Star Trek

What serious research is being done into large asteroids that threaten to hit the Earth? Is the scientific establishment just hoping that the asteroid predicted to arrive in 2017 will simply miss? Or are they seriously looking at ways asteroids could be deflected/destroyed, or at the very least, ways in which the damage on impact could be lessened?

Go to NASA’s web site, and tool around. I don’t remember where, but they have about a third of the telescopes n the world looking for said Asteroids. We’ll all be screwed if one comes our way, there’s no stopping an asteroid as big as texas, even with nuclear weapons. The best we could do is deflect it - maybe, but it would take a space race never before seen, and all available resources in the government to stop an apocalypse.

I find it funny that the governments of the world do not take the threat seriously...it is like..it hasn’t happened for miullions of years so it ain’t gonna happen?

I think they need to go back to school and do their maths agains.

If it hasn’t happened for a long time it is more, not less likely to happen!!??

No matter the timeline, the mathematical probability of an object large enough to do permanent damage to the environment is still almost nil. Besides at our current level of space-faring stagnation, there isn’t much we could do about it anyway. For instance, we’d pretty much have to start from scratch if we ever wanted to send a vehicle to land on the moon again, nothing in our ’arsenal’ has enough power to send anything that far!! Plus, the shuttle was supposed to be a 5-10 year ’bridge’ to the next generation of spacecraft, and a viable design for the next level of space vehicles hasn’t even been agreed on or sent to prototyping!!!

The 2017 asteroid is expected to miss, and since Earth is small and space is big that expectation is almost certainly correct. No one is working hard on ways to combat this potential problem because (1) the chances of any impact within, say, 1000 years are very small; (2) we currently couldn’t do anything to prevent an impact anyway; (3) in 1000 years we’ll probably be in a much better position to do something about it; and (4) we have lots of other things to worry about.

Calvin Coolidge, perhaps the most underappreciated U.S. president, once remarked something like, If you see ten problems rolling down the road toward you, and you do nothing whatsoever, nine of them will roll off into the ditch. (And the tenth one, I think he meant, will be easy enough to deal with, as long as you aren’t trying to do something about the other nine at the same time.)

There is such a thing as a danger of focusing on problems too early. At the very least, it can waste time critically needed for other things.

The probability (sorry Q1) of a Asteroid hitting Earth is very low and very unlikely to happen, but throw a year or a decade a century . . .. then the chance goes up. Will a giant one hit someday? You never know

Master Q
StarTrek_MasterQ@yahoo.com

Well, if humanity’s fate is that of the late dinasaurs, then we’d better start outfitting shuttles with living acomodations...la la. J/K We can always nuke the Asteroids...

The mathametic said the chance of an asteriod hitting the earth and wiping out all life as it did sixty five million years ago to the dinosaurs is extremely small. On Discovery’s web site, exn.ca, there is a detailed report into its calculations.