The Social Difficulty of Saving Earth From an Asteroid 391
mantis2009 writes "When it comes to stopping a cataclysmic Earth vs. asteroid event, social science and international political leaders have more difficult questions yet unanswered than physicists do, according to report delivered at this week's American Geophysical Union meeting. Wired has a discussion of an analysis authored by former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who worries that the international community is nowhere near ready to begin the complex and inevitably controversial task of deflecting an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Among the questions to be answered is whether to modify the Partial Test Ban Treaty to allow nuclear weapons in outer space. Another possibility to avoid the destruction of civilization would require the international community to choose an area on the globe where an asteroid might be 'aimed.' Who would decide which nations get placed in the asteroid's crosshairs?"
Who gets to decide where it's targeted? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A few years notice? (Score:3, Interesting)
To quote a movie:
"and turn one dangerous falling object into many"...
Nuking the thing isn't at all sensible but it's all we can really do. It's like ants trying to spit at the shoe that's heading towards them though... chances are we'll make things worse but at that point, we're dead anyway. Worrying about an international treaty at that point is like worrying about the lawsuit when the mugger pulls out a gun.
The radiation is hardly a concern at all. More important is how the hell do you survive the 200-foot-high wave, even if it is just a one-off?
Re:Not ready? No, and never will be. (Score:4, Interesting)
If an asteroid were to hit Afganistan in 3 years time and there's no deflection method for the size or speed, are you willing to take in the refugees. Are any country willing to, and how many. This decision easily takes 3 years with our current state of mind.
Re:Not ready? No, and never will be. (Score:2, Interesting)
Once we run out of living space for all of us, there will be war.
The cynic in my is thinking that's EXACTLY what some of the feet-draggers are hoping for.
Re:Simpsons did it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sales Job (Score:5, Interesting)
Rusty Schweickart is not, in this instance, an ex-astronaut, he is the CEO of B612 Foundation, dedicated to promoting their gravity tractor design for asteroid deflection. This design solves the 'problems' which are here hung around the necks of politicians. B612 has been 'solving' these same problems in the same way for over 20 years now. The situations where this design fails are still the same also, most notably short notice. This is no objective analysis of solutions to social and other problems that might arise --- this is a sales job for one of several designs that would need to be developed in order to meet the many possible problems. Yet this and the other designs with potential business backing, do not present themselves are inadequate alone, a social problem itself, in that these 'experts' are not pounding home the truth that no one an tell ahead of time which of these would be needed and/or would work if tried, so several different esigns would be required to be available. Also, these are large scale interplanetary programs, with a good chance of technical failure preventing successful completion, thus making it necessary to have more than one of each design available. Figure the odds of getting funding for more than one copy of one design. Yeah, until the impact table comes out with our names on it.
Re:Simpsons did it... (Score:1, Interesting)
Why not the Sahara?
Wouldn't you want to see an awesome glass structure formed from the immense energy?
Also, sand would probably take a larger amount of the energy away from the impact as well.
Re:Dose of Reality (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole world is sinking (ok, the water is rising)
It is? Well, yes, at about 0.7mm a year for a long time, with the most dramatic rising happening between 8 000 and 6 000 years ago. The common perception is that sea level increase should have accelerated in the 20th century but no such acceleration has been measured. Some people work with the number 1.8mm/year but that is the upper bound, not the average rise.
For the record, I am not one of those global warming deniers, just trying to keep the records straight.
The areas of the earth where people are most plagued by sea level, such as the Gulf of Mexico (New Orleans) and certain parts of the Pacific, the "increasing" sea level is not related to actual increasing sea levels. In New Orleans it is a problem of mis-management of a river and the resulting lack of "beach-building". In most of the low-lying areas of the Pacific now in trouble the problem is not rising sea but sinking land - it is geological.
There is nothing to indicate that increasing sea levels will become a major issue this century, and it may never become a problem. Even as Pacific Islands are sinking below the sea.
Re:And the target is.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: who gets placed in the asteroid's crosshairs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually I like the idea of an ocean impact. While there is an ass-load of people along any coast, the over-all effets are minimal. Yes, immense flooding and a billion people will die. But the important thing is the atmosphere will be loaded with water and will recover in days.
Meanwhile an impact on land would send dirt particles up, blocking light for weeks or months, killing plants, freezing the entire planet. We would have a much harder time (as a planet) surviving a land impact than a water one.
use its own rotational kinetic energy! (Score:2, Interesting)
(1) Rendezvous with the asteroid. Time is important, so this will probably require a nuclear rocket.
(2) Construct a really strong anchor point, probably using a net around the entire asteriod.
(3) Construct a space elevator connected to the anchor. The asteriod will have much weaker gravity and much higher rotational velocity than the earth, so an elevator there wouldn't have to be nearly as long or strong as here. The motion of the asteriod may not be simple (precession in addition to rotation), which means the elevator will pivot about the anchor point.
(4) Use the elevator to launch payloads (bags of rubble). This doesn't require any net energy: a payload beyond the stationary orbit radius will pull outward, and can be used to lift the next payload. Each launch gives the asteroid a nudge (by conservation of momentum). You can't choose the direction of the nudges arbitrarily - assuming simple rotation, they have to be in the plane of rotation. Approximately twice a year, payloads can be launched toward earth. That would be a good time to send construction workers back home.
Re:Help me out here... (Score:3, Interesting)
to know that there is going to be an impact, you need to have the asteroid and the Earth within (to a first approximation, for the description not for the calculation) 6360km of each other AT THE SAME TIME.
The Earth's orbital velocity is around 100000km/hour ; to get Earth and asteroid in the same place at the same time, you need to have your asteroid crossing the Earth's orbit within a window about 7 minutes in duration. During 7 minutes, the Earth's equator travels around 100km.
If we know (or have high confidence) that there's going to be an impact, then we know to a quite close location where it's going to hit. Remembering that we're not really concerned about small impacts, but ones with a nation or continent obliterating potential, then we can assure destruction of "Ground Zero".
(The back-of the envelope calculations are assuming that the asteroid comes in perpendicular to the Earth's orbit; a grazing or low-angle impact is considered more likely, I think.
If it's going to hit, we'll know Ground Zero to within a few hundred kilometers, as discussed above. But the level of damage that a "civilisation threat" would do makes the water-vs-land impact question pretty trivial. A water impact may well be worse than a land impact.