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I think our present space technology research focus should be on these asteroids. Both how to deflect them (peacefully) and how to mine them for rare metals. I

I think our present space technology research focus should be on these asteroids. Both how to deflect them (peacefully) and how to mine them for rare metals. If I read this table correctly it seems that only eight days ago a fairly chunky rock passed within 60,000 miles of us: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

retSava 9y ago
Well, in >4 bn years there have been probably less than 5 such events. Catastrophic yes, but very low possibility. I can understand if any agency even the slightest related to space prioritizes other things. As far as my understanding goes, space is very unevenly distributed, with lots of debris and asteroids in dense (well, humpf) parts of space, but the vast majority of it is just... empty space with so little matter in between that it is basically negligible. To mine an asteroid likely means going to where it's more probable to find a suitable one, and also more risky. Asteroids around us are few (IIUC).
- sqeaky 9y ago
  Death by asteroids is a low risk but high impact type of event. We cannot afford to have even one such event. It really does only take one and costs little for us to prepare. We want to mine asteroids and further science anyway, so we are going up there already. It's not like the cost of the whole space program is dedicated to defending from this. We just need to have a few plans ready to go when we do find it. It would cost millions of dollars, compared to the billions already in space and trillions we spend in defense. What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation? EDIT - Wording and spelling.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Death by asteroids is a low risk but high impact type of event. We cannot afford to have even one such event. Depending on how rare and difficult to tackle would be, we probably also cannot afford to do anything about it. If we have as much as 1% or even 0.1% possibility of one hitting earth in the next 100 years, we would have rallied to build something even if is very costly and difficult. In 0.00001% chances or less, there's no way any country is gonna's devote any significant resources... >What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation? Still very important? (We have a much more concrete and possible chance of billions of deaths from nuclear arms and/or global warming, but we still don't do anything about it).
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      Money doesn't help the rich when they are dead. Spending in one area does not prevent spending in another. we have many dollars and some problems require more than others. They can even work together, perhaps a tax on CO2 release can fund diplomatic and scientific missions to help mitigate or prevent the other two catastrophes.
  - vkou 9y ago
    > What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation? Every day that you commute to work, you have a higher then 0.00001% chance of dying in a traffic accident. Yet, you still roll the dice, and go to work. Presumably because you get paid. For a more global catastrophic event, consider that the odds that you will die in a catastrophic nuclear war between Russia and the United States are far, far greater then 0.00001%. Yet, we all carry on as if its business as usual. (When we could take steps to reduce how catastrophic such a war would be, or how likely such a war would be.)
    - AgentME 9y ago
      >Every day that you commute to work, you have a higher then 0.00001% chance of dying in a traffic accident. If all of humanity got in the car with me as I went to work, I'd be much more concerned about the odds.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        I think you've just pointed out the fallacy here: the false equivalence of a risk affecting one person vs. the entire human race (or planet). The if the odds of dying in an auto accident for one person are 0.00001%, then the risks of the 7.5 billion souls on this rock dying simultaneously in an auto accident are 0.00001% raised to the power of 7.5 billion. That's basically 1 * 10^-45% odds. The comparative risk posed by the asteroid is approximately 1 * 10^40 times greater. Which paints a rather different picture.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Each of us may face that risk, but all off us don't, together. This is a point at which conventional models of risk start falling apart. There's a meaningful difference between small events randomly distributed, and massive large impacts occurring everywhere all at once. Also between small events with no interconnectedness, and with systemic failure. Simple incident occurrence rate fails to capture this.
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      We also invest heavily in preventing such a nuclear exchange. Of course we continue on, we hope or expect that we will still be here. Rather than just lob missiles or give up, we took a stance and many active and expensive steps costing the equivalent of trillions of modern dollars. We definitely took real action on the Threat of Nuclear war.
  - delazeur 9y ago
    Y'all should check out https://b612foundation.org https://b612foundation.org
- bsder 9y ago
  > As far as my understanding goes, space is very unevenly distributed, with lots of debris and asteroids in dense (well, humpf) parts of space, but the vast majority of it is just... empty Even the "asteroid belt" is really empty. It's not like you see in science fiction movies where asteroids are hitting into one another continually.
credit_guy 9y ago
Really cool link, thank you. I think you are referring to the 2017 QP1 asteroid that was closest to us on 14-Aug. the distance was about a sixth of the distance to the moon, or 38k miles. The speed was 24km/s and the diameter 37-83 meters. Just for fun I ran the Impact Earth calculator to see what would happed if such an asteroid hit Earth. Assuming the worst case scenario (iron meteorite, max diameter, perpendicular hit) the explosion would be equivalent to about 200 MT TNT, and the crater would have a 2 mile diameter and 2000 foot depth. Edit: changed mph to km/s https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/ https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/
- imaginenore 9y ago
  > The speed was 24mph No way. It was 24 km/second.
  - credit_guy 9y ago
    Good catch, thanks.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Speed values in space always seem to omit "relative to what" clarifications. Relative to the earth, the sun, along the earth's orbital path or contra, etc.? It makes a huge difference.
  - credit_guy 9y ago
    The Parent's link did give the definition, my summary didn't. "V relative (km/s) Object velocity relative to Earth at close-approach."
- hutzlibu 9y ago
  .. so 4 times as strong as the biggest men made explosion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba Well, thats bad for sure, but far from humanity-threatening, I guess.
ars 9y ago
> Both how to deflect them (peacefully) Curious about your parenthesized addition. How do you deflect an asteroid non-peacefully?
- thatcherc 9y ago
  The ability to deflect asteroids away from Earth also means you can deflect them toward Earth and even aim them at your enemies! You could sneakily aim a meteor strike at anywhere on Earth and make it look like a natural event. Technically this is something that could be done today with gravity tractor [0] or an ion beam deflection [1] system, both of which are being developed by NASA. [0] - https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/mitigate/gravity-tractor https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/mitiga... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Beam_Shepherd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Beam_Shepherd
  - ars 9y ago
    > You could sneakily aim a meteor strike at anywhere on Earth Can you? Are you sure? My understanding is that it's not possible to predict the trajectory at less than the size of a continent. Much less actually control it.
    - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
      Well it just so happens that the 3 countries where this would be seen as favorable attack vector against the others happen to be the size of continents. Mainly China, Russia, and The USA.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      In principle it's no different from predicting the path of a spaceship, which can be done with great accuracy. The error comes from imprecision in knowledge of the meteor's location and velocity, which would improve greatly once you start pushing it around.
      - ars 9y ago

retSava 9y ago

Well, in >4 bn years there have been probably less than 5 such events. Catastrophic yes, but very low possibility. I can understand if any agency even the slightest related to space prioritizes other things. As far as my understanding goes, space is very unevenly distributed, with lots of debris and asteroids in dense (well, humpf) parts of space, but the vast majority of it is just... empty space with so little matter in between that it is basically negligible. To mine an asteroid likely means going to where it's more probable to find a suitable one, and also more risky. Asteroids around us are few (IIUC).

sqeaky 9y ago
Death by asteroids is a low risk but high impact type of event. We cannot afford to have even one such event. It really does only take one and costs little for us to prepare. We want to mine asteroids and further science anyway, so we are going up there already. It's not like the cost of the whole space program is dedicated to defending from this. We just need to have a few plans ready to go when we do find it. It would cost millions of dollars, compared to the billions already in space and trillions we spend in defense. What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation? EDIT - Wording and spelling.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Death by asteroids is a low risk but high impact type of event. We cannot afford to have even one such event. Depending on how rare and difficult to tackle would be, we probably also cannot afford to do anything about it. If we have as much as 1% or even 0.1% possibility of one hitting earth in the next 100 years, we would have rallied to build something even if is very costly and difficult. In 0.00001% chances or less, there's no way any country is gonna's devote any significant resources... >What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation? Still very important? (We have a much more concrete and possible chance of billions of deaths from nuclear arms and/or global warming, but we still don't do anything about it).
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    Money doesn't help the rich when they are dead. Spending in one area does not prevent spending in another. we have many dollars and some problems require more than others. They can even work together, perhaps a tax on CO2 release can fund diplomatic and scientific missions to help mitigate or prevent the other two catastrophes.
- vkou 9y ago
  > What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation? Every day that you commute to work, you have a higher then 0.00001% chance of dying in a traffic accident. Yet, you still roll the dice, and go to work. Presumably because you get paid. For a more global catastrophic event, consider that the odds that you will die in a catastrophic nuclear war between Russia and the United States are far, far greater then 0.00001%. Yet, we all carry on as if its business as usual. (When we could take steps to reduce how catastrophic such a war would be, or how likely such a war would be.)
  - AgentME 9y ago
    >Every day that you commute to work, you have a higher then 0.00001% chance of dying in a traffic accident. If all of humanity got in the car with me as I went to work, I'd be much more concerned about the odds.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      I think you've just pointed out the fallacy here: the false equivalence of a risk affecting one person vs. the entire human race (or planet). The if the odds of dying in an auto accident for one person are 0.00001%, then the risks of the 7.5 billion souls on this rock dying simultaneously in an auto accident are 0.00001% raised to the power of 7.5 billion. That's basically 1 * 10^-45% odds. The comparative risk posed by the asteroid is approximately 1 * 10^40 times greater. Which paints a rather different picture.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Each of us may face that risk, but all off us don't, together. This is a point at which conventional models of risk start falling apart. There's a meaningful difference between small events randomly distributed, and massive large impacts occurring everywhere all at once. Also between small events with no interconnectedness, and with systemic failure. Simple incident occurrence rate fails to capture this.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    We also invest heavily in preventing such a nuclear exchange. Of course we continue on, we hope or expect that we will still be here. Rather than just lob missiles or give up, we took a stance and many active and expensive steps costing the equivalent of trillions of modern dollars. We definitely took real action on the Threat of Nuclear war.
- delazeur 9y ago
  Y'all should check out https://b612foundation.org https://b612foundation.org
bsder 9y ago
> As far as my understanding goes, space is very unevenly distributed, with lots of debris and asteroids in dense (well, humpf) parts of space, but the vast majority of it is just... empty Even the "asteroid belt" is really empty. It's not like you see in science fiction movies where asteroids are hitting into one another continually.

credit_guy 9y ago

Really cool link, thank you. I think you are referring to the 2017 QP1 asteroid that was closest to us on 14-Aug. the distance was about a sixth of the distance to the moon, or 38k miles. The speed was 24km/s and the diameter 37-83 meters. Just for fun I ran the Impact Earth calculator to see what would happed if such an asteroid hit Earth. Assuming the worst case scenario (iron meteorite, max diameter, perpendicular hit) the explosion would be equivalent to about 200 MT TNT, and the crater would have a 2 mile diameter and 2000 foot depth. Edit: changed mph to km/s https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/ https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/

imaginenore 9y ago
> The speed was 24mph No way. It was 24 km/second.
- credit_guy 9y ago
  Good catch, thanks.
WalterBright 9y ago
Speed values in space always seem to omit "relative to what" clarifications. Relative to the earth, the sun, along the earth's orbital path or contra, etc.? It makes a huge difference.
- credit_guy 9y ago
  The Parent's link did give the definition, my summary didn't. "V relative (km/s) Object velocity relative to Earth at close-approach."
hutzlibu 9y ago
.. so 4 times as strong as the biggest men made explosion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba Well, thats bad for sure, but far from humanity-threatening, I guess.

ars 9y ago

> Both how to deflect them (peacefully) Curious about your parenthesized addition. How do you deflect an asteroid non-peacefully?

thatcherc 9y ago
The ability to deflect asteroids away from Earth also means you can deflect them toward Earth and even aim them at your enemies! You could sneakily aim a meteor strike at anywhere on Earth and make it look like a natural event. Technically this is something that could be done today with gravity tractor [0] or an ion beam deflection [1] system, both of which are being developed by NASA. [0] - https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/mitigate/gravity-tractor https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/mitiga... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Beam_Shepherd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Beam_Shepherd
- ars 9y ago
  > You could sneakily aim a meteor strike at anywhere on Earth Can you? Are you sure? My understanding is that it's not possible to predict the trajectory at less than the size of a continent. Much less actually control it.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    Well it just so happens that the 3 countries where this would be seen as favorable attack vector against the others happen to be the size of continents. Mainly China, Russia, and The USA.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    In principle it's no different from predicting the path of a spaceship, which can be done with great accuracy. The error comes from imprecision in knowledge of the meteor's location and velocity, which would improve greatly once you start pushing it around.
    - ars 9y ago