this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Imagine being one of the people to make that measurement though... You're in the observatory with some notes and a spreadsheet to calculate the keyhole orbit parameters. You have a big stack of business cards from journalists wanting to publish the result as soon as you calculate it.
If you made the measurement and it... wasn't good - imagine the result of telling the world that life would end in 2029 - would you maybe be tempted to call the other scientists around the world and discuss whether or not to reveal the actual result?
We do have the technology to redirect a potentially extinction-level asteroid, so I don't think it would be all doom and gloom. More like a scramble to launch a redirect mission. (And besides Apophis isn't large enough to cause an extinction event, just destroy a country or two).
If we have enough time, we don't even need to do something like that. We can just paint the Sunward side, increase its albedo and alter its orbit.
True, though bonking it really hard is probably going to be less complex in most cases.
Wouldn't that mission need to have already been in space in 2013 though?
That's what the scramble would be. Space launches avoid a lot of risk because the missions isn't worth loss of life. There is also a frugality to it.
That changes the second it comes down to saving millions of life and destruction of the way of life for everyone that survived. Money becomes unlimited and risk of life to save millions is tolerable.
If there was any way to calculate a risk above zero, someone like Musk would be playing it up to get access to that funding.
Money becomes unlimited?
I 100% guarantee people will be arguing over who should pay for it.... You will hear " Why should we find a mission to save all human life? Let them pay their fair share too"
I need to re-read Project Hail Mary again.
Bruh millions of people died in the US alone from COVID and people were actively fighting measures to ease the bleeding on principle alone, and money was certainly not unlimited.
The people cheering on the rapture would absolutely prevent anything being done to redirect an extinction level asteroid if they thought they wouldn't be affected (and they will think that). And plenty more people would question why they should pay to save otger people's lives, just like they do with healthcare
The problem with Covid is the poorly educated not understanding adding how odds work. The odds change for a cataclysmic event.
You're also focusing on the negatives of the situation. We have come out of that pandemic with the technology to spin up a vaccine very quickly.
There will definitely be doomsayers but most countries are not run by doomers.
With Covid the companies that were positioned for solving that problem received billions. Industries will push their country's leaders to solve the problem because they want to profit off the solution.
This would trigger game theory. Countries that react will need to invest, countries that do not invest will find themselves at a technological. disadvantage. Destroying a space object is a step on the way to mining another object , first one to mine space ends up winning the scarcity race.
For covid, there wasn't just one or two vaccines there were dozens developed. We only had access to a handful of options but other countries had their own independent solutions.
Despite the loudness of the ignorant, Covid moved us forward in many ways. This situation would do the same to the space industry.
Someone already made a documentary about such a thing happening.
Maybe, but if anyone told Elon Musk anything about it, that moron would blab about it on Twitter and make a bad joke about it too.