UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report 195
szyzyg writes: "The UK NEO Task Force which was set up last year has finally delivered its report and recommendations on the Asteroid threat. The recommendations include money to build a 3 metre search telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, and more funding for research in the field.
The report is written for politicians and makes a good introduction to the subject, including disturbing facts and figures."
Armageddon (Score:1)
There is a much cheaper solution (Score:4)
YES!! (Score:1)
öööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööö
Oh well. (Score:2)
There goes the usefulness of that report.
What a relief.... (Score:1)
.....it'll save all that depressing 2020 [osopinion.com] bother.
- Derwen
On asteroids (Score:4)
What we need is, in addition to being able to detect them, is outposts on other planets. It is necessary for the survival of our species and if we could just get our act together long enough to stop squabbling over things like money and national debt, we could help ensure that the human race won't be snuffed out like the dinosaurs before us.
We ought to put NASA under the DoD and give it a similar budget - afterall, this IS about defense - it is defense against mother nature.
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Yep, we need more funding to study this (Score:2)
Translation: We want to keep out jobs, so please pay us, regaurdless of the how important this really is in the scheme of things.
I'm not nessicarly saying this isn't worthy of study, but I am saying that it sure seems like a lot of things need more study.
How thorough could it be? (Score:2)
Alternate site (Score:5)
Rampant Paranoia (Score:2)
Hollywood releases a few movies, now suddenly everyone is freaked out about asteroids destroying the earth.
Maybe they're just making way for a bypass. You've got to build bypasses.
Telescope? (Score:1)
(BTW, any chance we can get a link to a non-acrobat version of this report? That viewer is just a pain sometimes...)
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:3)
The solution isn't to try to blow it up, because those pieces are all still moving in the same direction - meaning rather than a single impact on a single continent, you now have hundred-meter sized fragments falling over the entire hemisphere, but instead to hook a space tug up to it and gently push it out of the way while it is still 0.5 AMU or so away.
Bombs don't destroy things, they merely take larger things and turn them many smaller things.
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Heh (Score:1)
Asteroid Risk. (Score:3)
Yeah, and I have Firestone Radial ATX tires on my truck, too.
Oh well.
Re:Telescope? (Score:1)
What they ought to do is give everyone a telescope and an hour of free time a week. Then we'd be secure.
Let's all get ready for distributed-armageddon watch!
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Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:1)
Just in case...
Re:YES!! (Score:1)
Besides, a tellescope tells you when a rock is going to crash into the earth. It shows the Windows bias in government. It's made like Norten CrashGaurd which tells you when you're computer is going to crash and crashes it ahead of time.
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:1)
Re:Rampant Paranoia (Score:1)
Yep. Funny, isn't it? Anyway, what we could have built for the money Hollywood made from those movies....?
Children's astronomy book? (Score:5)
Seriously, that's kind of what it looks like. A book geared towards 8-10 year olds. Oh, right, they said it was targeted at politicians, I should've known it was gonna look like that.
Re:Rampant Paranoia (Score:1)
However, the articles were never in the popular press. They were always in the specialist press. Your statement would have been more accurate if you had said "Hollywood releases a few movies, and now the popular press is freaked out about asteroids destroying the earth"
[0] Of course, the odds of the humanity-destroying asteroid are small, but if you multiply that by all the people it would kill, that's where you get that asteroid-vs-plane crash statistic.
Re:On asteroids (Score:2)
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Misinterpreting the title (Score:2)
I need to get out more.
Re:On asteroids (Score:1)
*sigh* (Score:1)
Re:Rampant Paranoia (Score:2)
Re:YES!! (Score:1)
(otherwise, why the hell would anyone want to give money to build another "stupid telescope").
*sigh*
Re:Yep, we need more funding to study this (Score:4)
And on the lighter side, I think Deep Impact taught us the best lesson: if we would have just waited for the whole thing to show up near Earth, we could have blown up the entire thing, instead of just one of the pieces we created earlier. I guess the people in Deep Impact didn't see Armageddon. If they had, they would have known to drill to 800ft, not just 100m.
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:1)
Actually, astrologically speaking, it's quite likely as those folks will buy anything. I'm sure you meant astronomically speaking, in which case, yes, it is quite unlikely.
________________
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:1)
Realistically though, I doubt that there would be enough warning time to mount a feasible mission involving explosives as an asteroid deterrent. And unless NASA has been up to some new tricks, I rather think our space tug fleet is a touch small (read nonexistant).
Kierthos
I had asteroids once... (Score:1)
This [geocities.com] is not goatse.cx [206.251.12.78]
Confidence Builder (Score:3)
Found a lovely quote on CNN from Britain's Science Minister Lord Sainsbury, the person responsible for forming the committee on near earth asteroids:
"We put a lot of money into astrology and I think it's sensible to put just a little bit in to making certain that we know if there is a danger of an object hitting our very fragile planet," Lord Sainsbury said.
Hmm, if I was born a Cancer when the moon and Saturn were aligned in metaconjunction (or whatever), will I get hit by an asteroid?
better than nothing. (Score:1)
You mean 90 years... (Score:5)
The problem with statistically possible events is that they do occur, and in unpredictable ways, too. The 1908 impact happened in the most emote and sparsely-populated region on the planet. As we probably won't be so lucky next time (whether it is in 1 or 10,000 years time) it is fortunate that some people [nearearthobjects.co.uk] recognize the problem.
- Derwen
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:2)
If I remember my high-school physics correctly, blowing something up (i.e. only internal forces) causes the center of mass to continue in the same direction. Which means the average of all the pieces of the asteroid will still "hit" the Earth, even though each individual piece winds up going around.
Also, since you're in space, you've got the whole inertia thing working in your favor. As long as you impart some seperating force to the asteroid, each piece should continue drifting away from the central mass, as long as your asteroid isn't big enough to have its own gravitational force. And the further from Earth that you denote the asteroid, the more time you've got for the pieces to drift apart.
However, IANAAstroPhysicist and ICBW.
Re:Oh well. (Score:2)
You can explain nuclear physics in baby talk if you have the time spare.
Re:Telescope? (Score:1)
Network of LMTs (Score:3)
This should be done by international agreements, and the data should be put in public domain. It would not only be useful in looking for NEOs, but all kinds of monitoring projects, e.g. Gravitional Lens monitoring (which is my research area), Gamma Ray Burst follow-ups, the list is long. Of course, short exposure times is a problem with LMTs too (90 secs), but that can be fixed by combining nights.
There are substancial technical problems connected with a global network of LMTs, first, we don't know how the mercury will behave (turbulence in the atmosphere is a problem, now you might get turbulence in the mirror as well... :-) And, you won't see adaptive optics like you see on e.g. VLT on an LMT). Another problem is the huge amount of data produced, and how to treat it and give every potential user access to it. These are problems that must be overcome, but I believe that it should be possible to do, and definitively more worthwhile than building dedicated instruments for NEO search.
Just do it and get it over with!!! (Score:2)
How big is it? (Score:4)
How big an asteroid are you talking about? Yeah, if we discover an upcoming impact with a 10 km asteroid (or an Asteroid the Size of Texas, or God forbid a Comet the Size of a Hollywood Script Writer's Ignorance), then we're screwed. Fortunately, as the report says, those 10 km asteroids only come around every hundred million years or so. We can afford to gamble for a while.
The concern is that we'll be hit by something a couple hundred meters wide: big enough to craterize a city, small enough that we can't survey them with currently allocated resources, yet small enough that they could be pushed aside with an H-bomb if discovered early enough, or their target areas could be evacuated if they were discovered late.
Re:Alternate site (Score:1)
Mikael Jacobson
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:2)
Damnit, man, that's the only way to handle those space rocks ... didn't you ever play Asteroids as a kid?
Now, taking out those flying saucers that appear out of nowhere, well, that's another matter entirely!
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:1)
Scientists Propose Telescope in Southern Hemispher (Score:4)
Extintion (Score:1)
Near the very begining, when talking about asteroids, they discuss how asteroids have been hitting the earth since it was formed. Fine. Then they go on to say that an asteroid is responsible for the extintion of the dinosaurs.
Just curious, but when was that theory proven? Last I checked that was still a theory, in a mix with other theories about the dinosaurs. Yet here it is presented as a fact, with no room for discusstion.
I know the scientists want to keep their job, but this seems rather shoddy to me. Present the facts to the politicians, not your version of them. At least then we have a real reason for blaming them when they make another bone-headed decision.
Re:Yep, we need more funding to study this (Score:1)
what about... (Score:3)
airbags in case of collision?
The asteroid threat is real... (Score:4)
although probably not especially urgent.
For reference, I offer the book "Rain of Iron and Ice: The Very Real Threat of Comet and Asteroid Bombardment" by John S. Lewis, Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., January 1995. Lewis gives a very good historic and factual overview of meteor impacts on Earth and elsewhere, and presents some interesting speculation about the actual danger to Earth from falling asteroids and comets.
Fact: meteors do hit Earth. About 1/2 are of asteroidal origin. The remainder are cometary debris. MOST break up in the atmosphere. But those are the small ones. Anything larger than a certain size will reach the ground.
Fact: Based on SpaceWatch observations, there are probably about 2000 objects larger than 1 kilometer in diameter in Near Earth Orbits. These are the civilization killers. NEO bodies larger than 0.1 km in diameter probably number over half a million. These would cause widespread devistation. (Meteor Crater, AZ was formed by an asteroidal piece about 30 meters in diameter!)
The 0.1 Km strikes occure (on average) every 100,000 years. The larger asteroids strike Earth (on average) every 100,000,000 years (with the last one suspected as being 65 million years ago). No, they don't happen very often, but they do happen. We will soon be in a position to do something about it. I, for one, would like to be able to. The first step is knowing about potential threats.
25,000 years (Score:1)
A Steroid Armageddon Report (Score:1)
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Re:Rampant Paranoia (Score:2)
Yep, Clark R. Chapman [swri.edu] is pushing that. The reference is: C.R. Chapman & D. Morrison, 1994, Nature 367, 33-40. He has also testified that before congress.
He also lectured about that on a skeptics conference in Germany a few years ago. Our (Norwegian Skeptics Society) guy there (who is a historian of religion) wrote in his trip report that he had never felt so safe on the plane home before.... :-) Anyway, you should read it and make up your mind.
Re:Network of LMTs (Score:1)
The second biggest advantage is that even though you have 100 times more telescopes, you have 100 times more devices to monitor. Instead, build a single telescope that can watch 100 times more sky.
Steroids in the sky? What next? (Score:2)
I for one am astonished at the rampant use of steroids in the Olympic games. I mean, come on, can't anyone get by naturally. And now, we have to worry about steroids falling from the sky and hitting the Earth, taking out our entire civilization. This has gone far enough!
huh?
oh, Asteroids... nevermind.
It's more real than we think (Score:2)
Again, don't launch nukes or interceptors at Giant Asteroids - this only makes it worse as they fragment and still hit. Think of what happened to Jupiter when that comet fragmented into nine parts - it made it much worse. You're better off pushing it aside with an ion drive - you only have to nudge it a bit at a time so it misses earth.
Ever think what would happen if we pushed a big one so it missed the earth, but hit the moon, causing that to destabilize and impact (return to) earth? If that ever happens, you can forget about civilization
Re:Jane, you ignorant slut... (Score:2)
Jupiter ignored the threat (Score:2)
Re:On asteroids (Score:1)
Given all the money we blow on missile defense systems that don't work (And by the time they do, we could have just applied all of that money/effort to world peace/unilateral nuclear disarmament.), and the extremely low chance of ever needing them, you are quite correct. If nothing else, asteroids would be far easier to blast out of space than missiles, given that most of the ones we really need to worry about are pretty damned big (Relatively, anyway.).
Destablize the moon? (Score:2)
That would have to be one big asteroid! Say... about the size of the moon.
Re:Network of LMTs (Score:2)
Mind you, at a couple of Km, you'd be able to monitor the asteroid threat for every solar system in a 100 light-year radius.
(Alerting them might be a bit of a problem, though... :)
Another advantage of being space-borne is that although you couldn't "track", you could at least steer, by stopping, moving and restarting.
Re:Extintion (Score:1)
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:1)
The solution isn't to try to blow it up, because those pieces are all still moving in the same direction
The moon is being hit by asteroids quite a lot, hence the craters. There aren't many big craters on the earth. But there aren't. This is because the earth has an atmosphere, and friction with the atmosphere burns up smaller rocks.
If I had to come up with a plan to save the world, it would work in several main stages. First, I'd launch one third of all availiable tactical nuclear missiles, aiming them anywhere on the asteroid. I would set them to detonate at a on impact, target time 0200 hours. Shortly after detonation, I would launch all remaining tactical nuclear missiles into any chasms/craters/gulleys both preexisting and newly created on the asteroid, set to simeltaniously detonate at a certain time, let's say 0500 hours. Once they had all landed, I would fire our entire arsnel of Strategic nuclear missiles on a C-shaped trajectory, so they all strike one side of the asteroid. I would aim for half of the missiles to land on the asteroid before detonation and half to detonate in mid-air. Anyway, the strategic nuclear missiles all hit one side of the asteroid and all detonate at 0500 hours, at the same time as the embedded tactical nuclear missiles already scattered liberally over the asteroid. Hopefully, the massive explosion of all the strategic nuclear missiles would alter the course enough for it to bypass earth, and if not the tactical nuclear missiles would reduce it to many smaller objects which would have a much larger surface area to mass ratio, so any that come towards the earth would be burned up by the earth's atmospere.
AYMBATGIANAGABISAFMIGABAPAIRABOAO (As you may be able to guess, I am not a government advisor, but I've seen a few movies, I know bit about physics and I read a book on asteroids once).
Michael Tandy
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
Alerting them would be out of the question... (Score:1)
Re:You mean 90 years... (Score:1)
It was a stone meteorite, a conclusion reached in 1993 by three well-respected researchers and consistantly reaffirmed [nasa.gov]. OK?
Re:Rampant Paranoia (Score:2)
Expectedly, nothing came out that.
Made for politicians (Score:1)
Some Extra Info + Links (Score:5)
My Map of all NEOs [arm.ac.uk]
BBC coverage of these events [bbc.co.uk]
My 'Musical Interpretation' [myplay.com] of the report ;-)
The Problem with LMTs? (Score:3)
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:1)
Why, does it depend on the asteroid's 'sign'?
Re:Network of LMTs (Score:1)
Btw, LMTs (on Earth) (*can*) track objects by means of a movable mirror.
Re:Destablize the moon? (Score:2)
Or one that's moving really fast. Then again, all you need to do is to place the sucker into a decaying elliptical orbit....
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Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:2)
I'm scared I could be killed by an asteroid right now, apperently it's 640 times more likely than winning the (UK) lottery.
WTF is Bruce up to?
Arghh a bus!!!
[Signal 11 reset by peer]
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:2)
Re:On asteroids (Score:2)
Pay up.
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Re:Confidence Builder (Score:2)
> if I was born a Cancer when the moon and Saturn were aligned in metaconjunction
> (or whatever), will I get hit by an asteroid?
That's Sainsbury's point - that there are more people interested (and voting with their dollars) for astrology over astronomy - and that this fact does not speak well to our sense of priorities as a species, nor does it bode well for our long-term survival prospects.
Frankly, if humanity gets wiped out by an errant rock because its citizens are more interested in "looking for signs in the stars" than actually looking at the stars, then it probably deserves to be wiped out.
(It's a sad commentary on society how pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo beats real science in the world of the mundanes. Fer chrissakes, the real universe is goddamn fascinating. Stars made of diamond. Atomic nuclei the size of cities and the mass of suns, rotating hundreds of times per second. Just for starters. The gods of the astrologers are weaklings, limited by mundane imaginations. But astronomy has opened my mind up to things I could never have imagined.)
On the appeal of science vs. mysticism: "Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder", an essay by Richard Dawkins [edge.org].
The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program. Must we follow in their footsteps?
Re:25,000 years (Score:2)
Re:25,000 years (Score:2)
Look, even if the time expectancy for all of mankind being destroyed by an asteroid is even as low as 4000 years (and expect it to be pretty much higher than that), it only reduces your life expectancy by about one year. Not negligible, but not terribly high either.
Re:Misinterpreting the title (Score:2)
Re:On asteroids (Score:2)
We're lucky then - only one of them can read the panel attached to the side of the nuke that says "This Side Up".
...only an idiot would deal with them without some way of escalating if they escalate.
Right now nobody's escalating anything. All that money is going to waste - we could be building out our infrastructure and securing our place in the global economy - enriching the lives of the citizens this government is dedicated to. But what are we doing? Building bombs! We need books not bombs! As demonstrated in WWII, we have ample industrial infrastructure to match and counter any buildup of any enemy globally. We don't need those troops standing by right now. Train them, send them to college, and then keep them on file incase some 3rd world country does something stupid and we need them.. but for god's sake, don't pay billions for maintaining alot more force than we need.
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Re:Confidence Builder (Score:2)
but only after you meet a tall dark stranger who knows all the CL options to ls.
On a wednesday.
And your sex life is going to improve, other people are going to be involved!!!
Anyway shouldn't trust a Sainsbury, the food is nice, as is the packaging, but damn who can afford it? (UK only?)
Re:Telescope? (Score:2)
Global Impact Calculator (Score:4)
Especially useful and entertaining is this Solar System Impact Calculator [umd.edu], where you if you are lucky, you can help Marvin the Martian [umd.edu] get rid of the pesky planet blocking his view of Venus. :) You can check out effects of impacts on other planets as well. Just don't make Marvin mad [umd.edu] ...
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
Re:On asteroids (Score:2)
How about exploding US embassies in foreign countries.
As demonstrated in WWII, we have ample industrial infrastructure to match and counter any buildup of any enemy globally.
This is not 1940 - this 2000. Warfare has changed.
Train them, send them to college, and then keep them on file incase some 3rd world country does something stupid and we need them.
One must train for combat situations constantly, not occasionally, if you want to reduce the number of our casualties. And besides, if you had a 4 or 5 year degree with a job bringing in $80k or more would you want to run off to some third world shithole and fight for $24k a year? I didn't think so.
Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:2)
In order to be burned up in the atmosphere you have to reduce it to pieces smaller than an automobile, preferably smaller than a dictionary.
Re:Two big problems (Score:2)
You'd get blobs in an environment without gravity OR inertia, that is correct. By spinning, you are creating an "artificial gravity", which holds the mercury in place.
As for the second point, yes, I agree entirely. The catch is that aluminium (UK spelling alert!) foil only comes in those narrow sheets from the supermarket.
Re:On asteroids (Score:2)
I welcome that move. I can't wait until our economy is laid to waste by high oil prices. It would serve the fat pigs in this country well to finally shuffle off a 150 year old technology and modernize. Yeah, so it'd be painful, yeah, it'd trigger a massive global depression, but hey.. that's the price you pay, literally, eh?
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Re:Network of LMTs (Score:2)
(It's also referred to as "centripedal" or "centrifugal" force, and is what gives rise to the corriolis effect, which is what you're trying to do with the liquid mercury, when spinning it.)
Basically, F=ma (Newton I). Without a force, there is no acceleration. Therefore, the mercury won't move except in a straight line, caused by the container it's in rotating, bent round into a circular path. That forced bent path is what gives rise to the parabolic shape.
So long as the mercury has NO straight-line path, along the direction it's being accelerated, that leads into open space, it'll remain "glued" to the container by the spin.
(That isn't as easy as it sounds. You can't just use a large saucer and hope. You'd need to have a rim that would trap the mercury inside.
Re:Network of LMTs (Score:2)
The low pressure of space will practically guarantee that liquids remain liquid. In fact, the biggest problem would be to prevent the mercury evaporating. Molecules move at various velocities, following a Gaussian distribution. In plain english, that means that in any liquid, there are a non-zero number of molecules moving straight up faster than needed to escape the liquid.
But because space is, well, open, none of those molecules are likely to ever come back. So, you'd actually get a net loss, unless you had the mercury in a closed container. Which would then cause a problem, because you could build up sufficient pressure for the mercury to freeze.
What you'd probably end up with is something that looked like a cross between a centrifuge and a pressure cooker.
Worst case scenario- (Score:4)
You might only get a few months warning on those at best (they mostly shine within the orbit of mars), and at worst, they come at you from the sunward direction where our telescopes can't see them. You wake up one day wondering what that wall of fire is. Or maybe we don't wake up [comarecovery.org] at all.
There probably is no reasonable defense against such asteroids. Moving them- there probably is no way that can be done in that short time scale.
Think about it. This is a planet busting disaster [h4h.com] and there is no way to save the earth.
Its not particularly likely to happen soon, but it will happen eventually. Even long period comets that come round once a millenia or so. So this time they line with the earth for the first time and...
There is one way for humans to survive however. We need to build space habitats as soon as we possibly can.
Check out:
Artemis [artemis.com]
Neofuels [neofuels.com]
Permanent [permanent.com]
Sleep well, don't have nightmares! [rcpsych.ac.uk]
No, no, no! After dealing with the asteroids... (Score:2)
Protection from asteroids is a crucial first step in all of this. If we don't do that, we're toast, it's just a question of when the toaster's going to pop.
Sheesh, doesn't anyone around here read Greg Bear?
Nuclear weapons can't be used to stop asteroids (Score:2)
You are right, but for the wrong reasons. People assume that because we have nuclear weapons on ICBMs that we can automatically launch them into space. This isn't the case. In fact, IIRC (I'm in no way an expert, as I'm a citizen of a country with absoulutely no nukes, Canada :), there isn't even a launch vehicle that could even be made READY to launch at an asteroid to make a pathetic attempt at destroying one in time. I believe during the US senate's inquiry into the feasibility of this, a senator thought they could just fire a nuke - and he was told he was flat out wrong.
See, all that ballistic missile technology didn't go into space - that was banned by treaty - it went into missiles that just skim out of the atmosphere. Concidering the difficulty that we have in hitting missiles on earth, under controlled conditions, I can't see how it would be possible to use a jerry-rigged missile launcher to do so at any point in the near future. Americans, don't kid yourselves - you haven't launched anything of any size to beyond geostationary orbit since the 60's, and the scientists on those projects had great difficulty in making it work.
My own take on this is just to hope that (when) we get hit, it's something that causes massive destruction - takes out a country, for example - and wakes people the hell up, if we don't of course think it was "punishment" from "insert-pissed-off-diety here". Then we could work together to use nuclear technology to defend our earth, and/or consider another self-sustaining presence somewhere.
This is, of course, also assuming that nuclear weapons will even _work_ in space. I don't think there has been a successful test, and nobody knows for sure the technolgies that are involved in making one go boom. (Except, of course, the nuclear powers of the world) You don't really think all those computers the US Department of Energy buys - HUGE computers - to model the physics of nuclear exploisions - would be neccessary if it was as simple as everyone seems to think in the general populace.
Whitey's on the moon (Score:2)
by Gil Scott-Heron
A rat done bit my sister Nell
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
Cost effective solutions instead of panic (Score:2)
It's like planning shopping malls and drive-in movies when all you have is steam engines and the immediate goal is getting a transcontinental railroad line. Not only are the malls and movies too far down the line, steam trains can't use them. It's the wrong technology, and no one could imagine the right technology.
On the scale of asteriods striking the earth, fifty or a hundred years is insignificant. Much better to get the launch cost low and the self sustaining technologies going in an intelligent manner rather than rushing forward. Anything rushed now will be obsolete when everything comes together, and it will have been bought at enormous cost better spent elsewhere.
Artemis dreams of going back to the moon permanently, there are manned Mars mission everywhere, and none of them will result in a sustainable self-sufficient colony, and are so primitive that any R&D coming out of them will be obsolete in a few years. It is simply not possible to imagine what tech will be available in fifty or a hundred years. Any planning now will be irrelevant when needed.
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Re:Rampant Paranoia (Score:2)
Agreed. The movies are the result, not the cause.
> However, the articles were never in the popular press. They were always in the specialist press.
I think they trickled all the way down to Scientific American, which IMO hovers just above the popular press.
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Asteroid/meteor composition (Score:2)
Re:Konqueror takes Web browses to new level ( OT ? (Score:2)
Re:Network of LMTs (Score:2)
b) What keeps it from flying out the *top* of the mirror? On Earth, gravity holds it down, what holds it 'down' in space? (Hint: there is no gravity)
Now the idea of putting some on the moon has merit. Less gravity = slower spin = less vibration = better images.
However, the best solution, I think is lots and lots of smaller (ie, amateur) telescopes constantly scanning under remote control when not being used for other observations. Sorta like Seti@Home with telescopes instead of computers.
Unnecessary Asteroid Hysteria (Score:2)
Automated telescopes (Score:2)
We have a skywatch, operated by the USAF's 21st Space Wing, called GEODSS [af.mil]. GEODSS constantly scans the sky with fully-automated 1-meter computer-controlled telescopes at multiple sites around the world. This system finds satellites, space junk, and anything else that isn't in the catalog of known objects. It's tied to NORAD, in case it detects an ICBM. This system has been operational since the 1980s. With the end of the Cold War, there are fewer hostile satellites to find, so some of the GEODSS sites have been turned over to civilian control and are now working on asteroid detection.
GEODSS is an impressive system. Among other things, it can detect dark objects when they obscure a star. It's even possible to use one of the telescopes with a laser to illuminate a low-orbit satellite so it can be photographed with a second telescope. Anything bigger than a basketball that hangs around Earth orbit for long will be picked up.
The Hawaii GEODSS site is now used for asteroid detection, as the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program. [nasa.gov] Visit their site to see what they're picking up.
Re:Point taken. (Score:2)
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Re:There is a much cheaper solution (Score:2)
Same to you.
>well, it just happens my spellchecker corrected that particular word.
uh, yeah, right
>Nothing to see here, move along people...
pretty much true of anything you post, ain't it?