Space Invaders

Some links over at Volokh Conspiracy to stories about asteroid near-misses—do we need a Department of Homeplanet Security? Discuss. (Ron Bailey wrote about asteroid defense back in 2002.)

Comments

[Dave Straub]

Certainly more than we need a moon base or flights of fancy to Mars.

[Ron Bailey]

Julian, for a more "philosophical" view see my column "Defenders of Earth" at URL: http://reason.com/rb/rb073102.shtml

[late for the boom]

Oh joy, another threat we must divert 87 billion dollars to the prevention of a possible extra-terrestrial terrorist attack.

I hear the Klendathuans want to kill all human life, we must attack this threat preemptivly if we want to live, the future of earth is at stake!! Enlist now, the Mobile Infantry needs your service today!!

[cdunlea]

Yes...we could have an Orange Alert, a Brown Alert, a Green Alert and a Blue Alert, clearly showing the escalating scale of danger to us. Plus they could give out helpful tips on how duct tape can save our homes from fiery rock fragments screaming down at 20,000 mph.

Better not mention this to Ridge or Cheney, or they'll figure out ways to tax my unborn grandchildren to pay for yet another bloated fedocracy.

[thoreau]

Well, there are a lot of astronomers with a keen interest in the preservation of life. They already do a lot of monitoring. The monitoring itself is low-cost, and although much of it is admittedly already funded by the feds, it seems to get by just fine without a massive dedicated bureaucracy. It just piggybacks on various other astronomy projects.

Since the astronomers will be able to give us several years' warning, that should be plenty of time to put together a solution if the need arises. I see no need for a Department of Homeplanet Security.

[thoreau]

I might add that it wouldn't hurt if one or two Lieutenant Colonels at the Pentagon work up a scenario just in case, and file it away right next to our contingency plans for invading Armenia in response to a terrorist attack by commandos using Armenia as a training camp, while simultaneously invading Paraguay as a diversion.

Hey, supposedly they have every conceivable scenario worked out, just in case...

[Overlord]

If the government can not protect us against a bunch of religious nuts with box cutters or make a spaceshuttle that doesn't kill it's crew one out every fifty flights, then how can you trust them to protect us against a killer asteroid the size of a mountain?

[garym]

We wouldn't necessarily get that much warning, particularly if the killer body comes in on a hyperbolic orbit (like comets).

A government bureaucracy wouldn't make us particularly safer, but there should at least be a plan in place. A probe with a rocket engine can be dispatched to an asteroid, to nudge it away from its orbit; and the further out it's caught, the easier it is to divert.

[Dubbya]

Overlord,

No domestic attacks since 9/11.

[Jon H]

Hm.

Asteroids = serious threat, but Climate change = joke.

This'll be interesting to watch.

[Jason Ligon]

Jon,

Your equations aren't set up right.

Asteroid = Climate Change = Great Uncertainty, possibly joke.

[Brian]

Thoreau - your contention that scientists will be able to give us several years years warning is not necessarily true. Although the article doesn;t say when exactly the asteroid was discovered (although the first paragraph implies it was about 36 hours before the potential impact), the confused response in the astonomical community and the apparent desire on some astronomers' part to alert the President immediately indicates that this was a sudden and unexpected discovery.

You're right that detection efforts don't cost much and a massive bureaucracy is certianly not needed, but your snide remarks about the contingency plan are unwarranted and ignorant. The facts are that such events have happened in the past, that they are very likely to happen again, that they may happen with little warning (especially if there is no organized effort to detect potential threats), and when it happens the effects will be significant, possibly catastrophic. At present, there is no protocol or response plan. As the incident described in the article demonstrates, we cannot depend on individual scientists to act decisively and appropriately in such scenarios. Having a well crafted and carefully considered response plan that is updated regularly and redily available is the prudent course of action. No it shouldn't take a department of homeplanet defense type mega-bureaucracy, but it does take someone to organize it and government dollars to fund it.

[thoreau]

your snide remarks about the contingency plan are unwarranted and ignorant.

All I meant is that if they have some mid-level officers working on every other conceivable scenario, supposedly including some goofy ones, surely it wouldn't hurt to put somebody in charge of a contingency plan for an asteroid strike. That's all.

[Will]

If any of you had read the article you would have learned that the object was:

500m across - with an impact yield of about 18,000,000 tons of TNT (numbers from the space.com) ? The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in WWII had a yield of 20,000 tons of TNT.

consider also:

At the time it was given impact odds of 1 in 4 with a window of perhaps 36 hours... not even enough time to fully evacuate a major city.

It's a fact: an impact will happen again... it maybe be a small, city killer or a larger civilization destroyer... but it will happen.

"When" is the question - and until we catalog all of the near earth objects we won't know.

Further, I want to stress that it's not a matter of seeing IF an object exists that will hit us - but identifying the objects out there which will.

It's a small investment to make with the ultimate payoff of increased civilization lifespan.

Of course, I suppose if you're some biblical defeatist then this sort of science is pointless.

[garym]

A meteor did cause significant damage 96 years ago. Fortunately, it hit in Siberia, so all the damage was to trees. It would have done nasty things if it had come down in a populated area.

[Mark S.]

Garym:

Doncha know nothin'? That twernt no meteor, it twas an alien starship that crashed on them Rooskies!

[dj of raleigh]

Let's make the earth into the shape of a donut
so the asteroids can pass through harmlessly.
There would be greater surface area too,
and shipping and flight paths would be shorter.
I'm sure that scientists, or Hal burton, can do it,
just punch a hole from the pacific to the Atlantic.
We need jobs anyway, and the water levels would go down.
If we try it and don't like it, we'll plug up the hole
and fly the moon into it to plug it back up.
Taht would be a good use for the moon.
If you're thinking I'm not taking this issue seriously,
then you would be right.

[Mo]

garym,

It also could've been a danger during the Cold War. Imagine if they though it was us.

[Hydroman]

Let us all grab our ankles and assume the
position---put a rosey on your hemoroids,
before impact of the asteroids
anyone want to sing along?

[matt]

If we're stuck giving assloads of money to NASA I'd rather see it go to a program looking for asteroids or comets on a possible collision course with earth than idiotic trips to mars. Of course I'd rather have no NASA at all, but at least looking for possible threats to Earth might be productive....but like all governemnt programs I'm sure it would become an ineffectual bloated bureaucrary capable only of gobbling up more tax dollars.

[Analgesic]

I think we should worry more about problems here on earth. Forget the asteroid, let's cure the hermmorhoid first!

[MALAK]

I spent long hours in the arcade as a teen, training for just this kind of mission. Are you telling me that all those hours of playing "Asteroid" were wasted? Oh the shame of being replaced by a machine . . .

[Justin Slotman]

Re: Department of Homeplanet Security: Oh, gosh, yes. I don't want to go out like the dinosaurs.

[garym]

If anything has an externalities problem, asteroid defense does. You can't shield just the people who have paid from an asteroid hit, so the defense service is really soliciting donations rather than charging for a service.

[James Merritt]

We know that relatively large meteors have caused considerable mischief even in recent history, and we compelling reason to at least suspect, if not believe outright, that some meteors were the culprits behind major short-term climate changes and mass extinction. This is a matter of generally accepted science.

We also know that there have been many massive climate changes throughout the eons, many of which make the currently worrisome "global warming" variations seem positively mild in comparison. In other words, the earth has many times shown itself more than capable of creating severe "global warming" without human help (and beyond human control!).

What we're not sure about, is the extent to which human activity has influenced climate in the "warm" direction.

It makes sense to me to start dealing with what seems inevitable: big meteors and asteroids WILL strike earth, and it would help us to know where and when if possible; climate WILL vary, and the current trend appears to be toward warm, so it would be good to understand how quickly this is happening, and what we can to do survive in the conditions to come.

If we can, through technology, deflect meteors; or if we find out that global warming is definitely the trend, that human action is a major contributor to the current trend, and that human action can just as easily arrest or reverse that trend, then great. Let's deal with such knowledge and its implications when we're sure of it.

Let's not, however, ignore the things we KNOW.

I wonder if GPS satellites could do double-duty as watchdogs for near-earth objects?

[Mojo]

Near earth is too late. We need to monitor and identify objects the outer solar system, such as comets. The possibility always exists that a random chunk of debris could fly through our solar system, but the vast majority of the probable threats can and are detectable years in advance.

Having a space based Nuke or two on the ready seems like a good idea, until you consider the frequency with which such satellites are hit by bits of debris travelling at thousands of miles per hour, not to mention the nervousness such a move would garner in places like Russia and China.

[Kevin Carson]

Despite what Volokh conspiracy says, I'll bet David Friedman could figure out some way to privatize a "public good" like asteroid defense.

Private protection firms could charge a small premium for asteroid insurance, pool the money, and keep a couple of hundred-megaton asteroid-busters, just in case.

Or something like that.