The New Space Race

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Getting hit by lightning? 1 in 244,000? (5.4 times less likely to happen)
Having your plane crash? 1 in 11 million? (244.4 times less likely to happen)
Whats the odds of winning the lottery? 1 in 18 million? (400 times less likely to happen)

Are you trying to say that 1 in 45,000 is high enough to just write off as "not gonna happen"?

Yes. I'm not concerned about getting struck by lightning, having my plane crash, or winning the lottery either.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Yes. I'm not concerned about getting struck by lightning, having my plane crash, or winning the lottery either.

Well I guess we will just have to disagree then. An asteroid will be coming for us someday and one will cause massive damage and I don't want to be in the situation where we need to scramble for solutions because we assume that with a such a small probability it will never happen. Deadly impacts are not uncommon for the Earth, everyone might know about the one that killed the dinosaurs but for some reason people don't recall the Tunguska Event.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

Section from wiki.
"Although the Tunguska event is believed to be the largest impact event on land in Earth's recent history,[8] impacts of similar size in remote ocean areas would have gone unnoticed before the advent of global satellite monitoring in the 1960s and 1970s."

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Yes, we will certainly need to do something sometime. But I don't believe it's necessary to do it now. Seems like protecting the earths environment and people would be a higher priority, given the low chance of asteroid strike in the near future.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Yes, we will certainly need to do something sometime. But I don't believe it's necessary to do it now. Seems like protecting the earths environment and people would be a higher priority, given the low chance of asteroid strike in the near future.

Technically we don't know what the probably is because we have not spotted every possible object there is. For all we know there is one with a 100% chance of hitting us in the next year and we have not spotted it. Asteroids are a hidden danger that literally can spring up as a major threat at any moment, so why put off solutions toward it?

And its not like we have to dwell on one problem at a time.

[rory_20_uk]

So more telescopes it is then, and some reworked ICBMs to nudge them out of the way (fingers crossed) if found. Again, no need to stick some prefabs on Mars.

[CBR]

An ICBM does not have the capacity to send anything big in low Earth orbit so far away missions are not an option. But we have rockets like Delta, Ariane or Proton that are used for interplanetary missions and that should be enough. Maybe payloads will have to be bigger, as I don't know how big an ion engine or mirror is needed, but bigger rockets are being developed anyway.


CBR