Transterrestrial Musings  


Amazon Honor System Click Here to Pay

Space
Alan Boyle (MSNBC)
Space Politics (Jeff Foust)
Space Transport News (Clark Lindsey)
NASA Watch
NASA Space Flight
Hobby Space
A Voyage To Arcturus (Jay Manifold)
Dispatches From The Final Frontier (Michael Belfiore)
Personal Spaceflight (Jeff Foust)
Mars Blog
The Flame Trench (Florida Today)
Space Cynic
Rocket Forge (Michael Mealing)
COTS Watch (Michael Mealing)
Curmudgeon's Corner (Mark Whittington)
Selenian Boondocks
Tales of the Heliosphere
Out Of The Cradle
Space For Commerce (Brian Dunbar)
True Anomaly
Kevin Parkin
The Speculist (Phil Bowermaster)
Spacecraft (Chris Hall)
Space Pragmatism (Dan Schrimpsher)
Eternal Golden Braid (Fred Kiesche)
Carried Away (Dan Schmelzer)
Laughing Wolf (C. Blake Powers)
Chair Force Engineer (Air Force Procurement)
Spacearium
Saturn Follies
JesusPhreaks (Scott Bell)
Journoblogs
The Ombudsgod
Cut On The Bias (Susanna Cornett)
Joanne Jacobs


Site designed by


Powered by
Movable Type
Biting Commentary about Infinity, and Beyond!

« "You Are Going To Get A Nasty Case Of Crabs..." | Main | Let's See If I Can Fit Both Feet In Here »

Dodging Cosmic Bullets


The Instapundit points to this article in the BBC. Apparently, a 300-meter object came within a whisker (in cosmological terms, as such things go--it was not quite as close as the Moon) of hitting us. If it had, it would have been a very bad day for whichever continent it hit, unless it hit in the ocean (actually more likely, since that's what constitutes a majority of the earth's surface), in which case all of the surrounding coastlines, and objects on their edge, would have been temporarily moved inland a few hundred miles.

Dr Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University, UK, told BBC News Online: "The fact that this object was discovered less than a month ago leads to the question of if we would have had enough time to do anything about it had it been on a collision course with us.

"Of course the answer is no; there is nothing we could have done about it.

"It is a reminder of the objects that are out there. It is a reminder of what is going to happen unless we track them more efficiently than we do and make better preparations to defend our planet," says Dr Peiser.

Glenn correctly points out that one of the reasons that having robust space capabilities (I really dislike the term space program, because it connotes so much of what's wrong with the way that we do space) is important is that because until we have large-scale habitation off planet, our species (and most others on the planet) will remain vulnerable to this "all eggs in one basket approach."

But there's one other comment to make. In the above quote, in which Dr. Peiser says "there is nothing we could have done about it," the tense is correct, but it implies that this condition was inevitable, and will remain true forever, when in fact, with different choices made decades ago, there might have been something that we could have done about it.

Also, we may be able to do things about it in the future, even with only a month's warning, or even a week. But it means getting serious about developing space capabilities. Unfortunately, space remains unimportant to the nation, and NASA is important only to those who directly benefit from the pork that it generates. In order for this to change, events like this need to get more publicity, and the public discourse on the subject has to get much more thoughtful.

Posted by Rand Simberg at January 08, 2002 09:18 AM
TrackBack URL for this entry:


Listed below are links to weblogs that reference this post from Transterrestrial Musings.
Comments
Post a comment
Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments: