NASA chief: Earth is DOOMED if we spot a big asteroid at short notice Billions of dollars are needed to keep the Earth safe from asteroids like the one that smashed into Russia last month, experts have told the US government. Planetoid crashes into primordial Earth While NASA has made good progress cataloguing nearly 93 per cent of larger Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), smaller meteorites like the …
And you're still just a troll. You're financing Saudi Arabia and Libya every time you fill your car up with gas, which makes you a hypocrite as well.
You might want to read this before barking any more drivel as regards which President cancelled the shuttle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program
You also might want to look at the nations Bush handed out cash and weapons too, when he was in charge. Plenty of those darned commies and people of a different religion to you on that list, too.
As Richard Feynman established from Nasa engineers, the estimated chance of a catastrophic Shuttle incident was 1 in 200. According to Nasa management, it was 1 in 10, 000. He refused to sign the report into the Challenger disaster unless it was concluded with "You can't fool nature".
Richard Feynman- physicist, bongo player, educator, amateur safe-cracker, supporter of a strip club.
"Good job our ancestors didn't think like you else we'd all still be sitting up trees picking nits off each other!"
Speak for yourself and your own ancestors. Four of the 58 tomato varietals we are growing this year were sports discovered by my Great Grandfather, in the period between 1865 and 1880. My family has been growing them yearly from the time he discovered them.
All of this years crop is from seeds I harvested from last years crop.
"Killer rocks from space"? Probably not in my lifetime. Rogers Creek fault letting go? A good possibility. My distributed seed bank will survive, regardless (nieces & nephews, and grand kids, spread across the globe).
The next century is still out of my hands. It'll be in theirs.
Amazing that someone who "harvests seeds from last year's crop for next year's crop" is unable to see the irony in claiming that "the next century is out of his hands".
The seeds planted today will guarantee survival of your descendants.
"The seeds planted today will guarantee survival of your descendants."
No. Their survival is in their hands[1]. When I'm gone, I'm gone. I only provide the info, the land, the tools and the seeds. It's up to them to use them properly.
[1] Barring complete catastrophe, like "killer rocks from space!", of course. We're pretty certain we can survive/rebuild from a 7.3 on the Rogers Creek Fault. We'll see. When, not if.
I used to think like that when I was a spotty teenage nihilist, but there's nothing like seeing a few treasured relatives and friends die from horrendous medical conditions or taking their own lives, to wake you up and realise life does matter and it's our place to make a difference, in whatever limited way we can, to keep our species going.
It can't bother you that much else you wouldn't have bothered to get a PC together logon todat and bother posting such mindless shit! To quote the Inquisitor from Red Dwarf, "What have you done to recieve such great fortune as to have been given the precious gift of life?"
there's nothing like seeing a few treasured relatives and friends die from horrendous medical conditions or taking their own lives, to wake you up and realise life does matter and it's our place to make a difference, in whatever limited way we can, to keep our species going
That's an extremely tenuous argument.
It's perfectly tenable to argue that life is valuable, and even that the value of life imposes an ethical burden to improve the conditions of the living, without thereby incurring any responsibility at all toward the species. The existence of humanity in the long term is categorically different from the conditions of existence for those alive in the present. Hypothetical future humans do not possess identities, qualia, hopes and dreams; they don't exist at all, except in our imagination. There are any number of grounds on which to argue for a duty to continue the species, but the reduction of human suffering is prima facie not one of them, since at the point in the future where there are no more humans, human suffering will have reached a global minimum (ie, zero).
Unfortunately, the people who adhere to the line of thinking you've just espoused generally adopt it as an article of faith, despite any pretensions to philosophical foundation, and refuse to examine it rationally. So bring on the downvotes.
This is truly an issue of global significance yet there appears to be no integrated planning across all space agencies
Would the loss of a city be acceptable? How much evacuation notice could such a system give?
BTW the "fire a big nuke at it" is a fail according to NASA studies.
IRL the discovery of a NEO on a collision course with Earth would play out like the first 20-30 minutes of Armageddon.
Then they all go home to die.
Oh bullshit - some knob in NASA saying it won't work.
Popping a huge asteroid into BIG bits, a long way from earth, is a LOT better than a HUGE one hitting earth...
Sure we might actually get SOME debree... but what the fuck? A few scratched panels and maybe a bit of a ding, is a lot better than a cubed and crumbed car.
"better than a HUGE one hitting earth."
Well, no. Not really. Still the same mass and kinetic energy impacting the planet. Still the same total heating of the surface, still the same amount of dust choking the atmosphere. It would make very little difference whether it is all in one lump like a rifle bullet or spread out like shot, a kilometre width rock will cause a mass extinction regardless.
If the asteroid was disintegrated far enough way some of the fragments would surely miss. A suitably placed explosion would give the fragments extra momentum in all sorts of directions. If the extra momentum were perpendicular to the main track, the fragments would be on a different trajectory, if the extra momentum were along the main track the fragments would reach the Earth impact point sooner or later than the Earth and miss. Of course a lot of fragments and dust would still hit earth but a lot would also miss - unless I'm missing something.
I read the other day that comet C/2013 A1 (possibly up 50km in radius) may impact a planet late next year. This was officially discovered in January 2013 which doesn't give much time to do something about it. Fortunately its heading for Mars not Earth - and just because its well out of the ecliptic plane we've only just noticed it. This doesn't give me much confidence in present threat discovery..
"Round" is an English name of a geometric form.
"Worth" is something useful to humans or of value to them. No humans - no worth.
And another point you and the other animal-hugging downvoters are missing - Earth without humans is like an infertile plant - only useful for eating or burning, at best. It has no future.
So all other species are worthless because they're not human?
Don't bother. The "worth is a human concept" argument is at best a metaphysical tautology and at worst simply faith posturing as wit.
Metaphysical: Because it can be argued that 1) systems devoid of human actors contain asymmetric distribution of resources which motivate changes in those systems, and 2) economic models can thus reasonably be applied to those systems, the argument "worth is solely a human concept" is warranted only by positing an essence to the abstraction "worth" that requires it satisfy a predicate along the lines of "in the estimation of a rational being". In other words, there's a rational, consistent definition of "worth" which does not require human agency, so you can only restrict it to humans by ... restricting it to humans.
Tautology: If "worth" requires human[1] recognition, then it's nonsensical to say that in the absence of humans, the planet would have no "worth". We've already granted axiomatically that there is no worth to anything in the absence of humans. Equally, there's no penalty to the absence of worth, because only humans are capable of caring whether anything has worth.
Faith: Because when arguments like this are advanced, they're almost never posited as an occasion for actually considering whether they're sound. They're just an excuse for the author to promote the supposed consequent (ie, that the human species is intrinsically valuable and should be preserved).
[1] Or some equivalent presumed-rational observer - we could use a term like Dasein here if we wanted to hedge our bets.
Oh, I hope you understood what you wrote, because I, sure as hell, didn't!
But there is one point I seem to have detected: "They're just an excuse for the author to promote the supposed consequent (ie, that the human species is intrinsically valuable and should be preserved)."
Well, you're right - that's exactly what I tried to "promote", and I never pretended that I didn't.
You see, homo sapiens is the only species that is capable of spreading the Earth version of DNA to other places in the Universe. Without us Earth will be an evolutionary failure. A waste of interstellar carbon. All that Solar hydrogen fused for nothing. She will die an old childless spinster when the Sun will swallow it in a few billion years and no one will ever remember her name...
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