It looks like that asteroid that was supposed to kill everyone on Earth in 2014 doesn’t have much of a shot of hitting afterall.
Still, the threat is out there, and unless we start seriously developing space technology, it’s not a matter of if we’re struck, it’s a matter of when.
Take 10% of the money that goes to bureaucratic fraud and waste and apply it to NASA. Hell, take 1% of the money that goes to worthless porkbarrel projects and you’d easily have more than enough to develop an effective defense system in a matter of years.
Single out some the “pork barrel” platitudes that should specifically be done away with and you may have something…at least as far as funding new space technology. Wipe out every last cent of pork-barrel spending and it still won’t make trillions of dollars worth of Republican debt go away.
Exactly. Preparedness would be nice, some when the one that isn’t going to miss comes along, it’s not as hairy trying to do something. Or impossible. Depending on how far the effort goes, the side effects ought to be more than worth any cost.
“Take 10% of the money that goes to bureaucratic fraud”
would you explain us how someone is supposed to do that? By definition, this money cannot get back in the right track. Well otherwise, why not get 100%, and get every human 3 meals a day, school and hospital for all, a roof, and a car…
So where would the money come from? In ten years from now, you will not even have a plane anymore in your army, due to the the pentagon decision to rent planes from boeing for billions!!! Good thing you were talking about bureaucratic fraud!
Sorry, Jay….
I’ve researched the ABM program since the 70’s. DoD has been trying to hit the birdie since Nike-Zeus back in the 50’s. We’ve spent literally hundreds of $B’s for rocket scientists to build-out their furball ideas with our hard-earned cash, yet they STILL can’t hit the birdie. Just look at Boeing’s EKV 50% kill rate, and these are 100% pre-scripted countdown launch intercepts!!
They wouldn’t dare try an unannounced in-coming.
Now take our COMPLETE failure at ABM, and factor in a dark-field object weighing millions of tons, that can’t be seen until somewhere just beyond lunar orbit anyway, traveling around 17,000 mph, only a couple days notice, and what are you going to do to stop it? The US doesn’t even have an extra-terrestial nuclear delivery vehicle anyway.
But it’s worse than that.
The whole asteroid scare is just DoD trying to suck US taxpayers into another space race black hole like the National Aerospace Plane (NASP) supposed hypersonic vehicle back in the ’80’s, which everyone knew couldn’t fly. They wasted $10B jerking off on Cray comp time and fancy 3D computer graphics at LLL, sexed up the program by putting an “X” in front of it (X-30) and hiding the program in black ops. First flight test after FIFTEEN YEARS of fuckoff, the thing disintegrates BEFORE the scramjet engine can kick in. Surprise!
Then the Shuttle disintegrates(!) and now o-o-o,
they’re floating fake “polls” claiming Americans want a new shuttle design program, and guess who’s realigning their NASP aerospace vehicle?
We’re being stroked, Jay. All of us. Stroked huge. Some would say, grin and enjoy it, but Aerospace is the LEAST productive use of our
tax dollars, producing FEWEST jobs per buck.
The Brilliant Pebbles are the ones rolling
around in the heads of the DoD scam artists.
I would think as a conservative, Jay, you would be burning phone lines to Washington, demanding to know why the hell your tax money is being extorted for military sci-fi flim-flam scams.
Compare:
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=papers&code=89-D_12
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/23254
http://www.fas.org/sgp/bulletin/sec30.html
(read “More Aurora”)
“Eliminating the (Aurora’s) human life-support requirements at Mach 8, this flaming, hypersonic pumpkin seed would be unmanned and capable of on-board self-control. This vehicle would be as destructive as it is unusual. A payload of 120- odd nuclear weapons would be dispensed as the flaming stone skipped across enemy skies!!”
Who in HELL writes this flaming bullshit!?
And why in the HELL do we buy into it!?
Do we want these fruit-loop wackos in
charge of a 21st-Century Apocalypse?
The US is 1,000,000 times more likely to go bankrupt, than to face an asteroid extinction.
Therefore, a logical person would suggest we
first round up all these fuck-brain right-wing
aerospace nut-jobs, and launch them off to Mars!
What do you think? NASA program “X-NUTS”.
Mars has never been closer! Carpe Diem!!
I think the best way to deal with asteroids is to discover WMD’s on them, and the rest will follow automatically from there – plus you can send in the UN to clean up afterwards.
Elder, you need to take your thorazine now before you blow a gasket…
There are a few things that can be absolutely guranteed by science. One of them is that sooner or later there will be an extinction-level asteroid that will hit us. Unless we are either off world at that time or have the ability to destroy or divert such an object, the entire human race is, well, fucked.
Hitting a piece of rock that is on an orbital path and is hundreds of thousands of kilometers away isn’t all that hard, provided it’s seen in time. A few nuclear weapons would be more than enough to either divert it or break it into parts that would burn up in the atmosphere.
Of course, we can assume there’s no danger, and when that assessment proves us wrong, we can all die. Personally, I’d rather not be in that position.
do we have any kind of idea of what a nuclear explosion would provoke in outter space?
(I mean, in Bruce Willis movies it works fine, but in reality, wouldn’t it be very dangerous?)
Vince, I am afraid that in THAT kind of scenario, any dangers of outer space nuclear explosions would only be a minor concern compared to the thread of all out extinction of the human race. The more pertinant question about blasting a asteroid to bits and pieces is what happens to those bits and pieces? Just disintegrating a chunk of stone/metal/ice/shit/E.T. skeletons does not get rid of the material – at least in my amateur mind that debris still would pose enough danger to fill a casket. Plus it would be radioactive now. Nukes would not really solve the problem. I think.