First Dedicated Asteroid-Tracking Satellite Will Be Canadian 49
cylonlover writes "In the wake of the meteor blast over Russia and the close-quarter flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14 last week, many people's thoughts have turned to potential dangers from above. It is timely then that the Canadian Space Agency will next week launch NEOSSat (Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite), the world's first space telescope for detecting and tracking asteroids, satellites and space debris."
The meteor incident in Russia has spurred interested in asteroid defense across the globe; donations are pouring in for asteroid-related projects, government officials are making a show of seeming interested, and researchers are stepping up their efforts. Unfortunately, as a related article at Wired notes, we're still a long, long way from having anything more than early warning systems. Quoting: "A new endeavor coming online in 2015 named the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System Project (ATLAS) will provide an early warning system that could provide one week’s notice for city-destroying 45-meter asteroids and three week’s notice for potentially devastating 140-meter objects. ... A more targeted effort comes from the B612 Foundation, which plans to launch the Sentinel telescope in late 2016. This spacecraft would sit inside the orbit of Venus and constantly be on the lookout for killer asteroids, whichever direction they come from. Sentinel will spot nearly all asteroids 150 meters or larger and identify a significant portion of those down to 30 meters in diameter."
Re:Misplaced priorities (Score:5, Interesting)
We already have a lot of resources going to dealing with nuclear weapons and bioweapons. Meanwhile, after the fall of the USSR, the chance of a full scale nuclear war went down a lot. And there may even be benefits from many countries having nukes- there's the notion of "nuclear peace" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_peace [wikipedia.org]- once a few countries have nukes, they are less likely to go to war with each other. In contrast, we have very little going to deal with asteroids and other existential risk threats from space, so we might as well put some resources into it, especially given that asteroid tracking telescopes will also give us interesting scientific data.
Your basic point does however have some validity. There's the serious problem of the Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter [wikipedia.org]. That is, something apparently makes advanced civilizations very rare. It is possible that most of the filtration stopping civilizations occurs before they reach our tech level (e.g. need for life to arise, need for complex life to arise, need for intelligent life to arise, need for civilization to arise, etc.) However, there's a definite possibility that much of the Filter is in front of us and not behind us. If that's the case, Filtration likely needs to occur very soon (next few centuries) since once we're spread out a bit in space, destroying or severely setting back our whole civilization will be much tougher. This narrow window suggests that most of the civilization destroying events we need to worry about are ones that will be created by us, and not natural ones, since natural ones are just so rare. So while we're clearly not putting enough resources into investigating and preventing existential risks, it is possible that almost all the resources we put in should focus on the tech-based ones.