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Ask HN: Can we stop an extinction-level Asteroid?
Ok so i just had the pleasure watching the sci-fi movie Deep Impact ('98). Besides Morgan Freeman's award winning acting and 80's style computer graphics - I could not help but wonder ..
a)What is the probability?
b)Are we seriously prepared? How? Are there backup plans?
c)If so, will it be a multi-national effort or is it every nation for themselves?
I welcome all answers but will only count those scientifically familiar with the matter ;-)
- ArtWomb 8y agoYes! Space-based laser ablation looks very promising to me. Though few are actively developing such capability. Basic idea is to direct a laser to the asteroid surface. That would hopefully create a jet plume from vaporizing matter that will act as a propulsion system to steer its course a few degrees away from earths orbit. DE-STARLIE: Effective Planetary Defense Using Directed Energy Because our planet is itself a relatively hard target to hit, we could be talking about an event that only occurs once every billion years ;) 8 Billion Asteroids In The Oort Cloud https://watermark.silverchair.com/stu2267.pdf https://watermark.silverchair.com/stu2267.pdf
- grizzles 8y agoa) 0% of stopping it. 100% of it occurring again at some point. b) No c) Irrelevant Nope we couldn't save ourselves. That's why it's called an extinction level event. If you have say a 50 km^3 asteroid on a course to earth (about 1/10th the size of Vesta) there is little we could do on short notice. It might be another story if we had a long time to prepare. For example if the asteroid had a favorable composition, we could try drilling into it for a decade or two, in the hope that we could explode a nuke in a carefully engineered hole to try to alter it's course without breaking it.