I guess you missed this then:
Sheesh^2
The assumption that being out there would give a significant/useful increase in warning time is wrong.
- Why would an object on the way to Earth be obliged to pass by a Mars orbit watch post on the way to Earth?
- If it did go right by the watch post, that only adds weeks or months of notice. You want to be bought years, decades even… Not weeks or months.
The way to do it is not watch for “incoming astroids” at all. Find every single one of them and map their orbits. We can do that from right here. With that, we can forecast their position for years in advance.
If you spot an object on the way in to Earth… it is too late.
The w
Whatever you want to call it, Squeege, it has the same characteristics. It has to be a system that applies astronomically significant amounts of energy at astronomic distances. That spells weapon to me. I don’t want one built. The frequency of bad news from shit falling from the sky, and that of bad men doing shit with large amounts of energy are just not in the same arena.
Chicken Little planning is wrong. Yes, the possibility is there, and over geologic time, it is inevitable. Some time in the next few million years there will be an impact of global significance. I don’t feel all that threatened. I can name at least two dozen other natural phenomena that could easily precede that, and be just as devastating. I don’t want to spend billions on those either.
Major tidal waves will occur in the Atlantic, and large areas currently occupied by our civilization will be inundated, probably with only hours of warning. Too bad. Does anyone wants to move out now? No, they don’t. Someday, the deep plumes of either the pacific, or Africa will send out a geologically major basalt blanket, as they have done in the past. Ten to seventy percent of the larger life forms on Earth will die. Too bad. That’s all, just too bad. We don’t have the resources to begin major programs to search for answers to any of these things.
If you build your dainty non-weapon asteroid deflector to handle objects up to ten kilometers, you have not altered the real risk in human terms. You just upped the ante, and there are hundreds of objects larger whizzing around in transneptunian orbits. Pick a number, and there are larger ones. Only the engineering changes drastically for the difference between ten-kilometer objects, and thirty-kilometer objects. Which one will you build, the seventy billion dollar system for objects up to a kilometer, or the six trillion dollar one for objects up to twenty kilometers? How about the three hundred trillion dollar one to stop full sized comets? What happens if your planet buster comet swings by Jupiter, and gets broken up into sixty different twenty kilometer objects? Ooops.
Risk analysis says that you build to survive the most reliably predictable disasters in your predicted span of reasonable expectations. Given that in four thousand years of history, we know of one impact remotely like what you are talking about. In the last fifty million years we have no evidence of others of the CT boundary level of effect. That is not a reasonable threat. Tracking NEO’s has some specific importance other than the perceived one of doom crying. It is also no where near the exact art this type of program would need. Eventually we will need the tracking and orbit prediction that would provide that sort of accuracy, but that will be for orbital traffic control over the earth, where things are getting very crowded.
But we have lots of better things to do with our space buck, than to set up a shooting gallery for a multimillion year period threat. The potential for misuse is a far greater risk, even if it is only a tracking system. Add in the ability to move asteroids, and it is a weapon, however much you might wish otherwise. Replacing a one in fifty million year possibility with a chance we have seen demonstrated several times a century for the entire length of human history is not a good idea.
Tris
“The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness…This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” ~ Plato ~
Wow, Tris. That’s some of the best argument I’ve ever seen. For what it’s worth, you’ve convinced me.
Triskadecamus, most of your points are well taken. However, risk analysis doesn’t tell you squat if you haven’t yet assessed the risk. Nobody knows with what frequency a city-destroying impact event could occur or has occurred in the past. Think of it as due diligence. Analyzing the orbits of NEOs will tell us if there’s something to worry about or not within a reasonable span of time. It would be foolish to not do this, and it’s being done now, although slowly.
Squeegee: Just to recap: I posted a valid criticism of the OP, complete with an explanation, a cite, and even a little picture. I also quoted the exact phrase from the OP I was referring to. When you complained that I should “Give the guy a break. He said ‘in the orbit of Mars’, not ON mars. Sheesh.” I reposted the exact quote, this time with bold to aid in your compression.
Your response? You quote a completely different portion of the OP; I presume in an attempt to make it seem I had responded to a different point than the one I had clearly indicated. Let me ask you a couple questions: Was my quote accurate? Was it unclear from this quote that the OP proposed a “human-based establishment on one of Mars’ moons (Phobos or Demos), or even on Mars, itself”?
How about you let me decide for myself which portion of the OP I was talking about, and you relegate your responses to the facts I presented.
Well, a quick perusal of the list of cities destroyed by shit falling out of the sky during the six thousand years during which there have been cities is . . . zero. Number of places where impacts have occurred which could have leveled cities if they had happened to hit them during our recorded history of six thousand years, . . . one. How much analysis does that require? An essentially imaginary threat, which has an obscenely dangerous solution. Now lets consider the number of mass weapons developed that have never been used to kill large numbers of people. Also zero. Sounds like a sure thing to me. Risk analysis? Sure, easily done. The solution is so much riskier than the problem; it is ridiculous to even propose it. Tin foil hats are a better idea.
What makes you think our ability to compute orbits happens to occur at a time over the four billion year history of the planet that coincides with a sharp increase in the rate of this rather rare astronomical event? This is Discovery Channel pap, and like most of that ilk of doom prediction it ignores time frame. Six times in the last billion years it is likely that large objects impacting with the earth had worldwide effects. The only one that we know of during human history was unnoticed at the time by most of the world, and it took decades of investigation to prove that it happened at all.
If you want real threats to man, you don’t have to search all that diligently. AIDS, antibiotic resistance, global warming, rampant political corruption, economic dislocation of billions, pollution, particularism, even influenza is an overwhelmingly more important concern than the sky falling. This really is Chicken Little stuff.
Tris
“I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.” ~ George Santayana ~
Triskadecamus, if this is a “Chicken Little” problem, then yours is an ostrich solution. You don’t want to know if there’s a risk? So therefore, why look?? I’m frankly incredulous.
Sure, there are lots of more immediately problems to solve than this one. You named a few. I agree. I’ll name another: willful ignorance.
Simply pointing some telescopes around the sky to calculate the orbits of NEOs involves very little money, and zero risk. And this could tell us with decades to spare if and when any risk will occur.
As for your contention that solving the problem of an NEO has a solution more dangerous then the problem: nonsense. Your scenarios in the above posts which seem to postulate some Darth Vader Death Star gun are a fantasy. Given the most reasonable scenario (and you are the one pushing risk assessment), a <10 mile diameter NEO and a time frame of decades to solve the problem, the necessary hardware is not only not exotic, it mostly already exists.
The OP clearly stated that he proposed some sort of detection system in the orbit of Mars, perhaps being supervised by a based nearby, possibly on Mars. Many of the previous posts, including yours, seemed to assume that the detection system would be on Mars, which was not what the OP said. Then you quoted only the part that said on Mars, so I quoted the rest. Are we done now?
Whoops, the immediately previous post was addressed to Waverly. Sorry for any confusion.
No, Squeege, it isn’t willful ignorance. It is a rational decision not to waste limited resources on pipe dream doomsday predictions. The claim of once per millennium regional devastation effects of impacts is simply bullshit. It hasn’t happened. If it had happened, we would have the great stories of the six times that the wrath of God descended and smote the Whomevers, leaving only the large round lake you see there. Are you contending that these devastating calamities were simply not noticed? Kind of odd, don’t you think, every one missing the end of the world six times?
The once per hundred thousand year climate changing events is similarly simply made up. There is no evidence that it happened, or that that was the cause. Climate changes over the earth are not sharply delineated events. Did these asteroids gradually smash into the Earth every ten millennia? Where do you get this stuff?
The only big impacts for which evidence is available are hundreds of millions of years apart. (That’s science talk for “not very damned often.”) It is not a creditable enough threat to spend even an evening watching PBS over. It certainly does not merit building a space born weapons system able to release astronomic levels of energy, at extreme distance, with extreme accuracy, and manning it for the next thousand years. (That was the OP’s point, you know, not just the NEAR project.) If you want to see an ostrich’s butt, just look at the one in this argument who doesn’t see the potential risk in that.
I already mentioned that the NEAR project has other reasonable goals, and uses. But the Chicken Little Guard Station is simply tin hat foolishness, and I refuse give credit to made up pseudo science about the risk from something that provably hasn’t happened in all of human history, and probably hasn’t happened at all since the CT incident, sixty five million years ago.
Tris
“Oh, yeah?”
Squeegee, you (and Mr. Sorbust) are greatly missing the point. It doesn’t matter if he meant “on Mars” or “in the orbit of Mars”… either solution is completely unnecessary. Especially since asteroids don’t come towards the Earth at a trajectory that is parallel to the plane of the Solar System. Some can come from a trajectory that is completely perpendicular to Earth’s orbit, which would render any sort of plane-oriented detection system worthless. Furthermore, if the detection stations were placed that far away from Earth, millions of them would be needed in order to fully cover the entire 360º of the Solar System. If kept in Earth orbit, only a couple dozen or so would be needed to implement the sort of detection system that Mr. Sorbust proposes. That way, money would be saved on developing better optical systems.
Putting stuff “in the orbit of Mars” may sound cool, but life isn’t like a bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Mr. Sorbust is completely overexaggerating the “problem”, and is completely overexaggerating the “solution” to said “problem”.
Squeegee: I still read an intent to take some sort of action from mars proper in the OP, but why don’t we write this off to a simple mis-communication.
I’d like to point out, however, that any object sharing the Martian orbit has the exact same limitations I pointed out. Each has a limited arc of space that it can monitor, and a period of several years before it cycle that arc through the entire circumference of the orbit. Even then, only a 2 dimensional disk has been scanned in a decidedly 3 dimensional universe. Clearly we can agree that something was intended to be placed on mars. Whatever purpose this base was intended to serve, it will be 1)out of synch with earth most of the time, and 2) be further away from most satellites in a Martian orbit than the earth itself. [eg a satellite 180[sup]o[/sup] opposite Mars will always be closer to earth]
[interesting hijack]
Ilya Bindeman, a geologist at the U of Wisconsin pointed out an equally devastating event with a much higher degree of occurrence in short blurb that can be found in November’s Discover magazine. The magma chamber heating the geysers in Yellowstone national park apparently erupts volcanically with a relatively regular periodicity. The event, comparable to an asteroid hit, is next due within a range of time beginning now to a point no later than 100K years in the future. The moral to the story: when the IPU decides it’s time for you to go, it is time to go.
[/I H]
Waverly: fair enough. I thought you were missing the OP’s point, and perhaps I was missing yours. I completely agree with both you and SPOOFE that Earth-based observation seems completely adequate I stated this position somewhere above. My apologies for crossing wires.
As for Triskadecamus: despite what you seem to believe, nobody knows the entire history of the last 6000+ years, and many records have been lost. Legends are not reliable, but there are certainly legends of big bright lights and fire from the sky, and the wrath of God or whomever. If an impact event were regional and non-global in extent, it certainly is possible we’d never hear about it. Also, has it occurred to you that there are certainly more cities and more people in general than there were 1 or more millenia ago? There were until recently (and in some places there still are) vast spaces of the globe that were sparcely or not at all inhabited. A city-detroying-sized impact event might be noticed by neolithic nomads in South America or yak herders in Lapland in 500 BCE, but they would have hardly kept records that would survive. What do you expect, a copy of the Clovis-Street Journal from 9,000 years ago?
As for your Big Honking Space Gun: as I said, it’s not needed. You’re the only one pushing this fantasy. Influencing the orbit of an NEO doesn’t take a weapon, it takes a relatively small push and a long timespan to be effective. Charting the orbits of NEOs is a cheap way to have the information needed to do so.
Here’s a handy atlas of known impact craters, along with a link to an explanation of impact cratering:
http://gdcinfo.agg.nrcan.gc.ca/crater/world_craters_e.html
It’s also interesting to note that whatever hit Tunguska in 1908 did not leave a crater:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_380000/380060.stm
Triskadecamus
While I will not argue your contention that there are probably several things we should be spending our efforts on that are more worthwhile than asteroid defense, I think some of your points are off the mark.
(I was going to adress the point about huge amounts of energy projected at vast distances being needed, but I see now that squeegee has just done so. (Again))
As to the point about a major strike occuring every hundred million years or so:
Well, that’s really just an estimate based on geological and other records. We figure such a thing should happen on average every so many million years. But again, that is an approximation. Such an event is extremely likely to occur at some point in the future. It might not be in the lifetime of our civilization. But it might be next month.
I don’t think, given the enormous possible consequences (i.e., the complete destruction of the human race), that it is unreasonable to start thinking about some contingenct measures.
…er, "contingency measures.
Well, regardless of how effective monitoring anything from Mars may be, the colonization of mars should certainly be Priority#1 for efficient asteroid/comet/whatever planetary defense.
Frankly, I am more worried about the human race surviving in the long term than the short term. We’re short-term thinkers. We need to get some people off this rock and onto some other rock. I’d like to think it was a biological imperitive but I seem to be mistaken. Damn evolution.
For example, if this comet or asteroid had come down a mere eight hours later, it would have hit the east coast of North America.
So I am wrong about the weapon possibilities of having an asteroid deflecting system in place in space.
I am not sure where to go from here. In the first place, I am sure that you are not all morons. But you will blandly say that a system capable of manipulating the orbits of objects up to hundreds of kilometers, at extreme ranges in the solar system has no potential for misuse as a weapon.
I cannot go on with this. No one can be that stupid. I am sure that the engineers, and the politicians and the military men in charge of such a system are not that stupid.
It is a weapon.
It is an irresistible weapon, capable of delivering any level of destructive power from a kiloton to the destruction of the planet.
The argument that that would be a bad thing is not relevant, if that point is not plainly evident.
I must be wrong.
Tris
Evidently, Chicken Little was right.