NASA scientist warns Earth is due for 'extinction-level' event

[Hum]

Humans are woefully unprepared for a surprise asteroid or comet, a Nasa scientist warned on Monday, at a presentation with nuclear scientists into how humans might deflect cosmic dangers hurtling toward Earth.

 

“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” said Dr Joseph Nuth, a researcher with Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

 

Speaking at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union, Nuth noted that large and potentially dangerous asteroids and comets are extremely rare, compared to the small objects that occasionally explode in Earth’s sky or strike its surface. “But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”

 

Comets follow distant paths from Earth but sometimes get knocked into the neighborhood. Nuth said that the Earth had “a close encounter” in 1996, when an aberrant comet flew into Jupiter, and then again in 2014, when a comet passed “within cosmic spitting distance of Mars”. That second comet was only discovered 22 months before its brush with a planet: not nearly enough time to launch a deflection mission, had it been on a course for Earth.

 

“If you look at the schedule for high-reliability spacecraft and launching them, it takes five years to launch a spacecraft. We had 22 months of total warning.”

 

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[astropheed Veteran]

It's not like we're due in "give or take a 100 years", this is a very large scale. It's not something that needs to keep you up at night. I'd expect at a scale of 60 million years that there is at least a give or take of a few hundred thousand years.

 

You don't need to worry, neither do your great great great great great great great great great great great...         ... great great grandkids.

[FloatingFatMan]

13 minutes ago, Hum said:

“If you look at the schedule for high-reliability spacecraft and launching them, it takes five years to launch a spacecraft. We had 22 months of total warning.”

If there was an urgent need, it could easily be done in plenty of time.

[Hum]

Apparently this scientist doesn't know about the super-secret Scalar technology that can blow an asteroid to kingdom come.

[FloatingFatMan]

5 hours ago, Hum said:

Apparently this scientist doesn't know about the super-secret Scalar technology that can blow an asteroid to kingdom come.

Hum, this is the science forum. Please keep it factual, thanks.

 

[DocM]

Once reusability takes hold via SpaceX, Blue Origin and Vulcan, and with long durations upper stages (ACES, SpaceX Raptor stages etc.) and orbital propellant depot's, launches on need (LON) to very high deltaV trajectories becomes very possible.

 

Translation: launch quick using delivery vehicles which are extremely fast.