> It is like worrying about an asteroid hitting the planet, there is nothing we can do about it so why worry? It is very much like an asteroid in that there ar

> It is like worrying about an asteroid hitting the planet, there is nothing we can do about it so why worry? It is very much like an asteroid in that there are lots of things we can do. Excerpt from the article: “When people first considered the idea of defending the Earth from an asteroid impact, they reacted in a similar way to the supervolcano threat,” Wilcox says. “People thought, ‘As puny as we are, how can humans possibly prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth.’ Well, it turns out if you engineer something which pushes very slightly for a very long time, you can make the asteroid miss the Earth. So the problem turns out to be easier than people think. In both cases it requires the scientific community to invest brain power and you have to start early. But Yellowstone explodes roughly every 600,000 years, and it is about 600,000 years since it last exploded, which should cause us to sit up and take notice.”