International Organization To Assess Earth Defense From Space Dangers 93
arisvega writes in with a story about an international organization that is trying to come up with options to save the planet from a large asteroid or comet collision. "NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision (PDF) path with our planet. The effort is being led from the German space agency's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and had its kick-off meeting this week. It will draw on expertise from across Europe, Russia and the US. It's a major EU-funded initiative that will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory experiments and new modelling work, and then try to come to some definitive positions. Industrial partners, which include the German, British and French divisions of the big Astrium space company, will consider the engineering architecture required to deflect one of these bodies out of our path."
Re:Act of God vs Alien Invasion (Score:4, Interesting)
While both scenarios are extremely improbable, I wonder what the odds are of being struck by an extinction level asteroid or comet vs being invaded or flat out destroyed by aliens.
On the one hand the likelihood of dino-killer-class impactor is pretty low (but non-zero), and on the other hand we've got zero evidence that there are aliens with the ability to get here at all. Hmm, won't worry too much about either then. The gripping hand is that the likelihood of a city-killer impactor is quite a lot higher: the last known one of that sort of scale was only around a century ago (and luckily hit Siberia, a long way from anywhere; a Tunguska-level hit to any modern city would be terrifying in the amount of destruction). It's also going to be a lot easier to deflect those smaller objects, provided we spot them early enough; with a decade's worth of heads up, we should be able to ensure total safety.
Re:Looking at the problem backwards. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah but if the Earth is only destroyed 10000 years from now than I don't really care. Also, it's impossible to move any significant portion of humanity out of Earth, a human just can't produce enough in their lifetime to get them a ticket out of here.