How long would it take...

Factual Questions
1

I was in the movie store last night and saw the box for the movie “Deep Impact” which made me think of a possible topic of discussion.

It has been said that the reason why we progressed so quickly in spaceflight (10 years to the moon) is that there was a national urgency to do so. People really believed that is was important. So it is believed that since people do not feel a strong sense of urgency towards spaceflight, that progress has stagnated somewhat.

So, assume that a VERY large asteroid were discovered heading towards Earth and it is determined that the best course of action is simply to evacuate Earth (we will assume that simualtions and tests show that this asterioid cannot possible be blown up or have its course altered).

How long do you think it would take mankind to develop a method of evacuating a sizeable amount (lets say a million) of people to another planet or moon so that they could survive?

2

Sorry, maybe I lack faith in people, but I doubt it would even work at all. I don’t think that 6 billion people would put forth the extreme effort needed to save such a small percentage of the population.

The majority of the effort would have to be made by a minority of the nations and such an effort would probably have to take the majority of the GNP of the most industrialized nations. I think most of us would be doing one or more of the following:

1. Panicking
2. Praying
3. Partying

If it were known that the world was coming to an end, money would soon be pretty worthless and governments couldn’t tax enough to buy the stuff they needed to build the ships and space bases and stuff they needed.

Like I said, maybe I lack faith in humanity, but I have seen what people will do for food in the midst of a small civil war.

3

Where would we evacuate to? When the Earth is gone, I think it’s pretty much goodbye, everybody.

¾È ³ç, ÁÖ µ¿ ÀÏ

4

Honestly, at this point in time,I don’t think it could be done by any government. What I do think would happen would that the very rich would probably figure out someway to get off the planet (secret teams of scientist, a secret launch site…you get the idea). As far as the rest of us, if you think people are being weird about Y2K, sheesh…!

…it has never been my way to bother much about things which you can’t cure.

  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court-Mark Twain
5

The question of where to go (given sufficient time to develop the right technology) is a simple one.

For example, we could travel to Mars or the moon. The problem being that we need means of creating food and oxygen (well plus the problem of building craft capable of carrying a very large number of people, or a very large number of of smaller craft … 145,000 shuttle craft would do for 1,015,000 people plus probably about another 10,000 to 20,000 or so shuttlecraft to transport materials and such).

Since the soil on the moon and Mars are apparently not suitable to planting plants we would need the ability to have massive hydroponics or … whatever the term is for growing plants in air that escapes me so … air-ponics ;).

But apparently, people (at least two so far) that even in the face of a very real threat humanity would like the will to do anything about it … which is interesting itself.

Anybody think we would develop the technology and crafts to do it, and if so how long would it take (i.e. how much warning of the impending disaster would we need)?

Personally, I think it would take about (40 + 2 years) of advance notice. The first two years would be wasted in pointless bickering and trying to find alternative solutions before a small set of nations would band together to evacuate.

I think the main problem would be actually building such a large number of craft or building a few very large crafts.

Lets say we went with a large number of modified shuttlecraft (i.e. capable of travelling to another planet). Assuming that it wouldn’t take very long to develop it (which is a BIG assumption) we would have to build

165000 shuttles / 40 years = 4150 shuttles a year / 365 days = 11 per day.

Which if everybody focused on the task seems possible.

I assume furthermore than in 40 years time to build the craft, we could easily develop the necessary other technologies.

However, 40 years is a long time. If the asteroid were travelling at a mere 1000 km/h (not very fast at all) we would have to detect it at a range of roughy 350 million km.

I do tend to agree that if we detected an asteroid on a collision course with Earth it would likely be all over simply because it is unlikely we would have enough time to do anything about it.

6

If there were enough time to evacuate Earth, there would certainly be enough time to deflect the asteroid.

The graphics in Armageddon give a mistaken impression; it looks like Earth is sitting still waiting for something to hit it. But the Earth is moving quite rapidly and for an asteroid to hit it requires a great deal of luck and precision. A deflection of less than a half degree, if made early enough, would cause it to miss completely. Slowing it down by a couple of miles per hour would do the same. Heck, Robert Metzger in his science column in the current Aboriginal SF shows that it would be within the realm of possibility to slow the Earth in its orbit just enough for the asteroid to miss.

Of course, if we don’t see the asteroid in time, we’re SOL. But if you don’t have the time to deflect it, you’d never be able to evacuate anyone in time, either.

7

Wait a second! You’re all joking, right? I mean, this already happened. I can’t believe no one remembers it!

Doesn’t anyone remember when the asteroid destroyed the earth back in 1989? And the government built the enormous Earth 2 space ark? Does this ring any bells? And we all boarded the ark and took off, just before the asteroid hit? But we decided not to tell the stupid people what was happening, because we were afraid that it might…

Oh…

Um… nevermind.

8

Of course it could never get past the bureaucracy - and the elitists. You’ve never seen Dr. Strangelove ?

“Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.”

  • T.Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow.
9

Mark Mal, please report to headquarters and turn in your boarding pass. Mark Mal, please report to headquarters. Thank you.

The overwhelming majority of people have more than the average (mean) number of legs. – E. Grebenik

10

I guess it just depends. A million people is a LOT of people to evacuate, and then you have to have someplace to evacuate them TO where they won’t just die in a short while from other causes.

Currently we just don’t have the ability to do this. Not only can we not even get more than few people into earth orbit, but we don’t have anyplace to send them where they could live for an extended period.

But let’s just pretend we somehow magically did. I think the length of time would depend more on politics than anything else. Hell, if we WANTED to, we could send a few humans to mars within the next 5-10 years. It’s a hard to thing to do, but we DO know how. We just don’t care enough to actually DO it.

Now, if some huge object was heading for earth and couldn’t be made to miss (i.e, accepting the original questioners premise), then would we have the political will? I really don’t know. A lot of people won’t believe it’s happening. Huge amounts of resources and time will be lost in petty bickering and people working at cross purposes. Massive hysteria will result, people will claim we’re being “punished by god” for whatever they don’t like about our society, other people will use the impending disaster to create anarchy before it even happens.

But let’s say that we can ignore all those things, and just assume the IDEAL situation, one where suddenly NASA is given all the money and resources it can ever dream of using, and the best and the brightest minds from acadamia and the aerospace industry all join forces to work on the problem.

Given all those things, I bet that within less than 25 years, we could develop the ability to move large numbers of humans (say, tens of hundreds of thousands) off-world. It’s not an impossible thing to do, it’s just expensive and requires resources. And right now, we’re not willing to tolerate failure in manned space flight, but in an emergency, we could just say, “OK, we know that 1 in 5 of our ships will blow up on the way up and kill everybody on board. That’s an acceptable price, because we have to get it done fast and on a huge scale, or we die as a species.”

However, I don’t think we could probably give these people the ability to survive in the long term anywhere else. Moon? Pretty rough environment. Mars? Ditto, and it’s much farther away. Even if you can build some sort of pressurized habitat for these people where they can be self sufficient, such habitats are going to be VERY fragile. Can they survive a year with no accidents? 10 years? 100? From their habitat can they manage to expand to other places to reduce the risk of a single failure taking out what’s left of humanity? It’s all very hard. Probably massive redundency is the way to go.

Then you have to decide WHO to send. Their only hope for survival is to send our best and brightest; scientists and engineers to repair the living facility and to construct new ones, doctors to keep a few people with critical knoweldge alive, that sort of thing. No room for waste, but the 99.9999% of humanity which has no particularly useful skills on such a mission is going to be REALLY pissed off about being left behind, and some of them may even try to interfere with the success of it.

Let’s hope we can move off-world in the next thousand or two years via peaceful means before we HAVE to! We’re probably not going to get konked by anything really huge in the next few thousand years, so we have time. We probably have a bigger risk of killing ourselves off!

Hank

peas on earth

11

The hardest part of this entire “scenario” would be for the few who discover it to “keep it under their hats”.

An impending global doom from an incoming asteroid in our day and age would prove to be just as catastrophic as it was for T-Rex and friends…the only difference being that at least T-Rex, et al, at least had the comfort of not being made aware of the impending doom.

I love Star Trek as much as the next pretender, but, let’s face it…we simply have no species saving recourse for such a scenario.

The best thing that the star gazing astronomer who discovers an incoming catastrophic asteroid collision could do is simply “shut up”.

At least that way, he/she would spare the Earth’s population of the mass hysteria (i.e. all of the “cut throat”, “save myself at all costs”) bloody actions that would most certainly ensue.

I suspect that the government of whatever country initially discovers any incoming catastrophic asteroid would, subsequent to a meeting of the minds, arrive at the same conclusion…kiss the kids and hide in a corner.

I’d rather die without any prior notice, myself, although many religous folk may argue this point, on the premise that advanced notice at least offers time to make peace with God.

But, back to my main point here, being that should you be the one to discover an incoming asteroid that, upon impact, will be the end of life as we know it…you’d serve mankind better by keeping it to yourself.

After all, billions of years went by prior to your birth…yet you remember nor fear any of them. So, it just may be that billions of years will go by after your death and, once again, go by without any knowledge or fear…

Seems to me that ultimately, life is indeed meaningless…

JJ

12

Ok, so suppose an asteroid/comet comparable to the dino killer is headed our way, and we can’t deflect it. How long would it take to prepare for it in such a way as to save most of the population? About a year. The key here, is that we don’t have to evacuate. We are, in fact, less vulnerable than the dinosaurs: We have agriculture. Except for those unfortunate folks at ground zero, the way that the asteroid would kill is by changing the climate for a few years, resulting in starvation. Hence, all we need to do is stockpile food reserves for a few years, and preserve specimens of other animals and plants to re-populate.

“There are only two things that are infinite: The Universe, and human stupidity-- and I’m not sure about the Universe”
–A. Einstein

13

Chronos - What about dust clouds? I think a sizeable asteroid impact could produce a dust cloud that might choke off a lot of the plant life. No plants = no us.

That giant tidal wave doesn’t exactly look like a picnic, either.

“Hand me my wallet…It’s the one that says ‘Bad Motherf**ker’ on it.”

14

Yes, a dust cloud would kill many plants. That’s why we stockpile food and seeds. If you’re worried about the oxygen levels, enough plants would survive to keep that up (especially considering that many animals which would otherwise be breathing the stuff would be dead, too).

“There are only two things that are infinite: The Universe, and human stupidity-- and I’m not sure about the Universe”
–A. Einstein