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."
Southern guy with three names (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Dont Nuke 'em. Was Re:Southern guy with three name (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if your bomb is strong enough, you can blow it enough for the center of mass to become irrelevant, as all debris will fly away from it. If it isn't that strong, you can still ensure you blow it into small enough pieces that it's surface to mass ratio is big enough for them to not survive reentry.
But the best option is probably just to propel the thing, you are right.
Re: (Score:2)
When exactly (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:When exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
" He's really articulate and informed, but so are a lot of people."
Not scientists.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is articulate, charismatic, reasonably good looking, and interviews very well. He is relatable. Anyone who can talk about accurately talk about science and still seem relatable to the average person is perfect to interview.
For example: He was asked why he was able to get is point across so clearly on the colbart report. He said he timed the jokes from previous epsode and ew a bout how much time he had before the next joke. Then boiled his points down to fit into the times between the jokes.
Not a lot of people think about interviews that way, and certainly not scientists.
Now he has the rep to be the guy to go to, the media goes to him.
Re:When exactly (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Kudos to Cameron for that.
On the other hand, he left Jack in.
Re: (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: (Score:2)
Neil noticed early on that when he gave long winded answers to interview questions, it would be highly edited to fit whatever show it was for. So he started practicing giving short and succinct answers to specific topics. Once he started doing that, his complete answer would make it to the final product, with minimal editing needed.
Re: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
Maybe you should travel back in time to work as a Soviet scientist then.
Re: (Score:2)
What's wrong with being a "popularizer" of science? It's people like NDT who are able to make science appeal to the general public.
Unfortunately, Carl Sagan is now dead, Bill Nye hasn't really made the step from youth TV presenter to appealing to the general public, and Richard Dawkins has made "I'm an atheist," his selling point.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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, Funny)
"80% of life|success is showing up."
That's what the asteroid said.
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.
Re: (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: (Score:2)
What are you on about? Neil deGrasse Tyson has been in the public eye and a popular communicator of science long before "The Big Bang Theory" even existed. Wouldn't have been much of a cameo if no one knew who he was until that episode.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know what the obvious answer is. Really. Please tell me.
Let me guess... (Score:5, Funny)
Let me guess, he wants to reclassify Earth as a "Non-Asteroid-Attracting Planetoid" in the hopes of fooling the asteroids.
Re: (Score:2)
After reading Apophis' furious blog post over the demotion of Pluto, I think he's only made the problem worse!
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's also not really necessary. Unless we expected it to drastically change speeds, then it's good enough to know the previous orbit, predict the next orbit, and put it on a list of things to keep an eye on when their on their Earth approach again.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, the word should have been "beyond" or out and beyond.
Some objects appear to have periods of hundreds of years from what I remember reading.
That puts predictions on a whole new plane.
Why not monetize it? (Score:2, Interesting)
1 - catalogue all the asteroids likely to pass by earth
2 - analyse their composition
3 - determine which can have their orbit modified so as to be placed in orbit around earth for an energy effort low enough that one will come out ahead either using the asteroid for material in orbit (to construct space stations / satellites, the probe to explore the next asteroid &c.) or have ore valuable enough to be worth returning to earth
4 - profit!
Alternate scenario (Score:2)
3 - determine which can have their orbit modified so as to be placed in orbit around earth
4 - Oops!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There's a scene in the Mission Earth series (not Battlefield Earth) where the hero is trying to tug an ice asteroid into Earth orbit, gets disrupted by something, and derps it all over Russia.
Yeah, yeah, I know. L. Ron Hubbard, but I found the whole ten book series in hardback at a yard sale for $5. Actually starts out OK as space opera, goes seriously off the rails in the middle and, curiously, mostly gets back on the rails in the last book. I just liked the idea that Earth culture is so damned toxic that
Hundreds or thousands of orbits in the future ... (Score:2)
I propose.... (Score:5, Funny)
A triangular space ship with vector blasters!!! It worked in the 20th century and it should work in the 21st century!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Too little, too late, as usual.
Move us all (Score:4, Funny)
Couldn't Tyson just move all of us to his home planet prior to the asteroid hitting earth? Or is the environment of his home planet inhospitable to earthlings?
Wait a minute... (Score:2)
He does seem to be going on about this issue a bit lately.
What are you not telling us, Neil?
Know your enemy (Score:2)
Here's his plan... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No wonder... (Score:2)
No wonder they named a Jr High School after this guy.
what? (Score:2)
Iranian Nuclear Factory Bunker Busting Bomb (Score:2)
The USAF is looking around for a new bomb big enough to bust those wacky Iranian Nuclear Factory Bunkers. Maybe an Asteroid might be up to the job.
You would just need to catch it, and toss it in the right direction. This shouldn't be a problem for the current state of technology.
Probably.
Re: (Score:2)
That's irrelevant: the US already has bombs plenty big enough to bust those Iranian nuclear factory bunkers; the only problem is that they're nuclear themselves. What the USAF is looking for is a really big conventional bomb, because it's not politically feasible to start dropping megatons of hypocrisy on the Iranians.
With an asteroid, on the other hand, there's no problem using a nuke.
Is it very persuasive? (Score:2)
All this catalogueing (Score:2)
And the outcome will be? We will know the precise hour when we die.
How do we stop an asteroid anyway? I've heard proposals of nuking the asteroids, but I don't see how we will intercept an asteroid with enough nukes early enough to deflect the asteroid. I don't suppose a nuke would be much better than simply hitting the asteroid with a high momentum slug and hope to change the trajectory sufficiently. How will we accelerate such a slug and set it on an intercept course with the asteroid?
Re: (Score:3)
An asteroid impact is survivable on earth (Score:3)
Even though its good to plan for precuations and deflection efforts, the fact is, humans could survive a Chicxulub sized impact fairly easy, it is completely survivable here on earth. Unlike dinosaurs humans can store away enough food to get through a long period of time without sunlight, and store a seed bank supply containing huge stores of all seeds from food plants and livestock to repopulate and restore agriculture afterward, and libraries filled with the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Unless, we include the entire population of these efforts so the entire population stores away huge amounts of freeze dried and preserved food, the survival facility would have to be secret and heavily protected from the riots and chaos that would ensue in a asteroid winter. There would be many of these facilities located in top secret all over the planet so even if one was destroyed by the impact there would still be others. The people participating in them would have to live nearby and would have to go underground at a moments notice. Some of them would have to be located near fertile, farmable areas for recovery long after the strike. They would be far underground and bult to withstand wildfires, huge winds, earthquakes and all the other stuff that could happen. They would be protected from tsunami, located inland and so on and from any other conceivable disaster.
All of this could allow humanity to survive on earth even easier and with less trouble than on mars. It is actually easier to survive here on earth after an asteroid than it would be on mars.
Re:An asteroid impact is survivable on earth (Score:4, Informative)
I would add that what killed all the dinosaurs was not the asteroid impact itself, but the asteroid winter that caused a collapse of the food chain. The asteroid blast and fire ball and tsunami was localized, it killed dinosaurs locally but its not what killed them off globally, the blockage of the sun did. If enough food can be stored away to get through the winter and then seeds to immediately restart agriculture when things clear, humans can survive it.
Why the Pacific Ocean? (Score:2)
I think either he's been watching too many Hollywood films, or the reporter didn't correctly quote the statement.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
If it was possible for an asteroid impact to cause a mass extinction, wouldn't it have happened already?
Re: (Score:2)
Didn't it?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The dinosaurs say hello...
Oh wait, an asteroid impact caused their mass extinction.
Evidence Suggests... (Score:3, Funny)
T.Rex's last words were "What's that wooshing sound?"
Yes, it did, 12,900 years ago (Score:5, Informative)
Evidence for Younger Dryas impact: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/01/1110614109.abstract [pnas.org]
Note that the YD debris layer covers 10% of the Earth. It is hypothesized it was caused by a comet which broke up some time before hitting Earth, so created a large number of smaller craters rather than one big one.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
wake me up when they actually implement some of that socialism your referring to.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Future Tech won't handle it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I wonder what would happen if someone would start a Kickstarter project around this: "Save the Earth! Target funding: $1,000,000,000,000. The more you contribute, the greater the chance you will survive."
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I think it depends on which way the winds carry the ash. Seriously, Californians would be better off if they eliminated the power the east coasters have over them, and California (actually, the whole west coast) is where all of America's remaining technology is. Where do you think your smartphone, computer, etc. were all designed? Certainly not in Detroit, NYC, or DC. The east coast cities don't really produce anything of value, and in the case of NYC and DC, they do nothing but cause harm (from the ban
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with the Yellowstone supervolcano is that it probably won't wipe out California and the East coast
Don't worry, the flood of refugees will.
Re:Then a butterfly flaps its wings (Score:4, Insightful)
Approximations :-)
Hey, it worked for the Voyager probes.
Re:Then a butterfly flaps its wings (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
[1] Any mathematicians reading this are probably going to crucify me over my abuse of terminology there, sorry...
Re: (Score:2)
You can numerically integrate from initial estimates of known objects. Uncertainties get magnified when any two get close enough. Rotations come into play, mass can get redistributed. And of course a new object could always appear, don't forget the solar system shifts to entirely new space every 316 days.
Re:Then a butterfly flaps its wings (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Remember when the Republican party used to be sane? Today's Republicans are the gift that keeps on giving to the Onion writers.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
This is no joke.
Yes it is. Orbits, unlike the weather, are not chaotic. For those who don't know, chaotic means "sensitively dependent on initial conditions", which in practice means that the error in your output calculation is not proportional to the error in your measurement of the initial state. This is why accurate, non-probabilistic weather predictions will never be possible beyond the very short term.
Orbits are not chaotic. The error in the calculation of the orbit is proportional to the error in our current meas
Re:Then a butterfly flaps its wings (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it is. Orbits, unlike the weather, are not chaotic.
An orbit is not chaotic. Solving two orbits (three bodies) is the exact problem that lead to the development of chaos theory. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
We all have our brain farts. :D
Re:Then a butterfly flaps its wings (Score:4, Funny)
We can't even calculate all of the digits of pi! Whatever shall we do!
AHHHH!
Re: (Score:2)
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:Saving Earth is good... (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:2)
Thanks! And I do it without chemicals!
Re: (Score:3)
Well, you're a basket case if you think anything resembling the "species" will still be around in cosmic time scales. There were no humans around a million years ago, what makes you think there will in a million?
You're right. So instead, let us not talk just about preserving the human species, but whatever species our descendants will become.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you're a basket case if you think anything resembling the "species" will still be around in cosmic time scales. There were no humans around a million years ago, what makes you think there will in a million? And what makes you think we have the energy to sustain anything close to what we have enjoyed for the past 150 years ???? We'll all be right here, on this "basket". Idiot.
Well, there were our ancestors around a million years ago, stands to reason that our descendants will be around in another million years. Unless, of course, you're claiming we're only 6,000 years old and the apocalypse is coming.
There will still be a sun in another 150 years. There's plenty of energy coming from it to supply us with what we'd need for a decent life. It already supplies a large fraction of the earth's current energy budget through hydro (1/5 for the US). Then there's wind followed by other t
Re: (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
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: (Score:3)
the problem is we aren't working seriously on any of these things.
Actually, we are, but probably not with as large a budget as you (or I) would like. The National Ignition Facility isn't too dissimilar in concept from the Daedalus engine, and it may have a chance of generating surplus power. For the space elevator, we simply need much better materials, and there is an awful lot of research (public and private) in that area.
The timeline for this probably isn't decades, though - centuries would be more real
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think the Space Shuttle is a good example of your point. The SS is a good example of a boondoggle and stupid requirements. The whole idea of having something that could go up in space, grab big payloads, and bring them back down to earth is something that just wasn't needed; it's much cheaper and easier to make something that launches mass into space, in a one-way trip (only the humans need to be returned safely).
To make the obligatory car analogy, it's like buying a giant 6-seat pickup truck (w/
Re: (Score:2)
The issue isn't the number of planets, the issue is whether they are habitable for us. I don't know about you, but while I prefer my temps on the slightly warm side, I don't fancy living on a planet where the normal daily temp is 300C.
Nor do I wish to attempt to live on a planet without either water or some semblance of soil.
Finally, 30 lights years is only near compared to the overall distance to everything else in the universe. Even if yo
Re: (Score:2)
A starship would be the biggest project in the history of man, it would dwarf the "great wall" and the pyramids and everything else put together, it would require the output of the entire planet for decades, it would cast trillions with no return on investment!
Who will pay? Who will build? Who would design? Where would the materials come from?
It's a swell idea, and like all purely theoretical exercises, fun to think about, BUT it's NOT GONNA HAPPEN!
Re: (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
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Ridiculous paranoia! (Score:5, Interesting)
You realize of course that big rocks really do hit the earth from time to time. I'm not just talking about dinosaur killers and cataclismic events, but 'smaller' impacts too. In fact, there's a rather famous one [wikipedia.org] that happened barely a hundred years ago. There aren't many places on left on dry land that an impact like that can occur without it causing massive devastation. And that's even ignoring the damage that could be done if an impact occurred in a large body of water; cartoonishly large tsunami's are a real, actual possibility.
But hey, keep worrying about the latest doom and gloom predictions. Not that there isn't anything to them, but people have been making them for hundreds of years and human civilization keeps ticking over somehow. I'm not even sure what you mean by "matters closer to home", the only thing I can think of is the kind of catastrophic climate change that no one really takes seriously anymore (and I don't mean a 2 meter rise in sea level, yes that would be devastating but not cataclysmic.)
Re: (Score:2)
Fact: An extinction event sized body will hit the earth.
Unknown: When.
I'm not sure why you think detecting and deflecting an object that will wipe us clean from the planet isn't a matter close to home.
Oh, right, you're a short sighted ass.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
If by 15 years you mean more then a decade, then yes.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm pretty sure that 15 years IS more than a decade, actually...
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, 15 years usually is more then a decade ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Which we all know that's what we mean. Only an ass would take it to a stupid extreme to make them selves look clever.
That said, there are object large enough to destroy the earth.
Re: (Score:2)
There are other threatened species on the planet than humans.
Re: (Score:2)
yes, lets go to a fiction book based on decades old information to base science on.
Great book, but we do get better at this stuff as time goes on.
Re: (Score:2)
We should see if we can quickly deplete their list of denial options until they no longer deny the problem and say they simply refuse to act and will bury themselves in deep-underground suspended animation chambers...then I'll find a way to get myself onto the list of people to be preserved, and as an expert dune buggy driver, decent marksman, and could-be-worse boomerang thrower, the cute post-apocalyptic future-women will be mine! :D MUAHAHAHAHA, a flawless plan!
Re: (Score:2)
It's been made [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)