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It only takes one asteroid to end all life on earth. It's not a possibility, it's an inevitability. It's happened before, it will happen again, unless the hai
by JPKab 4y ago
It only takes one asteroid to end all life on earth. It's not a possibility, it's an inevitability. It's happened before, it will happen again, unless the hairless, bipedal fire apes that have proliferated on the planet use their newfound technology to redirect the asteroid slightly while it's far enough away.
- pif 4y agoThe rock that hit our planet 65 million years ago had a diameter of around 10 km. What do you think we may do about that?
- pjkundert 4y agoIf it’s a few years out — it takes a relatively small amount of thrust to avoid collision.
- Zandikar 4y agoThe more heads up we have, the less we have to actually do to prevent it. The key factor in having enough of a heads up is actually looking for these things in the first place.
- vlovich123 4y agoHave we made good progress in bringing down our estimates of the orbits for asteroids? In popular press they seem to have large error bars even only half a year out. What’s the confidence level that making a change two years out will have the intended impact instead of sending the asteroid closer to earth?
- throwaway4aday 4y agoThose error bars shrink based on the number of observations you're able to make of the asteroid. Once we get to the point of committing to a redirect mission we would have made sufficient observations to know exactly what the asteroid's trajectory is. After that it's just math.
- spoils19 4y agoHave we even considered if there may be rare minerals on the asteroid that we would want to mine to pull our population out of poverty?
- JPKab 4y agoI'm a huge fan of mining asteroids, provided that they aren't hurtling towards our planet. The tech to redirect an asteroid is a small piece of the tech we'll need to mine asteroids. Looking forward to us getting there as a species.