“In 1973, based on calculations about the object’s orbit using limited observations, astronomer Brian Marsden at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics predicted that Comet Swift-Tuttle could collide with Earth in 2126.”
It’s not gonna happen because:
“When Swift-Tuttle was last seen in 1992, Yeomans was among those who produced revised models for the comet’s motion, making the complicated calculations to account for the gravitational effects of the sun and planets on the space rock’s orbit. The 1992 sighting, along with data from 1862 and 1737, provided astronomers with enough information to rule out the possibility of a collision in 2126.”
But lets say the 1992 revision showed that an impact in 2126 was a near certainty. Swift-Tuttle is 16 miles across moving at 36 miles per second. An impact would dwarf the Chicxulub impact. Very likely a human species killer.
Do you think we would actually put the effort and money towards an attempt to stop it? Or would it basically be like global warming with politicians blocking any meaningful action and pundits supporting them by quoting any crackpot who disagreed with astronomers calculations?
Although such an impact would be apocalyptic in magnitude and effects, I suspect the human race is harder to render extinct than most large animals due to our ability to think, plan, organize, and use technology. We might wind up being the only large animal to survive it, but we’re very adaptable, clever, numerous, and widespread. Those are traits conducive to mass-extinction survival as species even if billions of individuals are wiped out.
A lot depends on whether or not we are able to stop it hitting the Earth - it is by no means certain we have the means to do so.
We might be better served by trying to come up with some sort of long-term shelter/survival plan.
Oh, no doubt there would be doubters and deniers. The question is whether or not they’d be setting policy or not.
I believe we would make an effort to deflect it if possible. I don’t know how much delta-V we’d need to deliver how far away, and if we could do it. If nothing else I think we’d try to hit it with nuclear weapons as it approached. That might not work and might make things worse, but I do think we’d try.
I think the major objections would be raised by those who see this as the apocalypse and object that we would be trying to stop the second coming.
Agreed. So now would be the time to start throwing some serious resources into investigating the options. I’m afraid one objection, even among believers would be that “100 years is a long time. They can just lob Nukes at it in 90 years.” Worked in 90s disaster movies.
I think there would be a serious effort to prevent the comet collision.
Why? Because addressing this problem takes the opposite approach from addressing global warming. Global warming requires us to cut back on industry. A comet collision would require us to build up our ability to travel in space - which means huge amounts of money going to big corporations. So there would be powerful interests supporting addressing the comet problem.
You could argue that Global Warming requires us to cut back on the current methods of industry. An Apollo sized project towards alternative energy, or even massive expansion of nuclear power is currently opposed. Even though that would also mean “huge amounts of money going to big corporations”.
Sure, but in the short to medium term it hurts at least as many industries as it helps; simply continuing to cheerily burn oil and raise cows makes a lot of people rich and then they can afford houses on stilts.
Comet prevention would be an economic Godsend to a lot of companies, and NOT preventing it doesn’t really help anyone. It’s also, to be honest, an easier problem to wrap one’s mind around. Climate change is unpredictable and slow and we don’t know where it will lead. A comet impact kills you. It sucks for everyone and it’s easy to grasp why it sucks.
It’s a poor analogy IMO. Climate change is full of very large uncertainties. And although it’s global by nature, the effects are likely to vary greatly by location.
Your scenario assumes certainty, and basically uniform cataclysmic effect everywhere, big difference.
If the people saying climate change was a ‘hoax’ all changed their minds and/or kept it to themselves, it would still an extremely difficult issue to come to grips with practically, as opposed to acting out about in opposition to ‘deniers’ which is a lot simpler.
Changing the path of an only 16 mi across astrological object in a single discrete event with a 100 yr head start is a lot simpler. And unless relatively trivial cost engineering studies over the next couple of decades, say, showed it to somehow be a significant cost wrt world GDP, which seems very unlikely, there wouldn’t be any real reason for people to oppose it for spurious reasons. Again, besides whatever one’s caricature of ‘ignorant denier’ is, there’s a lot of reason a lot of people, and countries, have for not imposing huge costs on themselves to greatly reduce GHG emissions. Unfortunately that’s a real problem also based in science, and economics, it’s not just proud know nothing yahoo’s.
OTOH your own intro shows that multi-body gravitational problems aren’t simple and can be gotten wrong. It surely would not be ‘denialism’ to have some skepticism about a finding of ‘certain’ impact of this object in the wake of an original prediction that it would hit followed by a prediction it would not. A new prediction that it will hit would only reasonably be subject to intense scrutiny and independent reproduction of results by many teams, probably over many years. Again, the nature of the climate issue is quite different. Anyone telling you they are able to predict effects analogous to saying a particular object will hit on a particular date, is pulling your chain. It’s an uncertain probability spectrum of effects, with likely much less impact on temperate zones than places on earth that are already hot. Earth becoming uninhabitable for humans because of GHG emissions can’t be ruled out but it’s a tail risk. It’s not in the main part of the probability distribution of negative effects of climate change one would seek to pay less to avoid than the cost of the negative effects.
I don’t see any more than, say, 0.1% of the world being deniers, any more than a condemned man (with a chance to escape) would doubt that the electric chair would function properly and kill him. We’d be talking a stark reality: Do something about this asteroid, or die.
Or we could try the Kryptonian approach. The Council, who understood Jor-El’s dire prediction but saw no possibility of avoiding extinction, ordered him to keep quiet. The only possible outcome of announcing the impending destruction of the planet would be mass panic and public disorder, which would solve nothing.
I think an impending comet strike would certainly bring out the apocalyptic doomsday cultists, who would sell all their possessions and gather on some mountaintop to await the coming of the comet-chariot to take them to heaven. Hey, this isn’t hypothetical!
When the doomsday cultists saw their prophecy fail, they doubled down on their doomsday beliefs. This led Leon Festinger to develop the theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
We saw it again more recently, with that Mayan Calendar Apocalypse thing that didn’t happen a few years ago.
Suppose the original calculation and the doomsdayers are right, so Earth really will get smashed. Watch fundy jeezoids proclaim “Divine Will!” and undertake to sabotage any diversion attempts because Gawd Wants Us Dead.
The rich are all dug in underground. They have supplies and facilities in place already to live quite comfortably indefinitely. They would indeed probably arrange for the most strident voices to be deniers, so as to prevent any awkward or inconvenient social unrest.
It shouldn’t be that hard to change its orbit to miss the Earth. Probably cost no more than a couple-three Mars probes, say about $10 billion. And shouldn’t even require a nuke.
There will be one set of nuts who will say it’s God’s will and it woulf nr sinful to do anything to stop it.
There will be another set who will be against government spending the money. There will be those who will publish alternate orbits and say Big Science is faking the numbers to get grants and contracts.
There will be some who say don’t do anything, make China do it.
There will some who want to argue and delay waiting for an inexpensive miracle.
In other words, if the culture is like that of today, we’re doomed.
Unlike global warning this would be a chance to develop things easily weaponized; I would be surprised if any major government passed up the chance to run with it.
Not touching the main point, but as an aside, that much certainty, that far into the future, is impossible for a comet. Comets are made largely of water and other volatile material, that melts and eventually boils when it gets close to the Sun, causing jets of material. These jets are usually asymmetric, and so impart a net thrust to the comet, but it’s impossible to determine where the jets will be, and hence the direction of the thrust, without a very thorough mapping of the entire structure of the comet (including the subsurface structure). The thrust is small, but space is very big, and it takes very little thrust to turn a far-future hit into a miss.
So change the hypothetical to be about a rocky asteroid, instead of an icy comet.
For countries ruled by a plutocracy, the rich would see no benefit of spending money now to avoid such a far off problem. They don’t want their taxes raised. They would spend a small amount of money buying the minds of the less rich, i.e., creating a bunch of deniers, to further their position.
It’d only when the time gets near that stuff would start happening.
Fortunately for us, no major country with space flight capabilities is a plutocracy.
OTOH, if such a major capable country was a technocracy, hardly anything would happen for a while. Some basic research would be done but in a 100 years there would be so much advances made in space flight (and as noted getting a better fix on the orbit) that spending a lot now for a program more costly than Apollo would be a waste of money.
It’d only when the time gets near that stuff would start happening.
So, two very different systems, two very different ways that things go at first. Um, err. Maybe not so much.
