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> extremely high tech (presumably large H-bombs on large rockets) How is 40s/50s technology high tech ?

• arethuza 16y ago
  You don't think designing a system that can deliver bombs deep into space is high tech? It's not like we could get a Saturn-5 out of storage, fuel it up, stick a Tsar Bomba on the top and hope for the best.
  • borism 16y ago
    H-bombs are sitting on tops of 30-year old space rockets right now. Sending them to defeat asteroid might be even more devastating than not sending them though.
    • arethuza 16y ago
      ICBMs don't even make it to orbit - if you wait till an asteroid is close enough that an ICBM could hit it then you might as well not bother. [NB I do know that the SS-25 could do fractional orbits.]
      • zeemonkee 16y ago
        No, but we've had rockets capable of delivering space probes across interplanetary distances for decades. Replace payload with nuclear warhead. Is that hard ? Maybe, but the manned Moon landings were hard, and we did those decades ago. Hard, but not "high tech". Now whether or not such a solution would actually work is another matter. The original comment however was "extremely high tech such as H-Bombs on rockets". Both are examples of tech that's decades old.
        • arethuza 16y ago
          But that argument also applies to stored program electronic computers - which are also 40s/50s tech. So we have the technology to get a large enough device far enough out into the solar system quickly enough for it to make a difference and to engineer all of this within a limited timescale? I don't know about that....