how to prevent it?
I figure if a NEO is found that is large enough to cause significant damage, that there will be scientists and government agencies making counter claims that it will actually miss us, or that the damage will not be as bad as predicted. All trying to get us to go back to our consumerist lives.
MWO: Adamski
They'd have to be very stupid scientists, or ones with personal planets.
But see, understanding Global Warming requires a basic grasp of environmental science.
Understanding a big fucking rock from space crashing into us and sending us to the Game Over screen does not require anything other than a reptilian brain.
You are calling the possible impact of Apophis a "local distaster"? A quick wikipedia check shows that the thing is 2x10^10kg. That is not a local disaster right there. NASA estimated a release of energy around 800 megatons if that thing hit Earth. There are not many places on the planet where that thing could land and not cause big problems for someone, or the entire world.
A collision with an asteroid of city destroying size within the next century or so is not just possible, it is likely. There are billions, if not trillions of potentially dangerous rocks up there and we need to start cataloging them. Electricitylikesme is correct, we do have the technology to stop one given enough warning (a tiny little impact would do it a few dozen years in advance) but at the moment we wouldn't get any warning.
Asteroid collisions and supervolcanoes will eventually destroy our civilization on this planet, current technology can do nothing to prevent the volcanoes, so we'd best improve our odds a little bit by dealing with the asteroids. Since we can get a good start on the asteroids with the construction of a few nice big telescopes (which would have inestimable scientific value beyond simply observing asteroid orbits) dedicated to it I dont think there is a good reason not to do so.
Your saying that say an organization such as the UN formed to organize international planning regarding how to prevent or avert said disaster, that there wouldnt be member nations veto'ing any plans that spent the $Trillions if they gave economic advantage to a rival country?
An analogy would be: Genocide is a horrible horrible thing, and countries would band together to stop it or prevent it from occuring. Except in Darfur, because you know... its different there.
MWO: Adamski
Also: I agree, more tracking should be done, but I dont see why it should fall entirely on the US to pay for this. I would prefer to see a more global initiative.
MWO: Adamski
It makes a whole lot more sense than, 'oh noes! why bother with early warning ground monitoring equipment when there's no way to stop teh earthquakes!'
To some degree it's because we can. You need alot of telescopes pointed at the night sky. You need tons of astrophysics and astronomy students in need of something to do. And you need cash. Many countries have two of the three, but only a very few have three of the three. And in the long run it's a benfit for us. Just think of how many scientists we'll pick up from other countries. Hell, if they can improve the state of the art in data mining, that alone would allow business to become more profitable. Money on pure R&D pays off in the end, and would you rather the center for that R&D be here or in the EU?
MWO: Adamski
The ESA is great but they lack experance with putting large payloads into space. And given that the EU tends towards paralysis with large scale decision making...that would be tough for them.
I mean, we can calculate that Apophis, if it hits a precise 400 meter keyhole in 2029, will be affected by gravity such that it will return and strike the earth on April 13, 2036. That's pretty fucking precise.
Why can't we design a missile that hits the thing, attaches to it, and starts thrusting to push it off course?
And, best of all, it's in space. Space can be fixed by exactly 3 nations - the US, Russia and the Chinese, with smaller nations aerospace basically able to defer to those 3.
In practice, everyone will turn to the Americans to fix this, because they still represent the most advanced knowledge of space travel in the world. However, like you said, this is actually a several trillion dollar effort so in fact - I think, contrary - that everyone would pile in on getting involved. It's obvious enough that people, generally, can support committees and direct decisions. It's long term enough that we have a lot of time to figure out our answer, but because it's so important you also can easily attract multi-lateral funding since who wants to bear the diplomatic burden of not wanting to save the world and simultaneously actually will be really badly affected if they don't. As a major point, their are a number of multinational efforts like ITER and the LHC with far less obvious benefits which nonetheless succeed in attracting multi-national funding on the scale of several billion dollars anyway. They're slow, but they get there and they're not urgent or life threatening.
But - all of this is kind of tertiary to the tracking issue. Whether or not we can solve the problem is a question people are mostly speculating on through either their optimism or pessimism with the world at the time. It has no definite answers, and the suggestion is of course that there are some approaches we could implement. But we'll never know if we can solve the hurdle without an appropriate tracking program and yes the US should not be the only ones to pay for it. Scientists in Australia are currently working on a southern-hemisphere version of the LINEAR program, following it's success - I think this is a good investment both in long term payoffs and building the skillset and interests here.
I am generally of the opinion that the fact we have survived without a calamity extermination our present civilization for the last few thousand years should not be used as an argument to take absolutely no preventative measures against those calamities we can avoid. And ironically, this means I do rank asteroid tracking above curing AIDs - because a 1000 years of social improvements is going to be worth jackshit if we can't protect ourselves from a random hammerblow from the heavens.
Well, just getting a probe to an asteroid or comet is actually rather tricky, its only been done a couple times before. And if you were going to alter the course of this thing you would need a fairly massive payload in order to do so. Basically it would probably have to be quite a bit bigger than anything humans have ever sent out of low earth orbit, which is difficult and expensive.
The closer the thing is, the harder you have the push it, and so the bigger the payload you need. But detecting this stuff far out is difficult, and the infrastructure to do so reliably is not in place. And even if you did find such a thing, that means that your probe has to go that much further and be that much more precise in order to get to it in the first place.
Plus, the question of how to actually deflect one of these things is not an easy one. Oh, well, just land a rocket on it, and push, right? Well, aside from being difficult, that may not even work. The composition of asteroids and comets is not very well known, nor is their overall structure. There is speculation that some of these may be little more than balls of gravel, held together very weakly by gravity. An attempt to push this out of the way or blow it up might just break it into smaller peices**.
So basically, a lot more research has to be done. A far better detection system is needed, we need practice with getting probes that can actually land on these objects, we need more information about the objects themselves, and we need bigger infrastructure stuff for getting these potentially large vessels into space.
** There is a common misconception, that has been mentioned in this thread a few times already, that breaking up a meteor into pieces will simply cause it to burn up and not be a worry. While half true, this doesn't lower the risk by any large amount. A pile of gravel hitting the earth would be about as bad as a solid rock of the same size hitting the earth. Why? Just think about it in terms of energy. Sure, the gravel will burn up. But, hey, its burning up in our atmosphere. Isn't that kinda... hot? Yes, yes it is. Notably, the Tungesta event is an example of something that caused widespread damage, but did not actually hit the ground. This pile of gravel would burn up (a bunch would probably still reach the ground, depending on the average size of its constituent particles), but this big mass of stuff burning up could cause the air to become rapidly heated, which would cause a shock wave, which would knock shit over. Plus this would add large amounts of dust directly into the atmosphere, possibly altering global climate.