Russia's RIA Novosti press agency. "Protecting Earth Against Asteroids":
"Anatoly Perminov, the Russian Space Agency chief, announced at a recent news conference that there were plans to develop a space system that could protect the Earth from a potential asteroid impact by 2040."
I'll raise a shot of Stoli to that. Glad someone is looking into this seriously. Russia's resources are giving it some serious cash. It would be nice to see some of it head that way, and see Russian science show itself to be back in the game at a world-class level (of course, some say it never left, just moved to Israel...).
7The chance of a program that can actually keep asteroids from hitting the earth paying off is very small. (At least for paying off by stopping asteroids.) We haven't had enough important asteroid hits in the last 500 years to matter. If we could do it very cheaply or as a side effect of something else, then it would be worthwhile.
In the long run we'd do well to have something like that. We've only had a few giant extinction events that could have been caused by asteroids, in well over a hundred million years. The odds are high we'll be extinct before we have another one. We're well on our way to a human-caused extinction event that rivals those without an asteroid.
But there have been smaller-scale things that are still troubling. North america might have had one around the time the Clovis culture disappeared. I'd completely missed the Carolina bay story until this week so i'm of course extra-interested now. It isn't exactly established what happened, but it could have been asteroids or comets or such.
Carolina bay
If you can make an asteroid miss the earth, there's a chance you can park it in a stable orbit around the earth. There'd be a lot of value in thousands of tons of mass in orbit that you don't have to lift from earth. That's wealth.
One other thought -- a nation that can make an asteroid miss the earth, might also manage to carve off a chunk and make it hit the earth at a specific spot. That's a powerful weapon. Like nukes but no radiation. I'd be somewhat concerned if I thought the russians were actually going to get that ability.
Russia suddenly altruistic after all that Gazprom wealth i guess?
The 20th century had two Tunguska-scale impacts; Tunguska itself and the Brazilian event in 1930. The 21st century has had one, the Norwegian event in 2006.
We've been lucky - none of these things hit anything that humans care about much. However, sooner or later, such an event could occur in any one of our cities - and that we would care about.
And we wouldn't know it was coming. Something needs to be done, even if it's just a detection network that can be used to tell people to evacuate before the thing hits.
Bravo to the Russians.