America's Best Current Defense Against Asteroids Is...Prayer?

We spend more money annually on air conditioning our bases in Iraq and Afghanistan than NASA's entire budget. To say there isn't money for this very important program is a ridiculous statement.
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-war-20b-in-air-conditioning

NASA should stop chasing life on Mars for billions of dollars and try helping life on earth. We are on short fuse that needs all our resources concentrated here not somewhere out in the solar system. The cost benefit ratio does not hold water.

I like the idea that the world works together for the defense of our planet. Those developing countries are spending billions of dollars doing what's already been done. Why not work together instead of wasting money and time that could be spent on any number of useful or amazing projects. Not to mention the collaboration on these sorts of projects would help bring the developed and developing worlds closer together.

Or religious organizations could pay property tax and we could easily fund missions to both find threats and eliminate them if need be.

For those who ask for free money, there is never enough.

An asteroid crashes into Earth destroying all but one human. This one human gets picked up by aliens and the aliens ask him, "Why did your species not deter the asteroid? You had the technology, the manpower, the willpower, what happened?" The man replied, "No one would pay for it".

Cookiees453,
Yea! But what a party, prior to it hitting, WOOO HOOO!

Is this something people actually worry about on a daily basis? (Getting hit by astroids I mean, not the probed by aliens part)

stupid spell check, I meant to say *asstroids :)

America's best defense against an asteroid impact is simple statistics. The US continent only comprises about 10% of the earth's total surface area. And when all of the factors are considered such as earth's rotation, the orbital path of earth, the trajectory of most asteroids within our solar system, etc., it is extremely remote that an asteroid will impact the US territory.

I think a large asteroid impact would be good for Earth and most life on it.

Question: What technology do we have that could potentially move that much mass in such a short amount of time, considering that we don't even see them until they're nearly upon us?

Ideas about how to affect any change in trajectory are immediately subject to what resources we'd need... Obviously we need something, or many things in space... the only way not to get anything into space is by rocket. How many rockets would be needed to put an effective asteroid deterrent in orbit?

We do not have the chemical energy technology required. We just don't, folks. Religious people will probably refuse the expense, because God is looking out for them...

I think we should hold a world wide-prayer session to see if we can convince God to stop the next total solar eclipse from happening.

Every Sunday, from now until August 21, 2017, churches everywhere should pray for the moon to drift out of alignment with the sun.

With the stakes as high as they are, I think God needs to show us that He CAN move a planetary body even if the planetary body in question isn't going to slam into the earth.

Faith is nice to have. But when the whole PLANET is at risk, I think God needs to reinforce that faith with a demonstration.

NASA needs to reroute all the money it is squandering looking for ET.

@ Mike13323

"Those developing countries are spending billions of dollars doing what's already been done. Why not work together instead of wasting money and time that could be spent on any number of useful or amazing projects."

Try working with them and see what happens.

I'm surprised at the shortsightedness of some of the comments on this story. It's taken 85 million years for life on Earth to evolve to a point where we can actually have some sort of say in our destiny in cosmological terms. Expeditions to Mars and the search for extraterrestrial life are the first steps in us becoming an extraterrestrial species.

I don't know how your retirement/stock portfolio looks, but I don't have all my money riding on a single stock or market segment because the risk is just too high. That being said, why would we willingly choose to gamble the future of humanity on the hope that nothing bad happens to our little blue marble and loose 85 million years worth of work?

When we sent vehicles to study "Eros" back in the 90's we discovered that Ateroids/Meteors have an enormous amount of resouces on them. Especially precious metals. Eros had more Paladium, Platinum and Gold on it than has ever been mined on the surface of the earth, in its entire history. Enough to crash world markets a few times over, in fact. If the gov and NASA are worried about money, grab yourself some chunks of lucrative space rocks. Of course to do this you will need the same tech you would need to track and divert/destroy/capture them, that this article is talking about. There is money in them there Meteors!!! Come on NASA, developing this tech is so valuable. It pays for itself. NASA-MTM (Meteor, Tracking and Mining) has a nice ring to it... no?

"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon."

Detect OK yes, but why. How did the New Orleans evacuation go? Now try it on say LA or NYC or Dallas. How much advance notice will we really get? Ok a few months that an asteroid will hit earth, a few weeks that it will hit northern hemisphere, a few days that it will impact X-Y location. And if you get it just a little wrong? Evacuate DC but it estimate is off 200 miles and hits NYC instead.
As for diverting, how about we “pass the hat” and see how much other nations are willing to contribute? Or will we only use this for our defense?

LoL this article is so funny!
Superstitious people always want religion to have more prominence, well here is your chance. lol
May god's will be done.
Hopefully the disaster will hit a very religious population, as they so often do. lol

In Rendezvous with Rama (highly recommended reading), that's exactly what happened- a meteor wiped most of Italy off the map and tore the Mediterranean a new one. After the massive loss of lief and culture the world came together and set up a massive asteroid monitoring and detection system, leading to research stations on the moon, Mars, Mercury, and a couple of Jupiter's moons- which all eventually evolved into colonies. In any case, it took about 1/6 of the world's population being directly impacted for anything to happen.

Sure this is fiction, but this is more than likely what is going to take for humanity to move beyond LEO- and that's the tragedy of it all.

The cheapest solution is a giant ship packed with tiny and cheap mapping satellites. send it up, disperse tiny mappers in all directions, crowdsource some funding, and give a share to the people who fund it based on how much metal is found on their asteroids their funds discovered. it becomes not only practically free, but profitable. even sales of the maps to mineral companies can be very profitable.

dkella There has never been a shortage of good ideas.
The problem is the people of Earth truly believe they have more important things to think about. And who are we to dictate other peoples priorities.

Therefore I think a "Noah's Ark" rescue plan has a better chance of success, where only those interested in being saved are asked to contribute.
After all a strong survival instinct and intelligence are what we need to successfully colonize space.
Do we really want to drag billions of ignorant freeloaders into space against their will?
It would be a great way to get these people to opt out of Earth's future.

Killert, most people love money, and altruism. A noah's ark is a nice idea, but not what i was talking about. I was merely suggesting that preventing asteroid impacts could be done practically, and profitably. Before people can successfully colonize space, we need to solve the bigger issues at home. Plus it is prohibitively expensive to ship raw materials to space from earth, to colonize , you need the metals in space, and a way of mapping them. People's priority will be to preserve the planet , then to expand outwards. The best way to free up funds for space exploration is to eliminate war and poverty, mostly by westernizing 2nd and 3rd world countries. Once a country westernizes, the birth rate falls, and you don't have to worry about "billions of ignorant freeloaders".

I think the bigger concern is that the mining of asteroids will change orbits, and produce more impacts, increasing risks to earth.

Again, I find the arch a somewhat flawed theory. Yes an ark would work for smaller meteror/asteroid impacts, but for larger ones, there is no hiding. Flash evaporation would trigger amazing tidal waves, no ark would be guaranteed safe. As for real asteroid science, they come in hot!! So hot that anything within the super heated gas radius of the thing would be vaporized. SO hot that they can literally ignite the atmoshpere, as we beleive actually already happened once. Space colonization in upper earth orbit may be the best option.

However, drones are not a bad idea. A cloud of them, around the planet, very far out, pointed out toward space might give us enough warning. Send out the nukes... a lot of them. Target the first ones directly at the metoer and set up other large nuke blasts just after to create a protective "linebacker" pressure waves. Keep exploding them until the thing slows and is deterred. Nukes may be our best hope.

"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon."

We have already found through independent means that the best defense against asteroids is a bunch of little white arrowhead looking spacecraft with more in firepower than in thruster capability. Our best pilots should be given the craft that have shields. They should have to earn them.