I haven’t had much hope that if there was an major asteroid racing towards earth that there could be much done about it, but I also know that likelyhood of it is very small so there is no need to lose sleep over it.
“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.
First administration: “We must do something about the asteroid. I’ve started a plan to divert it, but it’ll take several years.”
Second administration: “The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office.”
Third administration: “Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there’s just too much political resistance to solving it. Let’s focus on other priorities that we can solve.”
Yea that and panic at the end !
Sorry don’t you mean let’s fund AI?
/s
We’ve already solved this. We just need to train a team of dysfunctional oil drillers to send up to the asteroid.
🎵 Don’t wanna close my eyes 🎵
I don’t even remember what movie that was
Armageddon, the mega block buster hit movie of 1998
Thanks! I can’t for the life of me remember when I watched that, especially since I wasn’t even alive when that came out. Maybe we watched it in school or something
Not to be confused with the other mega block buster hit movie about an asteroid hitting earth released one month earlier in 1998, Deep Impact.
Deep Impact is to Armageddon as Volcano is to Dante’s Peak.
almost forgot about Dante’s peak. that was the shit!
Superior?
Yes
I would have sworn it was Space Cowboys. Shit.
That’s okay, humanity had s good run. I imagine we’ll have extinctified ourselves way before a space rock could do it. A+ for trying though.
Don’t look up
That’s the last three words of the article. The author didn’t miss the connection either.
I always wonder when people repeat something from the article or ask a question that’s answered in the article: did you not read it or did you just want to start a discussion about this connection and are somehow constrained in the number of words you can write per day?
I didn’t read it. The Register has a drier tone than I felt like reading today. I mean seriously, putting the word tabletop in quotes? I am NOT the target audience for that writing style.
It was a great movie - sadly, because it was so accurate. Provided that you can call a sci-fi movie accurate. But after the pandemic and shit, “don’t look up” looks like a playbook for a meteor extinction level event
What’s funny is that movie released during the pandemic, so it seemed like that was the thing it was commenting on, but actually it was filmed before the pandemic and was originally meant as a commentary on climate change. What it shows is that humanity’s modern tribalism is remarkably predictable. No matter what the problem, we will turn it into an us versus them situation where getting anything meaningful done becomes an uphill battle.
Actually they say that Comet Dibiasky is twice the size of the dinosaur killer, but they also say it’s 6-1 9 kilometres wide. 10 kilometres is the size of Chicxulub. Scientifically it was very inaccurate. But politically it’s flawless.
We are not at a point where the “global community” is more than a few competing, egoistic and greedy tribes with clashing world views, so that’s no surprise.
Yeah, I think that really it wouldn’t be the “global community” that ends up saving the world in an asteroid impact scenario.
It would likely be an organization that could operate on its own without endless committees. Say, the Chinese space agency, or SpaceX, or the Indian space agency. Someone would decide to just do it, without getting the whole world’s approval for the mission. Then the whole world would complain that the effort was made without any international cooperation or oversight. And the organization that literally saved the world would get chewed out by everyone because inevitably the plan will not have worked perfectly.
But I’m not worried, because even billionaires don’t want to die. Someone would do something.
would you trust Boeing to save you from an asteroid?
I’d trust them to try to intercept an asteroid… It’ll be harmless when they miss and achieve nothing, but in the off chance that they pull it off, yeah sure Boeing, go for it.
Achievement unlocked: discovering the Great Filter.
If an asteroid were to hit the Earth large enough to cause human extinction, it would save us the embarrassment of killing ourselves from poisoning the climate or microplastic pollution.
I’m pretty sure we navigated nuclear holocaust, but we haven’t fully ruled it out either.
I’m roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.
It’s a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.
Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.
As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution.
We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.
Master space? Master planetary defense? We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal.
As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there.
Well not with that attitude!
Yeah, space is hard and yeah mistakes have been made along the way. But things are definitely changing. Reusable rockets are nearly here… Between spaceX, rocket lab and stoke aerospace, there is real potential for these rockets to work. Hell, SpaceX has already conducted a successful orbital test flight.
With reusable rockets we’ll start to see a drastic reduction in the cost to get to orbit, probably by two orders of magnitude, but possibly even more. With the cost down people will reassess the value of space and the resources available there. In other words, people will start doing more in space, and getting more from space. Resource collection, refining and specialized manufacturing are three most likely industries to start expanding into space. Once there is work to be done there it will begin to make sense for people to live there.
As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there.
Not today, no. But within my lifetime, I expect we will. Remember, change is usually slow and this would constitute the most profound change in human history.
While everything living grows old and dies, and has its limits, we separate “<T> revolution” from “<T> normal development” for a reason.
I mean, what currently exists (with consumerism, incredibly wasteful production of electronic devices doing mostly useless work, less efficient production and organization being preferable when it allows someone to preserve power, Ponzi schemes of various kinds, ignorance and tribalism) is sometimes just a culture, not basic instincts (which have their downsides, but those are solvable). It’s not all cultures.
That culture has brought us revolutions unseen before. Then it stagnated and may die, but the humanity may survive and have more revolutions in the future.
I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.
Astronauts aren’t superhumans and there is nothing “special” about their training. They are just pilots with stricter physical requirements. The reason why there aren’t many of them is because there is no need for more. Our technology is not there yet for cheap and “boring” space travel beyond low Earth orbit (and probably won’t be for a century at least). And there isn’t anything worthwhile for humanity out there anyway. At least at the current stage in our “evolution”. So for now manned spaceflight programmes are just vanity projects funded by politicians (for “national pride” or whatever) or some billionaire celebrities like Musk.
Also I don’t think that world peace would be necessary for space colonization. It could be born out of conflict or for economic reasons, like colonization of Americas. It’s simply that it will take centuries for us to reach a point when the prospect of leaving Earth will become attractive for regular people (if we survive that much of course).
We aren’t even capable of caring for one another
It’s the part that drives me the most wild. We’re all stuck on this shitty rock hurtling through space together, literally the bare minimum we could do to make it bearable is to be kind to one another and supportive of one another. We can’t even be fucked with bare minimum.
Same, if we can’t even, in actions not rhetoric, start from a baseline of “we’re all in the same boat, we all have needs and seek happiness, how do we maximize everyone’s well-being to facilitate that?” then we’re still just savage animals wrestling in the dirt, but with the dangerous capacity to devise technologies for selfish ends we aren’t wise/evolved enough to truly appreciate the consequences of using.
Tbf, in order for humanity to get where they’re at in the Star Trek timeline they had to go through WWIII: Nuclear edition
The Bell Riots (and Irish reunification) are due in a few months.
Covid kind of disillusioned me to the whole “all humanity needs is a common enemy/suffering to get right” concept.
Iirc, it wasn’t just that as far as Star Trek goes. Iirc, most world governments and economic systems were destroyed, humanity was a mere fraction of its peak population. Humanity literally physically came together because it was necessary to rebuild.
Its one thing to have a common enemy/suffering without changing anything else as far as governments and social systems goes. It’s completely different when you not only have the enemy/suffering but to also need to literally rebuild everything from scratch
Humanity literally physically came together because it was necessary to rebuild.
I’m pretty sure that didn’t really happen until after the Vulcans showed up, TBH.
From Memory Alpha:
During the 2060s, Cochrane and his team of engineers began developing the warp drive. (Star Trek: First Contact) The challenge of inventing warp theory took Cochrane an extremely long time. (ENT: “Anomaly (ENT)”) In 2061, he was responsible for Earth’s first successful demonstration of light speed propulsion, though his work was far from complete. (VOY: “Friendship One”; ENT: “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II” library computer file) His primary motivation for commencing warp technology was financial gain in the devastated, poverty-stricken America that existed in the wake of the Third World War.
He finally built Earth’s first warp ship, the Phoenix, in the hope its success would prove profitable and allow him to retire to a tropical island filled with naked women. A historical irony was that, contrary to the fact he went on to use the Phoenix to inaugurate an era of peace, Cochrane incorporated a weapon of mass destruction into its design; he constructed the Phoenix in a silo on a missile complex and used a Titan II missile as his launch vehicle.
(WWIII ended in 2053; First Contact was on 5 April 2063)
The most horrifying possible outcome of a World War is, arguably, there being a definitive “winner”.
That’s just not true. WWI had a definitive winner in Europe, but not in the Middle-East. And Turks are still killing people unpunished. And Germany wasn’t a definitive loser, despite Entente countries making it really feel that role.
I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie
“Wow, rude!” – Carl Sagan, probably
Don’t Look Up!
We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.
We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.
- No one washes their hands — Increased infection rates.
- Research doctors don’t work — Reduced cure research speed.
- Sick people given hugs — Infectivity increased once spotted.
– Plague Inc. description of Easy Difficulty (Written before the 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown)
The cloth does nothing to stop the virus but also completely cuts off oxygen to your brain.
No I will not explain. It’s your job to educate yourself by watching more Jordan Peterson videos.
Did you get the special chloroform-infused masks? I hear they’re the only ones that do the job properly.
Sir, I’m trying to survive a pandemic not learn how to be a lobster.
Don’t make me tap the sign…
I know it’s stupid but /s really should be mandatory if you arennot serious. Because there are too many prople that are
Poe’s law strikes again
Cameron Poe?
Goddamnit, stop making me click the downvote button twice!
I hope you’re a troll. That’s just next level stupidity to be real.
The second sentence tells me troll/sarcasm. But there are people who unironically believe that
Just stopping by to say that I understood the obvious sarcasm/joke
Actually we DID. Tho’ only for a little while. And the results were enormous. The B/Yamgata Influenza lineage appears to have gone extinct. The cool part is we weren’t even trying to do anything with those specific efforts to affect influenza. All of which should encourage us to cooperate more. No less.
Please give us more cool facts!
also for the strong of mind: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Doctor Ignaz Semmelweiss in the mid-1800s suggested that obstetricians should wash and sterilize their hands before attending their patients to reduce the chance of postpartum infection. He was rejected by the medical community, ridiculed by colleagues, and eventually locked in an asylum where he was killed.
We’re sliding back in time.
Semmelweiss is also partially responsible for the widespread rejection of his findings. He basically called doctors who did not follow his advice murderers which naturally didn’t help his popularity. Antagonising someone who you are trying to convince usually just entrenches their opinions further.
People forget the most important bit. The clapback to Semmelweiss from other doctors was “A doctor’s hands are always clean!”
Humans are irrational fucking idiots and we prove it daily. The number of us who are willing to protect our own in-group over things they don’t deserve to be protected over is too damn high.
“A doctor’s hands are always clean!”
That’s when Semmelweiss should have rubbed dog shit on his hands and tried to rub them on these doctors’ face.
That is far less cool.
But it’s very interesting to think where we would be technologically and socially if humans weren’t such assholes
Why the change of heart at tha last sentence?
No shit.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In an exercise involving multiple US government agencies during April 2024, NASA conducted a so-called “tabletop” game in which participants plot their response to a 72 percent chance that an asteroid may hit Earth in 14 years.
Underpinning a bewildering number of moving parts is the likelihood that space agencies are not ready to implement the operations needed to find out more about the threat and mitigate it, even with more than a decade to prepare.
The game also found that the “role of the UN-endorsed Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG) in an asteroid impact threat scenario is not fully understood by all participants.”
“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.
It recommends “periodic briefings and exercises to continue to raise awareness of planetary defense and increase readiness for preparation and response to an asteroid impact threat.”
Speaking to US public radio service NPR, Terik Daly, planetary defense section supervisor at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said experts didn’t know of any asteroids of a substantial size that are going to hit Earth for the next hundred years.
The original article contains 610 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Congress is making laws about bathrooms and genitals like a bunch of 3rd graders running a minecraft server. Of course we can’t handle fucking asteroid defense.
It reminds me of how tech companies are all scrambling to use AI. There was a funny article recently where the author pointed out that these companies are struggling to do very basic things, so the idea that they could somehow tackle AI in a way that’s useful and profitable is silly.
Maybe the 10 commandments posted in every Louisiana classroom will stop the asteroids.
