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Planetary Defense
- cryptoz 11y agoThere is some context in this Gizmodo article, "NASA's New Office Is Our Defense Against Death From the Skies" [1]. I thought HN would prefer the direct link to the new NASA site, however. [1] http://gizmodo.com/nasas-new-office-is-our-defense-against-death-from-the-1752280136 http://gizmodo.com/nasas-new-office-is-our-defense-against-d...
- ack 11y agoNot just NASA. ESA is also busy. http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technology/ESA_s_planetary_defence_test_set_for_2020 http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technolo...
- startupfounder 11y agoHere is a list of NEO Earth Close Approaches: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ 1. Not a bad ROI to save a global economy with a GDP of $77.609 trillion and population of 7.095 billion.[1] 2. The side benefit is understanding how to mine NEOs worth billions.[2] 3. I would like to buy an insurance policy against an impact. I bet it would be super cheap as there is very low risk, but would get me to Mars or ISS. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining
- jfoutz 11y agoWarren Buffet might sell you that. He'll insure just about anything, and the terms are interesting. There's no negotiation. You get to present 1 time the about of coverage vs the premiums you'll pay. Keep in mind, the won't take a losing bet, the premiums must be more than the risk of payout, if you want 10 dollars of coverage for an event with 10% happening, you're going to have to pay well more than $1 for the premium. On the upside, if you're really worried about needing $10,000,000,000 of coverage, and you're willing to pay the premium, you can get it. You just have to make the deal sweet enough for him to take it. and you have to guess right the first time.
- shasta 11y ago3. I would love to sell you that insurance policy.
- philippnagel 11y agoDoes such an insurance policy exist already?
- sangnoir 11y ago> Does such an insurance policy exist already? Not to my knowledge. I believe parent is being sarcastic. If an impact event occurs: a) claimant might be too dead to make the claim or b) markets would probably collapse, making the payout worthless. So there is very little point in buying that kind of cover, the only party with an upside is the insurer - hence parent volunteering.
- dankohn1 11y agoUSD-denominated Credit Default Swaps on US Treasuries (which were a thing in 2008) fall in this category. Any scenario bad enough for the swaps to be redeemable is one in which you are unlikely to be able to redeem them. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-09-26/why-would-anyone-buy-credit-default-swaps-on-the-u-s- http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-09-26/why-would-a...
- cmsmith 11y agoI'm also offering USD denominated insurance against the United States descending into anarchy.
- EGreg 11y ago"Based on known terrestrial reserves, and growing consumption in both developed and developing countries, key elements needed for modern industry and food production could be exhausted on Earth within 50–60 years.[2] These include phosphorus, antimony, zinc, tin, lead, indium, silver, gold and copper" Sounds ominous! Why aren't we more worried? Because Capitalism?
- gizmo686 11y agoThe standard answers are: 1) Known reserves likely represent a fraction of what is available because we have not had reason to search for new reserves. 2) We do not really consume any of those resources in the same way that we consume fossil fuels, so as a worst case scenario, we can simply mine them from our landfills. This arguably falls under new, more expensive, reserves.
- oilywater 11y agoMostly that. But realistically there's no education on any of this stuff. For example 2017 is the year when some of the most used rare earth elements will be depleted and should be retrieved through recycling in the next years (gallium for the LCD displays is disappearing, so either we figure out the displays or massively recycle). This is not a surprise because the demand for rare earth elements has been rising exponentially, with the number of electronic devices produced :D Although, food production is definitely getting more and more efficient. But biology of living beings on Earth is too inefficient for the current production to be sustainable. Just compare the vast amounts of food (energy) a single duck, chicken or cow needs to maintain body heat, with the weight (energy value) of meat. This coupled with growing consumption in developing countries won't really work. Without Hot Air is an excellent book written by a problem solving pragmatist and excellent machine learning researcher David MacKay exposing the pure numbers and limits and extrapolating them carefully, to get the same conclusions. http://www.withouthotair.com/Electronic.html http://www.withouthotair.com/Electronic.html
- ridgeguy 11y agoGallium supply: Wikipedia [1] says USGS estimates gallium reserves as > one megaton. Production in 2012 was an estimated 273 metric tons. I don't see us running out of gallium soon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium
- patcon 11y agoSomeone should really scrape that site into an API and re-surface it to make it as well-designed as it deserves to be. Would be a fun UX/design side-project... EDIT: The first site you linked, that is :)
- mattbeckman 11y agoI believe there is one here: https://data.nasa.gov/ https://data.nasa.gov/
- Roodgorf 11y agoThis talk from Ed Lu[1] has a lot of great illustrations and cost/benefit analysis of NEO defense measures. He is obviously a bit biased as CEO of the Sentinel Mission, but IIRC, he isn't shy to admit that. [1] https://www.astrosociety.org/silicon-valley-astronomy-lectures/the-sentinel-mission-finding-the-asteroid-headed-for-earth/ https://www.astrosociety.org/silicon-valley-astronomy-lectur...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sirtastic 11y agoI'm kinda jealous of job titles that would come out of this department... "Director of Planetary Defense", "Strategic Interstellar Command Coordinator", "Chief Planetary Defense Officer".
- ashark 11y agoMy first thought was "I want to work there just so I can tell people I'm with Planetary Defense when they ask what I do for a living". The downside is the nagging feeling like you should be wearing oversized futuristic pauldrons and a ridiculous-looking Space Belt all the time.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoBut that's trivially solved by just buying some oversized futuristic pauldrons and a ridiculous-looking Space Belt.
- krapp 11y agoYou can't just buy those, you'd look like an utter fool. You have to appropriate sufficient black budget funds to have the belt fabricated at Area 51 out of meteoric iron and top secret metamaterials.
- qwerty_asdf 11y agoWe're going to have to get the ball rolling somehow, when it comes to space fashion. When some of us get re-orged to that remote mining outpost and are forced to share quarters with some cheap, rubbery-skinned, impolite replicants, we're just going to have to make do, and don some superfluous equipment from sporting goods.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoDepends on the franchise type I guess. MCU's S.H.I.E.L.D. wear and the Starfleet uniforms from First Contact and later look pretty smart, actually. I wouldn't be afraid to go out with something like this[0]. That is, I'd have to lose some weight first. [0] - http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121217161450/memoryalpha/en/images/e/ee/Starfleet_uniforms,_post-2373.jpg http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121217161450/memoryalph...
- CaseFlatline 11y agoDear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum, please use this department for your next SyFy B end-of-the-world B movie.
- jobu 11y ago"A first-ever robotic mission to identify, capture and redirect a near-Earth asteroid to a stable orbit around the moon, where astronauts will explore it in the 2020s." Wow! That's pretty awesome, but I'm hoping they plan this one _very_ carefully and/or pick a small asteroid.
- ceejayoz 11y agoAn asteroid of any dangerous size is pretty hard to move. You're not going to inadvertently tap it into a bad orbit with a hammer. We're already able to send probes to Pluto within a few kilometers, calculating an asteroid's orbit is well within our capabilities.
- mschuster91 11y ago> We're already able to send probes to Pluto within a few kilometers, calculating an asteroid's orbit is well within our capabilities. Yeah calculating the orbits and movements for a simple small mass might be fairly easy. But an asteroid is irregulary shaped which makes stuff quite complex. We have failed with Philae for example... The only way this is going to work is with a powerful nuclear bomb mounted on an interstellar rocket to blow said astroid to pieces (and these pieces should be tiny enough to vanish during atmospheric reentry), should the need arise - however the EMP would fry at least the satellites in orbit, maybe also on the ground.
- ceejayoz 11y agoPhilae was a mechanical failure that had little to do with the shape of the comet - its harpoons failed to fire. Nukes might be a solution of last resort for a late detection, but with enough early warning there are far more gradual and precise ways to do it (and they don't sandblast the planet, either). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor
- gizmo686 11y agoCalculating the orbit of an irregularly shaped object is not difficult, just use its center of mass. What is difficult is calculating an orbit around an irregularly shaped object, unless you are far enough away that you can still ignore the irregularities.
- Splendor 11y agoThis is a very exciting mission. Does anyone have a sense of how many potential near-Earth objects have a rocky surface with large boulders as required by this mission?
- scrumper 11y agoI just finished re-reading Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, in which he devotes a chapter to this subject. His conclusion is that, at our current level of civilizational maturity, we're better off crossing our fingers rather than learning how to redirect asteroids, since the technology required to save the planet from a massive impact is exactly the same as that used to conduct asteroid bombardment.
- ashark 11y agoI'm having trouble imagining a scenario where asteroid bombardment makes any sense in a world where nukes and ICBMs exist. Even factoring in the inconvenience of radiation it doesn't work. Too complicated, too expensive, too slow, anyone who could do it now or in the future will either have nukes or the ability to quickly acquire them.
- adrianN 11y agoEven if one insists on non-nuclear city killers, it's probably easier to get some Tungsten rods into orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
- versteegen 11y agoHardly a city-killer. The rods that were to be used in Project Thor would strike with the energy-equivalent of "11.5 tons of TNT".
- scrumper 11y agoHis concern is less about global escalation to some nuke++ level of WMD, but more around rogue states or doomsday cults getting access to control systems for asteroid deflection defenses. It isn't implausible: technologically sophisticated death cults exist (e.g. Mum Shinrikyo, North Korea, ISIS/Daesh), important stuff gets hacked all the time, and I doubt most on HN would be comfortable saying "well this stuff will be really secure." His proposed method of asteroid deflection is actually based on using nuclear explosions to shift orbits minutely far in advance of impact. Timing makes it pretty useless for war (as you point out), but very effective indeed for creating a precisely scheduled apocalypse and the global collapse and panic that likely precedes it.
- souterrain 11y agoThis is a master stroke. The masses want to cut science funding. Rebrand as "planetary defence" and the spigots re-open.
- vacri 11y agoNasa has an entire department dedicated to warning people about Vietnamese soups?