Neil deGrasse Tyson Outlines a Plan For Saving Earth From Asteroids 241
dsinc contributes a link to Neil deGrasse Tyson's short piece in Wired on how we could deal with the very real threat of killer asteroids, writing "In 2029 we'll be able to know whether, seven years later, Apophis will miss Earth or slam into the Pacific and create a tsunami that will devastate all the coastlines of the Pacific Rim." From the article: "Saving the planet requires commitment. First we have to catalogue every object whose orbit intersects Earth’s, then task our computers with carrying out the calculations necessary to predict a catastrophic collision hundreds or thousands of orbits into the future. Meanwhile, space missions would have to determine in great detail the structure and chemical composition of killer comets and asteroids."
Prediction Ability is UNFORTUNATELY Limited (Score:4, Insightful)
An asteroid calculated to miss for 1000 orbits can have its orbit gravitationally altered by a close pass with another small but significant mass object in the Kuiper Belt.
At that point, the next pass by Earth may not be "by Earth"...
Re:Future Tech won't handle it (Score:3, Insightful)
wake me up when they actually implement some of that socialism your referring to.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
The dinosaurs say hello...
Oh wait, an asteroid impact caused their mass extinction.
Re:When exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
It happened exactly when he stepped up and started talking about science and advocating the rare attitude of giving-a-shit.
"80% of life|success is showing up." -- Woody Allen
Re:When exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
His enthusiasm.
There are lots of other astronomers, last I checked the US graduates about 200 PhD's in astronomy and astrophysics a year, but the vast majority of them don't get excited at the mere notion of talking about science the way Dr Tyson does. Which is why he ended up doing science outreach at planetarium, which is why they put him on TV etc.
He is by no means the only, and probably not the best scientist in the world. But his enthusiasm and energy are infectious, most of the other scientists you talk to are more concerned with publishing their next paper or making sure they have enough money to pay their graduate students. If you look at his CV he hasn't published anything academic since 2008 (nor did I immediately find anything on google scholar that would indicate he's just lazy about updating his webpage, but admittedly I don't normally search for astrophysics), and the work he's published recently seems to more be him as part of the planetarium or american museum of natural history than personal research, and he doesn't appear to take on grad students. That sets him apart from probably 90% of the practicing astronomers, in that he is actually focused full time on science communication rather than doing science. That makes him rare in the field, he's reasonably good at it, and he happens to have been in the right place at the right time with proximity to TV shows to go from a good career as a directory and writer to a particularly good one as TV personality.
My undergrad is in theoretical physics, with most of that on optics and semiconductors, optics is largely 'laboratory astrophysics'. I find now several years after having finished my undergrad that I have a lot of trouble following most astrophysicists giving talks, because they're talking at a 4th year level, and seeing as how I'm a game developer and computer scientist these days that's far removed from understanding astrophysics. Dr. Tyson when he talks is able to mostly limit himself to first year intro to astronomy level, where people can actually understand what the hell he's talking about most of the time, finding people who can do that is unfortunately rather difficult.
Ridiculous paranoia! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:When exactly (Score:2, Insightful)
When exactly did Neil deGrasse Tyson become the world's official representative on all things astronomical? Was it the the pluto thing? It's just really weird that every media outlet seems to go to him for everything these days. He's really articulate and informed, but so are a lot of people. I don't get it.
Watch out, we're dealing with a badass over here! [kym-cdn.com]
Re:Then a butterfly flaps its wings (Score:4, Insightful)
Approximations :-)
Hey, it worked for the Voyager probes.
Re:Saving Earth is good... (Score:5, Insightful)
There were no humans around a million years ago, what makes you think there will in a million?
Sentience.
And what makes you think we have the energy to sustain anything close to what we have enjoyed for the past 150 years ????
E = mc^2
Idiot.
Defeatist.
Re:Then a butterfly flaps its wings (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Then a butterfly flaps its wings (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Future Tech won't handle it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Saving Earth is good... (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I'm dubious. The technology isn't that hard really, it's the political will. Creating that technology and building things at the scale needed for success requires massive funding, which means a couple guys in their garage can't do it themselves. Here's [theonion.com] an Onion article that, while facetious, is pretty accurate. We humans, in groups, just aren't very intelligent, and are completely unable to work together to do necessary things to ensure our own survival. Generally, the only things that work well for us are things which a couple guys in their garage can do, and then after proving it, everyone else decides it's a good idea and jumps on the bandwagon. This is why things like smartphones have worked so well: it's not that hard for small groups of people to build such things and prove they work; then, once the masses see that they can talk to their dumb friends and play Angry Birds, they all want to buy one, making the whole thing highly profitable. There's no clear profit in building large spacecraft and traveling to Alpha Centauri, and once we have an Earth-killer hurtling towards us and it's clear we won't survive, it'll be too late to do anything to either avert the disaster or save the species. What's worse, we're too stupid to learn from history and from the failings of others, so we repeat their mistakes. The dinosaurs showed what happens when you don't invest in a space program. They had hundreds of millions of years to do so, yet they didn't bother (for obvious reasons), and then a giant asteroid wiped them out. Now, we've advanced enough to where we've figured out that this happened to them, yet we still don't take the threat seriously. And unlike the dinosaurs, we don't have the excuse that we're too stupid to develop language, technology, civilization, or even spaceflight.
Personally, I think we're headed into another Dark Ages, where we'll lose most of our technology and go back to living in grass huts and fighting each other in Feudal wars using swords and shields. Maybe after another two thousand years or so, we'll have another technological revolution and develop spaceflight again, and discover that the old myths and legends about humans walking on the Moon were actually true, and that time develop a serious space program and travel to other stars. But if a killer asteroid strikes before then, we're doomed as a species.
Re:Saving Earth is good... (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate to burst your bubble, but his branch of our species is the one reproducing the most, while yours is dying out. In a few generations, there won't be many people like you left, and tons of people like him, all burning through the planet's resources as fast as they can, driving giant SUVs and starting more and more resource wars. You might have the will and foresight, but you don't have the finances and power to carry out your plans; you can't get a handful of guys together in your garage and build a generation ship or a large Moon base.
Re:When exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
That is a very shortsighted attitude. An ignorant public is guaranteed to be hostile to funding pure research. Europe got the LHC while we left the SSSC half built and rotting in the ground. A major reason for it is the difference in regard for science and especially what science research leads to in the long term.
And as the public's scientific literacy degrades so to will our ability to come up new tech or even maintain what we have. It will be very easy to convince people ignorant of the methods and findings of science that all scientists are boondoggling eggheads who hate Jesus.
Scientists are supposedly intelligent, educated, and good at reasoning. Why they make a team sport of denegrating popularizers baffles me. Science needs freedom and funding to do it's work. Cheerleading for ignorance just so one can feel like he has a bigger brainpan than a "mere popularizer" is so stupid on multiple levels.
Re:Saving Earth is good... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately our country (USA) is run by a bunch of intelligent, alpha sopciopaths, some of whom claim belief in creationist theory in order to get votes from the actual stupid people. What's worse is that we voted these fools into power because even by the primaries we have no choice except evil lizard A and evil lizard B.
FTFY. :-)
Re:Saving Earth is good... (Score:5, Insightful)
The technology isn't that hard really, it's the political will. Creating that technology and building things at the scale needed for success requires massive funding
But that's exactly why the technology is hard. Given unlimited sums of money, there are many scientific and technological endeavors that become technically feasible or even trivial: fusion power, Mars colonies, cancer cures, eliminating dependency on fossil fuels, etc. The problem is that we don't have unlimited sums of money, and we don't know in advance of any shortcuts of miraculous developments that would make something like interstellar travel affordable (let alone profitable).
Some actual numbers are required to really understand how far away we are. The best study of interstellar travel that I'm aware of is Project Daedalus [wikipedia.org] from the 1970s. The hypothetical spacecraft - unmanned - would have been powered and propelled by D/He3 inertial confinement fusion, and would take 50 years to reach Barnard's Star, where it would release several probes. The fuel would be obtained by siphoning He3 out of Jupiter's atmosphere over a 20-year period. Estimated cost was $100 trillion. This is for an unmanned probe that would take most of a human lifetime to reach a very close star. To give you some perspective, the annual US budget is $3.6 trillion, and the entire global GNP is around $70 trillion. We do not actually know how to build most of this technology (although ICF may be almost within reach) - we only know that it is probably technically possible. More importantly, we do not know how we might build it cheaply.
I'm all for continuing research into nuclear fusion, new propulsion systems, industrial automation, exoplanets, etc. But the idea that we could have an interstellar spaceflight program if only we found the "political will" is utterly detached from reality. The problem isn't that people in general are stupid: the problem is that people don't want the government to redirect a massive portion of their economic output towards a project that we don't know how to build, won't be completed in their lifetime, and won't improve their lives on Earth. (And still wouldn't ensure the survival of the species, for that matter.) That's not stupidity, that's common sense.
The dinosaurs showed what happens when you don't invest in a space program. They had hundreds of millions of years to do so, yet they didn't bother (for obvious reasons), and then a giant asteroid wiped them out.
This comes up in every single thread on this topic, and the response is always the same: if we suffered a similar impact, Earth would still be a vastly more hospitable environment for humans than anywhere else that we know of, including Mars. It would undoubtedly result in mass extinction, and a large fraction of the human race would probably die from starvation, but we could still sustain millions (if not billions) of lives indefinitely, albeit at a greatly reduced standard of living. The dinosaurs died out because they lacked technology and food cultivation altogether.
Re:When exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:When exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
The Colbert interview was awesome. He apparently gave a hard time to James Cameron because the night sky in Titanic was historically inaccurate and when Cameron did the director's cut a while later he asked Tyson to provide the sky.. and he did.
Did you see the interview he gave on The Daily Show a few weeks ago? Toward the end he tells Jon Stewart... you know the globe you have spinning in your opening graphics... it's spinning the wrong way. Got a huge laugh out of Stewart, and the crowd... and I'll be damned if I didn't notice the globe spinning the wrong way when I saw the opening graphics the next night.
Guys like him, and Bill Nye, are indeed a rare breed.
Re:Future Tech won't handle it (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me get this straight, in the same post you complain that we won't work together and fix the problem and then also chastise "socialism" - Do you think there is a private company who would be doing this save for the chains of government?
He's probably American. They haven't a fucking clue what socialism actually is. To them it's just a word that appeared in the English language during the 2008 US presidential election campaign when the bimbo-in-chief started bandying it around to refer to any Obama policy she didn't like.