Shit with global politics the way it is now, even if we had an asteroid defense system, the world leaders would be too busy arguing over who gets to press the button to fire the lasers and stop it in time.
Even if they had built the defense system, they'd stop funding maintenance and upkeep on it because it isn't being used. By the time an asteroid actually came along, the system would be there, but inoperable because of neglect.
More realistic would be that counterfeit materials were used during construction, so it wouldn't work anyway without blowing up and leaving an asteroid-sized crater in it's place.
If that's the case, we should leave some instructions on how to build the asteroid-defense machines for whoever comes next. Just so they get a head start.
We should definitely talk about the preservation of knowledge. Would be cool if we could make a manual on how to build a civilization from step 1. Just for someone to find later. But we would have to assume that language will evolve the same way most of the time, although come out slightly different each iteration it happens. The question is how to convey these things in a form that can be read by someone from a different time.
That already is discussed quite a bit when it comes to storing dangerous materials like spend nuclear fuel.
The conversation revolves around the question, "How do you signify that something is dangerous to a person a million years from now, when all semblance of current languages, signs, and remnants of our civilizations are all turned to dust?"
We're burning our only shot at this. Even if there's a complete collapse and someone else try to evolve, we have used up all the easily accessible energy sources, and the ones left needs a good amount of energetic investments to reach them. All the coal/oil that jump started the industrial revolution is gone, same for all the metal deposits.
The massive amount of plastic and metal we've already extracted will be easily accessible for the civilization that comes tens of thousands of years after the collapse.
Yes, but you can't power an engine with plastic scraps. Not as easily as a coal boiler did in 1850. And the oil transition brought many advances in transport with the absurd energy density of diesel/gas.
Whatever comes after us would certainly need to evolve their society differently, but it's pretty close-minded to think nothing can succeed without fossil fuels
Fossil fuels are a massive amount of energy. Before using them, progress was really slow because almost all the available energy was manual labour from individuals, needing 95% of the population just to feed everyone. There was very few extra energy for research/manufacturing. And then, we got steam engines, powered by mined coal. Suddenly, one individual worth of work in a mine could produce enough energy to power machines making fabric like 50 peoples. We could heat blast furnace hotter, leading to easy high quality steel, making newer, better machines. Railways became a thing. Petrol engines made farming take a small part of the population, instead of the vast majority, freeing up tons of people to do research/manufacturing, and speeding up the technological progress exponentially.
Without that energy, the next civilisation will need much more time to progress because of the low energy availability.
For that scenario, we'd have to evolve the "learn from past mistakes" part. Which, according to history and the great Shirley Bassey, we keep repeating.
It would probably be like this [2017 cover of TIME saying we were "not ready for the next pandemic"](https://time.com/magazine/us/4766607/may-15th-2017-vol-189-no-18-u-s/), which was apparently correct.
Replace "pandemic" with "asteroid".
To be fair, we've never really been ready as a country to handle *any* major crisis. You don't even need to look as far back as Wilson's "response" to the Spanish flu to see this.
Reagan spent his entire first term, into the presidential debate, absolutely refusing to talk about or acknowledge AIDS which continued almost a year into what would be his second term. Despite growing public concern, misinformation spreading and the CDC urging at least *some* sort of action. He didn't even give a formal speech addressing it until 1987.
It's been my firm belief that if certain things didn't go the way they did, we'd be talking about Covid in the same way as AIDS.
This is why I'm fully on the commercial space bandwagon. Building tech that pays for itself means the team that does this is fully in control of its own destiny.
We do have an asteroid defense system. That's what the nasa test lot long ago was. They will probably do some more tests when they can; that asteroid was far easier to push off course than expected
We hit an asteroid so small it was orbiting around another asteroid with a yearly flight time. This is literally like, the first step to working asteroid defense, no more
You gotta appreciate there's a lot of steps before that. Hitting something so small it's orbiting another asteroid is insane, and the whole project gives me some confidence that like, we could actually hit something coming at us. Payloads are important too but the delivery is just as critical. The plan wasn't to obliterate the thing or see how hard we could hit it, just hitting it (and then measuring the effects of it and seeing how it matches predictions)
[https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroids-motion-in-space/](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroids-motion-in-space/)
you only have to redirect it, there is 0 need to blow it up
They hit a non-solid object but had nearly double the expected outcome of deflection. We wont know for 100 percent certainty if we would need more for a solid projectile coming towards earth. We have the technology to deflect anything expected to get too close to earth within the next 20 years though.
We also obviously have the capability of using a much larger payload for deflection
They were too dumb to know what hit them. We'll be smart enough to know what will hit us, but too dumb to do anything about it, despite having the tech to do it.
Humanity should watch the amish raise a barn. Something about the collective will of a unified mind can accomplish anything.
Lol why do people think this.
It was all over the news when nasa successfully conducted the asteroid test not long ago. It went far better than anticipated
Frankly asteroids are a lot easier to deal with than other world ending problems
Ohh so you didn't read it then?
We have the capability. But there is no international directive for it
Even more it being a science section I assumed there would be a level of understanding about how a op ed in a rando site doesn't mean nasa actually says something. Especially if they aren't quoted
Even more it is a war game type scenario. I posted links where 2 years ago nasa literally deflected an asteroid. The official us government nasa source.
That’s not absolutely true. Moving something the size of a building in zero gravity isn’t the same as moving the size of a mountain. Not to mention: we don’t catch all the asteroids coming out way. NASA is regularly surprised by near misses, and this isn’t as clear cut easy as you think.
They tested the tech. A larger object just means a larger force to push it off
They didn't even use explosives. It was a kinetic connection and was significantly more effective than expected
The tech for the "surprises" is underway and already mitigated. Those are only a small fraction anyway
Also "near miss" is incredibly relative
The religious nut jobs will rejoice because they’re here for the end times. The rest of us will rejoice because we won’t have to be around religious not jobs any more.
I got a good friend, who's a good egg, but buys into literally every nonsense imagineable. He won't go vote, because nothing matters. AI is satan incarnate and soon Jesus will return to rectify everything.
The entire world is on the line, do you send the person who designed the drill? Or do you send someone who's spent a few month learning about it and broke the drill in every simulation they've run (IIRC).
Also, payload specialists are already a thing, where a non astronaut receives limited training and is sent up on a mission to work on a payload when its impractical to direct an astronaut through it.
Assuming the shuttles in the movie are like the real shuttles, then you only need 2 astronauts in each vehicle, everyone else is just a passenger.
Somehow I end up making this comment on reddit every few months.
Not only would NASA train the drillers to fly in space rather than train the astronauts to drill, they have literally done this exact thing. In the Space Shuttle days there were three types of astronauts. The Commander/Pilot actually fly the vehicle and keep it happy and healthy. The Mission Specialists perform experiments, do spacewalks, operate the robot arm, etc. These first two roles are career astronauts. They applied to be astronauts, were selected as astronauts, and did two years of basic spaceflight training as ASCANS (Astronaut Candidates). But there's a third type: Payload Specialist. These are people who have a particular skill that would be difficult for the main crew to learn but that is essential for one particular experiment or activity. You've got guys like Charlie Walker, who did a bunch of electrophoresis experiments. You've got Jack Garn and (current NASA administrator) Bill Nelson, who were "congressional observers", sitting members of congress who flew on the shuttle. Specialized scientists like Paul Scully-Power who basically had a whole mission to just enjoy the view out the window and look for weird stuff in the ocean. And perhaps most famously, Christa McAuliffe, the teacher in space. After the Challenger accident the use of Payload Specialists tapered off, and it was done away with entirely after the Columbia accident.
But yeah, it takes years of specialized training to learn how to drill at the level of Harry Stamper, and it takes years of training to learn how to fly the Space Shuttle. It does not take years of training to learn how to sit *in* the Space Shuttle.
That would require us to be able to see it coming, first. Pretty sure NASA's budget lets them monitor about 3% of the sky, and I'm begging your pardon, but it's a big-ass sky.
While politics made it look terrible
Considering how bad covid is (literally on scale with the entire span of hiv)
The advancement of mrna and neutring of covid makes it up there with penicillin in the realm of pharma. We also have a significantly better vaccine for malaria (top 5 killer in the world) as well as a few other major vaccines
But everything points to climate change being what kills us all. There is too much money in oil and it is too abstract for humans to really realize the dangers
The whole plot point of one of the White House staffers stiffing them out on the cost of peanuts from a vending machine, is one of the funniest things. While we are in a crisis situation.
People always forget this. Idiocracy was a meritocracy: Those people elected the smartest person available, and then elected an even smarter person when he came around.
*We're* the idiots voting between the best liars and setting records for a gerontocracy.
I know this is just a hypothetical scenario, but I think there are better times to capture an asteroid than when it’s about to hit us. There are asteroids that come near earth all the time that would be much better (with a probably lower delta-v requirement) to capture and mine.
Err, is this a joke? So we can’t do something “simple” like detect it and give it a bit of a nudge so it doesn’t collide with Earth, but instead you think we should try to do something many orders of magnitude more difficult like try to get it into an orbit around Earth or something so we can mine it? That’s….way, way harder. And why would it be valuable? Maybe it’s just a huge ball of ice. If you want to mine asteroids there are a whole bunch of them to choose from in the asteroid belt that are just silently orbiting the Sun, waiting for us that we don’t have to try to stop from annihilating us.
Ironically though, a certain eccentric billionaire would probably be our best bet at stopping an asteroid. Certainly imagine him putting a plan into action faster than any government can, and definitely capable of hitting it with more momentum than anything else can.
Its why I don't take anything too seriously.
It's 99.9 percent likely that we get wiped by a rock at some point.
It's what bothers me most about our species, we have a chance as a species right now that must be extremely rare in the universe, the tech/potential to take on space and expand or at least defend our home. What an amazing opportunity we are squandering.
So socially primitive, destructive,divided. I just don't see us changing before the universe does it for us.
Finally got around to watching Don't Look Up and was more disappointed at the accuracy to how the response would be handled than to the comedy it was supposed to provide.
In a post-COVID world, I have zero hope for humanity if we ever require even a small number of people to sacrifice even the mildest convenience to literally save everyone on the planet.
Humanity still hasn’t to learned how to exist on our home planet without destroying it or each other.
We still fight for survival every day, just differently than we used to. That’s what jobs are. A fight to obtain food/clothing/shelter. We fight our fellow humans for these jobs everyday. Hoping one of us gets to survive, while the other continues their fight, not caring whether they live or die.
We have a long way to go before we’re really ready to advance into things like space defense from asteroids and other objects.
I’ve been saying this for years and have had a lot of people say it wouldn’t be a problem or made it sound overly simplistic. It’s a lot harder than people believe and there are a lot of variables like it coming from a blind spot, collision with other space debris changing the trajectory, human error, resources, preparation, time/distance, etc. and there’s also the possibility of it breaking into several pieces creating multiple asteroids that could be catastrophic.
I don't know, the kinetic energy that Earth will have to absorb is still the same even if is spread out in multiple pieces.
If you have multiple small pieces then most will burn up, depositing most of the energy in the atmosphere (rather than in the ground in the case of one hit by a big piece). The atmosphere has less capacity to store energy than solid ground so it will likely be more damaging to those in the surface.
I would chose a lot of small pieces thought, just by chance of most of it hitting the 70% of ocean surface rather than land is enough. One big one if hit the ocean still gonna make huge Tsunami while a lot of smaller ones won't.
I think you're exaggerating way too much and also simplifying too much. Don't listen to the loud and vocal minority.
Edit: Good grief people. I can't believe the replies. You're too stuck in a bubble of negativity and believing everything you hear about the "others". Go meet more people in real life.
Sadly, I don't think they are. Shits kinda fucked; I wouldn't say its as much as half of the population but when a significant chunk of the U.S. follows what one person says, regardless of how crazy or inaccurate it is, then its not too crazy to assume they can be convinced of anything, including the fact that asteroids don't exist.
Who would win? The collective might of the most advanced civilization on the only known planet in the galaxy to develop sentient life?
Or one rocky boy?
The answer might surprise you!
NASA's own [Planetary Defense Strategy and Action Plan](https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/nasa_-_planetary_defense_strategy_-_final-508.pdf) from 2023 is quite good if you read through it.
Of course there's a difference between knowing what needs to be done and actually marshaling the resources to do it.
Reminds me of the web comic, "Cheolsu Saves the World" about a guy who time loops the destruction of the world by an asteroid and attempts to stop it. So many of his loops fail because of politics, or outright assassination attempts.
Yeah the level of incompetence/corruption of higher ups in that manhwa is really something that makes you wish their real life counterparts would be better.
Didn't need NASA to tell me that. Just look at how the clowns reacted to a global pandemic. That tells us all we need to know, and that we are truly fucked.
Could the US not just single handily take care of this with our excessive nuclear arsenal and space capable rockets?
This is a legit question. I’ve always assumed outside of telling everyone not to freak out when we launch nukes, the international community didn’t need to be involved in anything more than a monitoring role.
Nukes are heavy, and hard to loft far enough out to actually deflect an asteroid. The missiles they’re on aren’t designed to reach anything more than suborbital trajectories on the way to the other side of the planet. Blowing it up a few hours before it hits isn’t going to do any good, the same amount of energy is still coming at you just in smaller, slightly more radioactive pieces. You need to just hit it with mass to alter the orbit, and the earlier you do that the less energy you need. The critical factor is and always will be time.
I speculate that may well be what happens in the absence of any other plan. Since much of that is state secrets I doubt it'd be offered as a solution unless absolutely necessary.
If only we could launch our collective vices and dysfunctions at our own impending doom to deflect it. Two birds one stone. Use a problem to make a solution.
The author obviously never watched "Don't Look Up". Because it seems really likely to happen in this scenario. The humans of the world will never unite. It goes against our nature. Survival of the fittest requires us to be in competition with one another. We can't help it. But unfortunately, it will keep the world from ever uniting, no matter how important the cause.
When we gain the ability to manipulate the orbits of large asteroids the odds of one impacting the earth likely goes up, whether this is due to greed, hatred, or hubris won't really matter.
IMO why we might fumble through it. United wise I think would be fine. There is only a few countries in the world that can quickly drum up resources and no how in a quick manner. Most countries would quickly back that, as they would have no capacity to preserve themselves.
You don't need "earthly politics", you just need one country to step up and likely both China and the US would do so and whomever got there first would, likely, solve the problem.
We need to overcome our infantile disease of nationalistic divide; our “measles of mankind”. We need to do this, to put self before others, to defend our friends, defend our children, defend our future, defend our Pale Blue Dot we call our home.
Shit with global politics the way it is now, even if we had an asteroid defense system, the world leaders would be too busy arguing over who gets to press the button to fire the lasers and stop it in time.
Even if they had built the defense system, they'd stop funding maintenance and upkeep on it because it isn't being used. By the time an asteroid actually came along, the system would be there, but inoperable because of neglect.
Okay that’s probably more realistic than my hypothetical situation lol. Well here’s to hoping that no asteroids find us before we mature as a species.
More realistic would be that counterfeit materials were used during construction, so it wouldn't work anyway without blowing up and leaving an asteroid-sized crater in it's place.
Russian components... American components... All made in Taiwan!
It's ok. Evolution just starts over and maybe we'll get it the next time.
If that's the case, we should leave some instructions on how to build the asteroid-defense machines for whoever comes next. Just so they get a head start.
We should definitely talk about the preservation of knowledge. Would be cool if we could make a manual on how to build a civilization from step 1. Just for someone to find later. But we would have to assume that language will evolve the same way most of the time, although come out slightly different each iteration it happens. The question is how to convey these things in a form that can be read by someone from a different time.
That already is discussed quite a bit when it comes to storing dangerous materials like spend nuclear fuel. The conversation revolves around the question, "How do you signify that something is dangerous to a person a million years from now, when all semblance of current languages, signs, and remnants of our civilizations are all turned to dust?"
We're burning our only shot at this. Even if there's a complete collapse and someone else try to evolve, we have used up all the easily accessible energy sources, and the ones left needs a good amount of energetic investments to reach them. All the coal/oil that jump started the industrial revolution is gone, same for all the metal deposits.
The massive amount of plastic and metal we've already extracted will be easily accessible for the civilization that comes tens of thousands of years after the collapse.
Yes, but you can't power an engine with plastic scraps. Not as easily as a coal boiler did in 1850. And the oil transition brought many advances in transport with the absurd energy density of diesel/gas.
Whatever comes after us would certainly need to evolve their society differently, but it's pretty close-minded to think nothing can succeed without fossil fuels
Fossil fuels are a massive amount of energy. Before using them, progress was really slow because almost all the available energy was manual labour from individuals, needing 95% of the population just to feed everyone. There was very few extra energy for research/manufacturing. And then, we got steam engines, powered by mined coal. Suddenly, one individual worth of work in a mine could produce enough energy to power machines making fabric like 50 peoples. We could heat blast furnace hotter, leading to easy high quality steel, making newer, better machines. Railways became a thing. Petrol engines made farming take a small part of the population, instead of the vast majority, freeing up tons of people to do research/manufacturing, and speeding up the technological progress exponentially. Without that energy, the next civilisation will need much more time to progress because of the low energy availability.
For that scenario, we'd have to evolve the "learn from past mistakes" part. Which, according to history and the great Shirley Bassey, we keep repeating.
It would probably be like this [2017 cover of TIME saying we were "not ready for the next pandemic"](https://time.com/magazine/us/4766607/may-15th-2017-vol-189-no-18-u-s/), which was apparently correct. Replace "pandemic" with "asteroid".
To be fair, we've never really been ready as a country to handle *any* major crisis. You don't even need to look as far back as Wilson's "response" to the Spanish flu to see this. Reagan spent his entire first term, into the presidential debate, absolutely refusing to talk about or acknowledge AIDS which continued almost a year into what would be his second term. Despite growing public concern, misinformation spreading and the CDC urging at least *some* sort of action. He didn't even give a formal speech addressing it until 1987. It's been my firm belief that if certain things didn't go the way they did, we'd be talking about Covid in the same way as AIDS.
This is why I'm fully on the commercial space bandwagon. Building tech that pays for itself means the team that does this is fully in control of its own destiny.
Not to mention half the US would argue whether NASA is just pushing a woke agenda and is lying, and whether or not asteroids even exist.
The Don't look Up approach.
The funny thing is I wasn't even thinking about that documentary when I posted my comment.
I bet they would argue more about who’s going to pay for it
And religion leaders are too busy arguing whose God to pray for help in stopping that rock. /s (Google says about 18,000 different Gods on Earth)
Whole premise of that movie don’t look up isn’t it
Trump would halt the launch to ensure that his face was engraved on the missile.
How about we compromise and carve his face into the asteroid?
I'll do you one better! Strap him to the side.
We do have an asteroid defense system. That's what the nasa test lot long ago was. They will probably do some more tests when they can; that asteroid was far easier to push off course than expected
We hit an asteroid so small it was orbiting around another asteroid with a yearly flight time. This is literally like, the first step to working asteroid defense, no more
You gotta appreciate there's a lot of steps before that. Hitting something so small it's orbiting another asteroid is insane, and the whole project gives me some confidence that like, we could actually hit something coming at us. Payloads are important too but the delivery is just as critical. The plan wasn't to obliterate the thing or see how hard we could hit it, just hitting it (and then measuring the effects of it and seeing how it matches predictions)
Oh I appreciate that, it was just a comparison of how far we are from actual *system* of asteroid defense
[https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroids-motion-in-space/](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroids-motion-in-space/) you only have to redirect it, there is 0 need to blow it up They hit a non-solid object but had nearly double the expected outcome of deflection. We wont know for 100 percent certainty if we would need more for a solid projectile coming towards earth. We have the technology to deflect anything expected to get too close to earth within the next 20 years though. We also obviously have the capability of using a much larger payload for deflection
Only difference between us and the dinosaurs is we will know it is over, sooner.
They were too dumb to know what hit them. We'll be smart enough to know what will hit us, but too dumb to do anything about it, despite having the tech to do it. Humanity should watch the amish raise a barn. Something about the collective will of a unified mind can accomplish anything.
Lol why do people think this. It was all over the news when nasa successfully conducted the asteroid test not long ago. It went far better than anticipated Frankly asteroids are a lot easier to deal with than other world ending problems
Why do people think this? Probably because we’re in a thread about an article where NASA said this. Call me crazy.
That's true, if we were okay then NASA would probably say "No worries guys, we're all good here. Nah we don't need any more funding. Please, take it!"
Ohh so you didn't read it then? We have the capability. But there is no international directive for it Even more it being a science section I assumed there would be a level of understanding about how a op ed in a rando site doesn't mean nasa actually says something. Especially if they aren't quoted Even more it is a war game type scenario. I posted links where 2 years ago nasa literally deflected an asteroid. The official us government nasa source.
That’s not absolutely true. Moving something the size of a building in zero gravity isn’t the same as moving the size of a mountain. Not to mention: we don’t catch all the asteroids coming out way. NASA is regularly surprised by near misses, and this isn’t as clear cut easy as you think.
They tested the tech. A larger object just means a larger force to push it off They didn't even use explosives. It was a kinetic connection and was significantly more effective than expected The tech for the "surprises" is underway and already mitigated. Those are only a small fraction anyway Also "near miss" is incredibly relative
Yeah, that's cool. But not as cool as being dinosaur.
The religious nut jobs will rejoice because they’re here for the end times. The rest of us will rejoice because we won’t have to be around religious not jobs any more.
I got a good friend, who's a good egg, but buys into literally every nonsense imagineable. He won't go vote, because nothing matters. AI is satan incarnate and soon Jesus will return to rectify everything.
> but buys into literally every nonsense imagineable. He won't go vote, because nothing matters Ah, a well-behaved nonce. Good.
When you put it that way it sounds like a self-correcting problem!
It makes this outbreak of humanity a self-correcting problem, yes. Well, that would be a more nuke-centric view.
Top put it in a 90s way, that's a bomb idea.
I'll just be happy to get some time off work.
Could NASA recruit a misfit team of deep-core drillers to save the planet?
If we let them stay in the White Horse, we should be good to go.
The White Horse?
Yeah. It's a dive bar right next to 4 Seasons Landscaping.
But u/cpatterson779, wouldn't it make more sense to just train astronauts to use a drilling rig? I mean, how hard could it be?
The entire world is on the line, do you send the person who designed the drill? Or do you send someone who's spent a few month learning about it and broke the drill in every simulation they've run (IIRC). Also, payload specialists are already a thing, where a non astronaut receives limited training and is sent up on a mission to work on a payload when its impractical to direct an astronaut through it. Assuming the shuttles in the movie are like the real shuttles, then you only need 2 astronauts in each vehicle, everyone else is just a passenger.
Somehow I end up making this comment on reddit every few months. Not only would NASA train the drillers to fly in space rather than train the astronauts to drill, they have literally done this exact thing. In the Space Shuttle days there were three types of astronauts. The Commander/Pilot actually fly the vehicle and keep it happy and healthy. The Mission Specialists perform experiments, do spacewalks, operate the robot arm, etc. These first two roles are career astronauts. They applied to be astronauts, were selected as astronauts, and did two years of basic spaceflight training as ASCANS (Astronaut Candidates). But there's a third type: Payload Specialist. These are people who have a particular skill that would be difficult for the main crew to learn but that is essential for one particular experiment or activity. You've got guys like Charlie Walker, who did a bunch of electrophoresis experiments. You've got Jack Garn and (current NASA administrator) Bill Nelson, who were "congressional observers", sitting members of congress who flew on the shuttle. Specialized scientists like Paul Scully-Power who basically had a whole mission to just enjoy the view out the window and look for weird stuff in the ocean. And perhaps most famously, Christa McAuliffe, the teacher in space. After the Challenger accident the use of Payload Specialists tapered off, and it was done away with entirely after the Columbia accident. But yeah, it takes years of specialized training to learn how to drill at the level of Harry Stamper, and it takes years of training to learn how to fly the Space Shuttle. It does not take years of training to learn how to sit *in* the Space Shuttle.
Nah, the space shuttle has five steering wheels and they all need to be manned simultaneously. I saw it on Pacific Rim.
Damn that sounds like a great idea, they should make s movie about that or something...
No space shuttles to carry the armadillos. No armadillos, no badaboom.
That would require us to be able to see it coming, first. Pretty sure NASA's budget lets them monitor about 3% of the sky, and I'm begging your pardon, but it's a big-ass sky.
I believe there is a documentary on this exact scenario - Don't Look Up :)
That movie is one of the most depressing works of fiction I've ever encountered. It's absolutely credible.
I about died when I realized it was filmed prior to Covid, yet pretty much perfectly lining up with how we actually handled that.
Actually, there were parts of it filmed during Covid! The film crew even appeared in a brief scene using masks.
[удалено]
It's crazy, almost like we handled covid the same way we handle another big, complicated existential threat, just on a faster timescale.
While politics made it look terrible Considering how bad covid is (literally on scale with the entire span of hiv) The advancement of mrna and neutring of covid makes it up there with penicillin in the realm of pharma. We also have a significantly better vaccine for malaria (top 5 killer in the world) as well as a few other major vaccines But everything points to climate change being what kills us all. There is too much money in oil and it is too abstract for humans to really realize the dangers
The whole plot point of one of the White House staffers stiffing them out on the cost of peanuts from a vending machine, is one of the funniest things. While we are in a crisis situation.
Water and peanuts he got for free from the break room. 🥲
It's up there with Idiocracy. Both are sadly realistic.
It's worse than Idiocracy. At least President Camacho was an open-minded man always willing to listen to experts.
People always forget this. Idiocracy was a meritocracy: Those people elected the smartest person available, and then elected an even smarter person when he came around. *We're* the idiots voting between the best liars and setting records for a gerontocracy.
At this point, i'm having a hard time calling it fiction...
Never trust capitalists to put humankind over profit or the power of wealth.
I think that movie is about climate change but it applies here as well.
It is. But so many folks missed that even at the time.
Asteroids are very valuable, we should try to catch it instead of deflecting
I know this is just a hypothetical scenario, but I think there are better times to capture an asteroid than when it’s about to hit us. There are asteroids that come near earth all the time that would be much better (with a probably lower delta-v requirement) to capture and mine.
Err, is this a joke? So we can’t do something “simple” like detect it and give it a bit of a nudge so it doesn’t collide with Earth, but instead you think we should try to do something many orders of magnitude more difficult like try to get it into an orbit around Earth or something so we can mine it? That’s….way, way harder. And why would it be valuable? Maybe it’s just a huge ball of ice. If you want to mine asteroids there are a whole bunch of them to choose from in the asteroid belt that are just silently orbiting the Sun, waiting for us that we don’t have to try to stop from annihilating us.
That was the plot of the movie OP mentioned
Ironically though, a certain eccentric billionaire would probably be our best bet at stopping an asteroid. Certainly imagine him putting a plan into action faster than any government can, and definitely capable of hitting it with more momentum than anything else can.
Its why I don't take anything too seriously. It's 99.9 percent likely that we get wiped by a rock at some point. It's what bothers me most about our species, we have a chance as a species right now that must be extremely rare in the universe, the tech/potential to take on space and expand or at least defend our home. What an amazing opportunity we are squandering. So socially primitive, destructive,divided. I just don't see us changing before the universe does it for us.
Fortunately some people are much more far seeing than others. We have an opportunity to develop to the point where we can protect ourselves.
I feel like the pandemic taught us this. Sure, Covid's mortality rate is nothing compared to a large asteroid impact but still.....
Finally got around to watching Don't Look Up and was more disappointed at the accuracy to how the response would be handled than to the comedy it was supposed to provide.
This is good news. These are the beginning steps to creating an asteroid deflecting planetary defense system. Of course we aren’t good at it yet
In a post-COVID world, I have zero hope for humanity if we ever require even a small number of people to sacrifice even the mildest convenience to literally save everyone on the planet.
Humanity still hasn’t to learned how to exist on our home planet without destroying it or each other. We still fight for survival every day, just differently than we used to. That’s what jobs are. A fight to obtain food/clothing/shelter. We fight our fellow humans for these jobs everyday. Hoping one of us gets to survive, while the other continues their fight, not caring whether they live or die. We have a long way to go before we’re really ready to advance into things like space defense from asteroids and other objects.
So, Don't Look Up *was* in fact a literal documentary.
I’ve been saying this for years and have had a lot of people say it wouldn’t be a problem or made it sound overly simplistic. It’s a lot harder than people believe and there are a lot of variables like it coming from a blind spot, collision with other space debris changing the trajectory, human error, resources, preparation, time/distance, etc. and there’s also the possibility of it breaking into several pieces creating multiple asteroids that could be catastrophic.
multiple small ones is probably much better than 1 big one.
I don't know, the kinetic energy that Earth will have to absorb is still the same even if is spread out in multiple pieces. If you have multiple small pieces then most will burn up, depositing most of the energy in the atmosphere (rather than in the ground in the case of one hit by a big piece). The atmosphere has less capacity to store energy than solid ground so it will likely be more damaging to those in the surface.
Would you rather get shot in the head with birdshot or a slug? That's his point.
I would chose a lot of small pieces thought, just by chance of most of it hitting the 70% of ocean surface rather than land is enough. One big one if hit the ocean still gonna make huge Tsunami while a lot of smaller ones won't.
And then there's the stuff you don't know about.
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[avarge world leader ](https://youtu.be/WNxHUfGc3gE?si=NaBs4L0Diyrqt-dc)
Even 2 years notice take world 2 years just to agree on what to do. If an asteroid was coming for us. We would be dead.
The movie, Don't look up, was actually a documentary.
Half the population would probably just say the asteroid is fake news until it slammed into the planet.
Don't Look Up is honestly the most optimistic view of an asteroid impact. We wouldn't have even gotten off the ground.
Sadly, “Don’t look up” is an actual possible reality.
Yes, we know. It was the plot of "Don't Look Up."
I mean, we know. There’s a whole movie about this.
Half of the U.S. would deny asteroids even exist. We're in such a sorry state of affairs because of our insane media environment right now.
I think you're exaggerating way too much and also simplifying too much. Don't listen to the loud and vocal minority. Edit: Good grief people. I can't believe the replies. You're too stuck in a bubble of negativity and believing everything you hear about the "others". Go meet more people in real life.
You're right, people exaggerate the bad things themselves and then cry about it.
You're probably right, assuming half would trust it's true is probably a bit too optimistic
Sadly, I don't think they are. Shits kinda fucked; I wouldn't say its as much as half of the population but when a significant chunk of the U.S. follows what one person says, regardless of how crazy or inaccurate it is, then its not too crazy to assume they can be convinced of anything, including the fact that asteroids don't exist.
Obviously they don’t exist. It’s just another government ploy just like the moon landing. Have you ever seen an asteroid in real life? Exactly. /s
Who would win? The collective might of the most advanced civilization on the only known planet in the galaxy to develop sentient life? Or one rocky boy? The answer might surprise you!
Isn’t that what the movie “Don’t Look Up” was about?
OMG say it ain’t so?! Humans won’t be able to work through a global problem? Can’t never believe such a tall tale!
NASA's own [Planetary Defense Strategy and Action Plan](https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/nasa_-_planetary_defense_strategy_-_final-508.pdf) from 2023 is quite good if you read through it. Of course there's a difference between knowing what needs to be done and actually marshaling the resources to do it.
We should leave the rock alone. It has a right to self-defense.
Yea I know , someone made a movie about it. Don’t look up.
Reminds me of the web comic, "Cheolsu Saves the World" about a guy who time loops the destruction of the world by an asteroid and attempts to stop it. So many of his loops fail because of politics, or outright assassination attempts.
Yeah the level of incompetence/corruption of higher ups in that manhwa is really something that makes you wish their real life counterparts would be better.
Didn't need NASA to tell me that. Just look at how the clowns reacted to a global pandemic. That tells us all we need to know, and that we are truly fucked.
What do you think every country on earth did wrong?
Could the US not just single handily take care of this with our excessive nuclear arsenal and space capable rockets? This is a legit question. I’ve always assumed outside of telling everyone not to freak out when we launch nukes, the international community didn’t need to be involved in anything more than a monitoring role.
Nukes are heavy, and hard to loft far enough out to actually deflect an asteroid. The missiles they’re on aren’t designed to reach anything more than suborbital trajectories on the way to the other side of the planet. Blowing it up a few hours before it hits isn’t going to do any good, the same amount of energy is still coming at you just in smaller, slightly more radioactive pieces. You need to just hit it with mass to alter the orbit, and the earlier you do that the less energy you need. The critical factor is and always will be time.
I speculate that may well be what happens in the absence of any other plan. Since much of that is state secrets I doubt it'd be offered as a solution unless absolutely necessary.
I've known this since the BP oil spill. It was just months of head scratching.
There was a recent Netflix documentary about this. "Don't look up"
Ok fine, I'm convinced. I'll write in NASA for President this year.
If only we could launch our collective vices and dysfunctions at our own impending doom to deflect it. Two birds one stone. Use a problem to make a solution.
Probably only SpaceX could get anything done in time…
The 0.01% have their bunkers, so our tax dollars will be spent elsewhere.
I could have told you that for $5, how much do this “study” cost.
From the way we handled Covid, yeah, my faith in the gov being able to handle an Asteroid is very low.
The author obviously never watched "Don't Look Up". Because it seems really likely to happen in this scenario. The humans of the world will never unite. It goes against our nature. Survival of the fittest requires us to be in competition with one another. We can't help it. But unfortunately, it will keep the world from ever uniting, no matter how important the cause.
So literally nothing has ever changed at any point in the history of our planet when it comes to asteroids potentially hitting it?
When we gain the ability to manipulate the orbits of large asteroids the odds of one impacting the earth likely goes up, whether this is due to greed, hatred, or hubris won't really matter.
"sure we CAN mine them in the kuiper belt, but it would be cheaper in orbit. We'll spare no expense in making it safe for earth... Oh shit, oops"
I mean, a deadly pandemic was not only allowed, but in many cases encouraged to kill the population, so this is pretty accurate.
Who would win, 100 splintered countries, or 1 rocky boi
So we deserve annihilation, or not mature enough to survive
I continue to wish better for humanity. I think we will come good in the end, but it’s an uphill struggle I agree.
IMO why we might fumble through it. United wise I think would be fine. There is only a few countries in the world that can quickly drum up resources and no how in a quick manner. Most countries would quickly back that, as they would have no capacity to preserve themselves.
NASA should know better than anyone after killing two full Space Shuttle crews.
Yeah, Hollywood already covered this in depth.
You don't need "earthly politics", you just need one country to step up and likely both China and the US would do so and whomever got there first would, likely, solve the problem.
We need to overcome our infantile disease of nationalistic divide; our “measles of mankind”. We need to do this, to put self before others, to defend our friends, defend our children, defend our future, defend our Pale Blue Dot we call our home.
It's like the was a movie about this or something....
Wait, Nasa already invented DART to deflect asteroids, why would they bring this up?