British Company Takes Lead To Stop Asteroids 198
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that following the news of NASA's budget cuts impacting their ability to do things like watch the sky for asteroids, a British company has decided to create a "gravity tractor" ship that could divert asteroids away from Earth if the need should arise. Of course, a gravity tractor certainly isn't a new idea. "Dr. Cordey said the company had worked with a number of space authorities on other methods of protecting the Earth from asteroids, but this one would be able to target a wider range. He said: 'We have done quite a lot of design work on this with the European Space Agency and we believe this would work just as well on a big solid iron asteroid as well as other types.' But the high cost implications mean that before the device could be made, it would have to be commissioned by a government or a group of governments working together."
The Free Market fixes another intractable problem! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, never mind then.
What about their business plan? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What about their business plan? (Score:5, Funny)
Be a shame if something happened to it.
Re:What about their business plan? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm very curious to learn which is their business plan. Could it be "pay us a gazillion dollars or we won't use our technology against the asteroid"?
Any technology that can be used to divert an asteroid away from the Earth can also be used to direct one toward the Earth. I would guess they could get venture capital for a business plan like "pay us a gazillion dollars or we will use our technology to alter the course of this asteroid."
Lots of other businesses have "destroy the Earth" in their business plan. Why should commercial space ventures be any different?
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Perhaps it could also be used for catching asteroids and parking them in orbit for automated mining.
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It would be way too expensive to force an asteroid that's hurtling towards the earth to slow down and go into orbit instead of whizzing past.
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Throw killer robots into the mix and you've got a plan...
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Given that Earth is teeny weeny and space is like totally big, it would seem it requires better (by several orders of magnitude) targeting to hit Earth than to hit not-Earth.
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I would call their bluff.
If they don't use it, they won't be around either after the asteroid hits.
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maybe its "This asteroid that wont destroy the earth but will destroy a sizable chunk of land is headed for earth. Whatever country that pays us the least amount of money (in %age of GDP) is going to get it. this will be a blind auction, cash only, upfront. (if multiple countries bit the same amount we will redirect more asteroids) Muhahahahahaha!
Economics for Evil Geniuses... (Score:2)
maybe its "This asteroid that wont destroy the earth but will destroy a sizable chunk of land is headed for earth. Whatever country that pays us the least amount of money (in %age of GDP) is going to get it. this will be a blind auction, cash only, upfront. (if multiple countries bit the same amount we will redirect more asteroids) Muhahahahahaha!
Cash, huh?
Isn't that sort of a problem? I mean, the government which gives you that cash is also the government whose existence gives that cash value. After you've taken payment, they could go into inflation overdrive, severely devaluing the currency they've given you (with hefty tax cuts and spending programs for their own population to ease the blow)...
It seems to me that if you're extorting money from major governments, you've got to take payment in forms that have more inherent value. Gold could be a
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I think it's more like "give us millions of pounds to develop this thing we came up with on the back of a napkin kthxbai".
They don't have a prototype. No proven or even experimentally tested hardware. They just have a vague idea and a press release.
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(like killing Arabs).
Wait...what?
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I've wondered about this kind of an issue, it seems to be some kind of dilemma because the people funding it to save the earth would even helping those that aren't willing to help pay for it because those people assume that someone else will pay for it. If everyone assumes someone else will pay for it and as such, don't bother to pitch in, will the problem actually be solved? Assuming this is a problem that human civilization has to solve, this could be one of the biggest, most convoluted games of chicken
Re:The Free Market fixes another intractable probl (Score:4, Interesting)
That sound you hear is people laughing at you, not with you.
Except that when the "product" is the collective safety of the entire earth and there is no opportunity for profit, then the free market will let it slide, waiting for "big bad government" to fill in the gaps, as it always does, no thanks to the randites.
And if there is something headed our way that will literally destroy the entire world, "free market" and all, then so be it, huh?
FTFY
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The problem with that theory is time. Free markets are highly reactive, not proactive. It takes a long time for a gravity tractor to significantly affect an asteroid. By the time the free market realizes that a gravity tractor is of value, it may be too late for it to be effective.
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I thought the free market was being run by a secret oligarghy of bankers and gyro meat vendors?
The only question is.... (Score:2)
Smart Bomb or Hyperspace?
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Those technologies don't even exist.
We should get some psychics and move it by telekinesis, duh.
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Don't worry, the time travelers will give us the technology JUST IN TIME.
First things first. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily (Score:5, Informative)
99942 Apophis will make a near pass to Earth in 2029. However, if it passes within a narrow window, called the keyhole, the Earth's (and Moon's) gravity will deflect it such as to place it on a direct Earth impact in 2036. Now this isn't all that likely to happen, but it is possible. Worth having some contingency plans for at least.
Re:Not necessarily (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not necessarily (Score:4, Funny)
Sometimes, you need to create a problem to solve another.
Warm regards,
Yahweh
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This should scare some people.
I actually don't recommend reading this if you obsess about things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_to_civilization,_humans_and_planet_Earth [wikipedia.org]
For the rest - have fun and sweet dreams.
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Screw the asteroids! Just give me a fricking red button.
- Dr. Evil
Re:Not necessarily (Score:5, Funny)
Apophis will make a near pass to Earth in 2029.
Must be a mistake. The Goa'uld already tried that back in 2002 ... we used a hyperspace generator to jump the rock around Earth. Worked like a charm too, although it was a bit touch-and-go there for a bit. In any event, Apophis is only a false god. A dead false god.
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Correction: through, not around.
I don't think you can successfully pick that nit, given that the rock was transferred via hyperspace. Besides, had it gone through the Earth, there'd have been one goddamn big hole in our home planet.
Re:First things first. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Can't we do both at once?
My backgrounds in space mission design, not geology.. pretty sure the cost to benefit ratio is going to show I'm better off working on asteroid deflection while the geologist down the street gets to work looking at mitigating supervolcanoes. And of course the automotive engineers over there on the other side of town are probably best off developing newer, more efficient cars, and my friends in aerodynamics should working on more efficient aircraft and better wind turbines.
Lots of p
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Hmmm... I'm good at looking at porn, wasting time on slashdot and clicking pretty icons on my Mac. I wonder what problem I can solve to make the world a better place?
And if it involves beer, brats and Dr. Who marathons, even better!
World, I'm ready to save ya!
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Can't everyone just, like, move away from that place?
I don't know if I'm reading wiki wrong but that doesn't look like an end-of-all-life-on-earth sort of event, like an asteroid slamming into it would be :)
(Disclaimer: I just finished re-reading Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle. Well worth a read!!)
What could go wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
Meanwhile, in an East Texas courtroom...
Dr. Cordey: Your honor, I'd like to file an injunction to prevent NASA from using their gravity tractor to stop the asteroid that will impact Earth next week.
NASA: This patent is ridiculous. They don't have their own working gravity tractor. They aren't even trying to build one. All of their ideas in their patent come from working with NASA and the ESA.
Dr. Cordey: We don't have our own gravity tractor, but we are working with the ESA to build one. It should be done in a year or two.
NASA: Everyone on the planet will be killed next week. We have to be permitted to stop the asteroid.
Judge: I'm going to allow the injunction. You can appeal it within 60 days if you like. Without patents protection, all we have is chaos. We can't make an exception here just because it suits us.
1 week later: BOOOOOOOOM.
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Under those sorts of conditions, I'm fairly certain NASA could (with the support of the president) say "The judge has made its decision, now let them enforce it!" and used the gravity tractor anyways.
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Could throwing a court house at an asteroid help?
15 years to prepare? (Score:2)
I've always thought it would be best to use some kind of propulsion system to help move the asteroid in it's same direction causing it to overshoot us. Trying to change it's current vector or trajectory seems like it would be wasting energy.
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For many impactors up to about the size of The Foot it is enough to know exactly where and when they will impact. For objects bigger than that (Lucifers Hammer) is may be easier to move people off the planet than changing the trajectory of the impactor.
Missile Command? (Score:2)
Seems like they could make some kind of game, and have people play that game to control the missiles that shoot down asteroids threatening cities.
(Ok, so that is a combination of Ender's Game and Missile Command)
Asteroids? (Score:2)
Seems like they could make some kind of game, and have people play that game to control the space-ship that shoots asteroids.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_(video_game) [wikipedia.org]
Red lighted (Score:2)
British Company Takes Lead To Stop Asteroids
Thank God! That was such a stupid idea to base a movie on that game [slashdot.org].
Gotta find them first (Score:4, Insightful)
All this relies on finding said asteroid years if not decades out.
I can't confirm, but I remember hearing that between NASA and all the other space agencies we track less than 20% of space inside of Jupiter's orbit. A large dark asteroid out of the Kuiper Belt could be closing on us right now and we wouldn't see it until months before impact, too late to do anything about it.
IMHO, lets work on finding and tracking large asteroids first.
Re:Gotta find them first (Score:5, Informative)
Already on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAN-STARRS [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Synoptic_Survey_Telescope [wikipedia.org]
CCTV (Score:5, Funny)
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Does this plan involve taking all of Britain's CCTV cameras and pointing them towards the sky?
Yes indeed it does, thereby making one giant CCD imager.
Re:CCTV (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't you realise that just pushes the asteroid problem along to the next planet?
Nah, asteroids impacts are crimes of passion.
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Yes. That way, if an asteroid destroys civilization, they have a 0.1% chance of catching it in the act.
I have a few questions... (Score:2)
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And are they going to hire Bruce Willis to drive it?
No, Robert Duvall [wikipedia.org].
One stone, two birds... (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's an idea...
How many tons of launch debris do we dodge daily in orbit?
Why not collect it, and use its condensed and combined mass for such a "gravity tractor?"
Just asking...
Re:One stone, two birds... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fuel. The debris occupies a huge volume, and to collect each piece, you have to spend enough time in an intersecting orbit for the piece to come to you.
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It is dispersed throughout a large volume, certainly. But with an automated craft, provided with ion engines and enough time, it seems you one be able to achieve a considerable collection of debris.
Brits. Thank you. (Score:2)
I'm glad to see that someone is taking real threats and problems for *all of us* more seriously than petty disagreements about improvable beings/entities and hoarding shit daily.
Thanks for being the first to be serious about it.
Rosoideae Rosa By Alternative Nomenclature (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary seems to imply a "British Company To Pick Up NASA's Dropped Asteroid Ball" slant. "Seems" is used here because rhetorical device is relied on because the facts themselves don't do the job.
One failure is the false dichotomy created by positioning the Near Earth Object program(s -- there's seven http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/programs/ [nasa.gov] ) for detecting and tracking thousands of rocks against a vehicle intended to take one such rock and push it around. A tactic like this is common when the writer has little faith in the intended focus of the piece to carry the story alone, and they present a badly constructed straw man in contrast.
The second problem is in presenting NASA's possible future NEO (a currently operating and planned continued project, mind you) budget crunch as problematic, whereas this British company's announcement of what amounts to grand plans on paper that would admittedly require huge national or international funding to even begin is held up as "taking the lead".
If announcing one has plans that one considers viable is "taking the lead", the team in TFA is taking the lead behind dozens of other "programs" in equal or farther planning stages, some described in a recent Discovery/Science Channel program, many written up in popular media over the years and available to the search engine of your choice, with the Top Ten Ways listed at http://dsc.discovery.com/space/top-10/asteroid-stopping-technology/index-03.html [discovery.com] . Harry Stamper's roughnecks and Spurgeon Tanner's shuttle crew are not among them, which didn't stop me from using them in the obligatory /. inclusion of SF references.
Where are they taking it from? (Score:2)
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Ah yes. As always, the random Slashdot poster is smarter and knows better than whole legions of physicists and engineers.
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Ah yes. As always, the random Slashdot poster is smarter and knows better than whole legions of physicists and engineers.
Actually, he doesn't have to be smarter than legions of physicists and engineers. So far, this is in a very early planning stage. Therefore, changes are he only has to beat a board of executives who knows nothing about physics or science (on average) who have been given a high level executive summary of this great idea that they should invest in and how it can both lead to a better world (not being smashed up by said cosmic nasty) and possibly making a good deal of money based on their investment (after all
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Actually, yes he does - because this gravity tractor has been intensely studied for some time. As indicated by this link [slashdot.org] prominently provided right in the article, had you bothered to read it.
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Your opinion are irrelevant, uninformed, and meaningless.
Yeah? Well, you have bad grammar or failed to hit a keystroke, so there!
Meanwhile, back in the land of the actual point here rather than being picky and pedantic - the guy promoting it does in fact work there. That doesn't mean he isn't making a huge sales pitch for a government sized order. A salesman for your local telco doesn't have to know the inside out of how the entire communications system operates.
I ain't saying that this isn't feasible, but you certainly seem to be shutting out what would ap
Re:Bad science (Score:5, Informative)
I'm curious what it being weaker than the weak and strong nuclear forces and the electromagnetic forces has to do with it. If the design works, it works. I'm curious to see your equations if you think it won't work. Also gravity is the only purely attractive force, and the one thats hardest to explain, which is why we really pay attention to it.
The advantage of a gravity tractor is that you don't have to land, because landing is a *VERY* hard problem on an asteroid. The biggest problem is that its very difficult to latch on, since you can't rely on gravity to hold you in place. Since you don't hae a good idea of the surface before you arrive, its rather difficult to design a solution thats going to work for all the different possibilities.
This leads one to consider how can you manage to deflect an asteroid without landing, and a gravity tractor is an obvious elegant solution. Note also that in this case you're still using the vaunted ion thrusters to impart the force on the asteroid. Considering the spacecraft and asteroid as two separate systems you have to use the thrust to maintain your standoff distance; considering them as one system (my preferred analysis), you have the thrusters moving the whole system, with internal gravity keeping the whole thing together. The only difference between it and landing, as far as thrust is concerned, is that you are limited to a maximum thrust by the gravity bond: the same sized ion thruster on a landed spacecraft and on a gravity tractor will have exactly the same effect.
The only time it would make sense to land is if you wanted to do a very high-thrust chemical burn (or maybe something like VASMIR, which would only be in the emergency case. Of course, in that case, the costs become irrelevant ($50B for a mission or wiping out Europe isn't a hard decision to make) and you're more likely to seek to impart a maximum impulse by doing a high-risk/high-reward method such as a kinetic impactor or nuke (and multiples as backup).
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A 500 kg spacecraft hovering at around ~300 meters from the CM of the asteroid is sufficient to alter the trajectory if 99942 Apophis by ~50 Earth radii by 2036, if applied in the early 2020s for a period of a year. Note that Apophis is 2e10 kg, so a 1 ton asteroid would be incredibly easy to move. The force imparted is around 1/100 of a Newton. The key for getting the most out of such small forces is to use them early and use the orbital tendencies of the asteroid to magnify your result. The close flyby
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True, if you only have the two bodies interacting with each other. However, in this case, the asteroid is in a heliocentric orbit, and also has a very close flyby of the Earth in 2029, which makes the picture very different.
Whenever you propagate the equations of motion forward over multiple orbits, very small errors at the present time grow much larger errors in the future. This is what makes it so hard to know where these small object are going to be: an estimate of the current state thats accurate to w
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Fair enough. In my view \vec{f}=-(GMm)/r^3 \vec{r}... none of your fancy physics for me.
Re:Bad science (Score:4, Informative)
Sure you could solve each of these problems individually, but a gravity tug bypasses them all at once, at the expense of needing either
Probably the cheapest solution would be to refine a good sized nickel-iron asteroid into a compact solid metal mass and then attach a solar sail for thrust. Bonus points for compressing the metal mass into neutronium compressed by a diamond shell.
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OK smarty pants, what about rotation? (Score:2)
How are you going to deal with rotation? You have exactly two places on the rock where the thrust may be applied in one direction. Those may not be the optimal places to apply thrust, or the easiest places to obtain solar power. If it rotates like a planet, the stable spot would be like our poles and would experience long periods of darkness, so solar power is out. If the probe is not on a pole, then you have to vector thrust which is complicated on a spinning rock, and you can only thrust when it's possib
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Works perfectly fine if you have enough lead time
We should be happy enough when we see it coming at all.. How much "lead time" do you expect to have?
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Erm, actually, for an asteroid big enough to knock out a city, we'd probably have ten years or so notice.
Too bad this spaceship would require a launch 15 years in advance. Don't forget production time if we haven't built one yet!
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Nuclear weapons would be far more entertaining; kind of a near-Earth fireworks display ("ooooh, aahhhh"). Besides, one more used up there is one less that may be used down here.
Re:Bad science (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bad science (Score:4, Insightful)
Holy crap, decimate used with the original definition.
OK, now I've seen everything.
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What, no X-Ray laser pulse ships?
Am seriously jonesing to see Footfall's space battle made in to a movie.
Nukes in Space (Score:2)
Nuclear weapons would be far more entertaining; kind of a near-Earth fireworks display ("ooooh, aahhhh"). Besides, one more used up there is one less that may be used down here.
It wouldn't be much of a fireworks display: without an atmosphere to carry a shockwave or absorb radiation to produce light and heat, a nuclear weapon detonated in open space would just be a release of radiation, invisible to the eye. Detonated on, or within an asteroid, the blast would have some material to work with, but the blast (as well as the surviving chunks of asteroid) would dissipate quickly...
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Except for, you know, the fallout from the blast.
Except for, you know, we've already performed a couple or so [wikipedia.org] nuclear tests before...
Reminds me of an old friend who one day told me he thought the US had a few dozen nuclear weapons in their arsenal...
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I'm not worried about radiation exposure from this sample. The odds of one of those atoms decaying is infinitesimal!
Re:Bad science (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the whole "search for killer asteroids" is fatally flawed. Let's see... the last one hit 200,000,000 years ago. The last time someone won my State lottery was just last week, and typically they hand-out ten of these multi-million dollars prizes a year, so 10 out of 4 million tickets sold.
I have about 500 times better odds of winning my State lottery, than getting killed by an asteroid.
You have a problem with your math and your numbers. Big asteroids hit about every 68 million years. If one hit tomorrow it would kill 6.8 billion people. So on average, we can expect asteroids to kill about 100 people per year. That means you are about 10 times more likely to be killed in an asteroid impact than to win the state lottery.
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"Big asteroids hit about every 68 million years"
And the last one was 65 million years ago, so we have another 3 million years to go. If we haven't got starships by then theres something wrong.
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>>>Big asteroids hit about every 68 million years. If one hit tomorrow it would kill 6.8 billion people.
So in the entire existence of not just homo sapiens, but the whole mammal kingdom, not one asteroid has ever hit. I go back to my original point- We're more likely to die of suicide than a giant rock. In fact, we'll probably evolve into creatures like Q or the Ancients* before the next big rock hits.
*
* Star Trek/Stargate reference
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You're not supposed to inject reality into the "omg killer asteroids are coming" discussion.
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...If humans do go extinct,...
I don't think that humans will go extinct, at least not before the second coming of Jesus Christ to this earth and then not either. We humans of modern times have come to think that we are in charge of this world even though we did not make it. This world will be destroyed by fire some day, but not until God personally does so. (2Peter 3:7) Contrary to what most people think this day and age, we are not the bosses of this world because this is not our world.
We're discussing science in this thread, not mythology.
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One of the biggest and most improbable is the existence of Israel against all odds, exactly as it has been foretold thousands of years ago will happen.
Firstly, it is very possible that the people who instated Israel as a state were influenced by the prophesy of it's existence.
Secondly, Asteroids have hit before and will hit again, it is only the size of the asteroid and time from now until the hit that are variable.
Third, The bible is anecdote and not a good historical record. Therefore any "prophesies" within cannot be independantly verified and "The bible is right because it says so in the bible" is very flawed logic.
Finally, the reason that Jerusale
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>>>possible that the people who instated Israel as a state were influenced by the prophesy of it's existence.
There's not even that prophecy in the bible. They are making-up stuff. Furthermore the Bible claims the sun stopped moving through the sky for 3 whole days. The only way to make that happen is to make the earth stop spinning, and leave the opposite side of the world (California) in the dark. That seems extremely unlikely, which why during the Age of Reason (1600-1700s) it was concluded t
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All of them? I don't recall seeing a seven headed dragon anywhere.
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Don't forget to divert the anti-matter particle beam and re-calibrate it to frapé.
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Amateur.
Everybody knows you've got to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.
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now how are we gonna get a gazillion tons of water all the way to the asteroid?
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Burning it with a solid state laser to cause out gassing would be simpler and lighter, plus it could also be used on smaller items like space junk.
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You'd need a lot of energy to get that water to a high velocity. Ejecting the water at high velocity would tend to push the "fire engine ship" in the opposite direction. Then you'd need even more energy to run some kind of thruster to resist that recoil.
I'm glad he donated the idea, that's about what it's worth.
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Won't matter much if we can divert an asteroid if budget cuts cost us the ability to see it coming.
Deep down, nobody really believes it will ever happen, especially Congress, which has no awareness of consequence anyway.
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Well, and if it does, they'll believe it's the Rapture.
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