“Soon technology will prevent this from occurring, until then don’t think it couldn’t.”
Please answer a question before you check out the link that inspired this post.
If a “Mass Extinction” sized comet or asteroid were discovered tomorrow, and we had a week to prepare for the inevitable impact, could we stop it? How about if we had a six month notice?
There are several ideas on how to divert a threatening space rock. Let me rephrase that. Threatening space MOUNTAIN. Rocks just make pretty streaks of light in the night sky and are not threats. The comet or meteoroid that air-burst over Tunguska in 1908, leveling 2150 square kilometers of forest, now THAT was a rock.
I’m talking about something about six to ten miles across. “Surely we know about everything that big floating around out there,” you might say.
Everything is such a big number. There are observatories (both Earth based and in orbit) detecting asteroids, finding new ones every day. There’s a very large area to look at, and it will take a long time to find them all.
I will step out on a limb to predict an object will be found within the next five years, which will impact the Earth in the future, and plans to deal with the threat will make headlines. I’m sure it will be a small one and not difficult to deal with. May be it will land in the ocean and won’t cause any damage, but we’ll have a ringside seat.
I think small impacts happen more often than most people believe. If a small impact occurred twenty years ago in some remote area, it would not have been noticed. Now with the new technology, small threats will be forecast and observed.
The odds we have missed an asteroid the size of the one that helped wipe out the dinosaurs are extremely high. The majority of those have been found and are being tracked.
Now comets are another thing all together. Some of them orbit the Sun every few thousand years or longer. We might not have time to divert something we notice a year before it’s due to hit. I wonder, if it was deemed to be something we couldn’t avoid, would the authorities even notify us.
Now check out the links below and see if we’re as prepared as you thought we were.
Don’t forget to check out my other blog too, this is what my book is about.
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