I don’t see how preparation is really that feasible. If a meteor is on a strike impact with Earth it’s hundreds of thousands of miles away and moving very fast.
Most of them break up in our atmosphere. There are more craters on the moon because they don’t break up in the atmosphere and there is no erosion so we see the Moon’s history over millions of years.
The crap will hit the fan pretty fast. I don’t know if it will be as soon as 10 years.
We should be beating the crap out of economists left and right. Maybe educators too.
Double-entry accounting is 700 years old. It should have been mandatory in high school 30 years ago. Sure charge up your credit card for a $2000 laptop computer. In 3 years it will be worth $500.
What do economists say about the depreciation on the demand side?
http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=28529
psik
Preperation is not only feasible but quite within our technological capability.
We need to develop our spacecraft to a point where they can operate further away from Earth (Whether manned or unmanned),for longer durations and be able to adjust the orbits of, or destroy near Earth objects that are likely to impact.
Historically major advancements of this kind have been propelled by warfare,but unfortunately one hell of a lot of people alive today can not even imagine the prospect of an impact and so cant be bothered to take any interest in the actuality,not the possibility of it happening, let alone pay out for it in taxes.
And politicians wanting to keep their jobs are not about to rock the boat.
To address your second point,yes,most meteorites do burn up in our atmosphere but they’re not the ones we’re worried about.
We don’t worry about catching cold,we do worry about getting Cancer.
And the metaphorical Cancer is coming,its not a case of if but when,no matter how much we bury our heads in the sand.
And look on the bright side!
If we develop our spacetravel capability enough to deal with this then the side benefits of this will be to advance the cause of Human civilisation and bring incredible economic benefits.
Pretty much a "Win win "situation if only we’re prepared to put our hands in our pockets to pay for it in the first place.
And yes I am a taxpayer,and no I am not involved in anything related to the space travel industry in any way.
Civilization has collapsed before.
I don’t know what it would take but I worry anytime here is a spike in gun sales.
That’s true if they’re on an immediate collision course with Earth when they are discovered. If that is the case (and it might be for a comet), then you’re right, there’s not much we can do about it.
But there are also asteroids and comets that aren’t an immediate threat to Earth but we can calculate their orbits well enough that we can know that they might be a threat tens or hundreds of years in the future. Those are the ones whose impact could feasibly be prevented.
According to a Discovery Chanel show I was watching, given a decade or so warning (a not unreasonable time frame), NASA has a lot of options for shifting the orbit of something on a collision course with Earth. Given less than a decade though…well, according to the show we are probably screwed. Not because there isn’t anything we could do, but because the various governments politicians would screw around so long that in the end nothing effective would be done.
C’est la vie. Let’s just hope the next Big One doesn’t show up for a few million more years…
-XT