(This is from 2021, but if you don’t feel like contemplating celestial apocalypse, just skip to the top link under headlines for the latest political update. Thanks to Leslie for alerting me to this disastrous Trump pick to head OMB.)
There's nothing like the thought an asteroid hurtling toward our planet on a trajectory that would end life as we know it to remind us that like it or not we are all in this together.
With that unsettling thought in mind, it's worth noting that Politico has put together a thoughtful article about the lack of a planetary defense system, which is as good a way as any to say that we are still at a relatively primitive stage of our development as an "intelligent" species.
NASA is as close to a global defense department as we've got and it has recently begun tracking thousands of space objects that at least theoretically have the potential to knock us out for the count. So that is a start -- keeping track.
And NASA has identified 27,000 but as the article documents we have no agency that is responsible for knocking any one of those asteroids off its path of destruction should it target earth, although there is the promising-sounding Planetary Defense Coordination Office buried deep within NASA.
Accordingly, there are those who worry this effort may be too little too late. According to the article:
* “There are three million asteroids and we have not a freaking clue where they are and they are flying around us,” said Danica Remy, president of the B612 Foundation, which is building a database to track near-Earth objects. “We’ve barely made a dent.”
* Concerned Chinese government scientists published a paper this month proposing an “assembled kinetic impactor” delivered by missile to defend against what they call a “major threat to all life on Earth.”
* The Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping program, a venture between the B612 Foundation, Google and Analytical Graphics Inc., is constructing a “Google Maps for space” to track near-Earth asteroids. That should prove helpful.
* Rusty Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut who co-founded the B612 Foundation and has advocated for a greater role for the United Nations, recently outlined how “the political aspects of the whole issue of planetary defense are very serious.”
Schweickart was referring to the recent experiences we have had with the Covid and all of the divisiveness and disinformation that has arisen as a result of the pandemic. That arguably can raise reasonable doubt about our collective ability to prepare for the much greater existential threat of an asteroid collision.
Further viewing: Don’t Look Up.
HEADLINES:Project 2025:
It's On (Predictably). (Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance)
Trump selects Project 2025 contributor Russ Vought to run OMB (Axios)
Trump's withdrawn attorney general pick Gaetz will not return to Congress (BBC)
Hear Bondi's vow about prosecutors who investigated Trump (CNN)
Trump picks Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary (Financial Times)
Trump selects Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Labor secretary (CBS)
Texas Board of Education votes to approve Bible curriculum in elementary schools (NBC)
Musk, Ramaswamy lay out plans for ‘mass’ federal layoffs, rule rollbacks under Trump (The Hill)
How Social Security Bill Could Change 2025 Benefits (Newsweek)
New York judge calls off next week’s Trump sentencing in hush money case (WP)
White Supremacist Incidents Are Rising Across the U.S. (NYT)
Supreme Court steps into fight over FCC’s $8 billion subsidies for internet and phone services (AP)
ICC Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant Deepen Israel’s Isolation (WSJ)
The new missile Russia is using in Ukraine and why it has NATO on edge (CBS)
How a change in rice farming unexpectedly made India’s air so much worse (WP)
4,000-year-old canals used for fishing by Maya predecessors discovered in Belize (Guardian)
MIT researchers develop an efficient way to train more reliable AI agents (MIT)
Elon Musk emails reveal OpenAI’s history of struggles over money and power (WP)
Trump Admits Entire Political Career Has Been WWE Storyline To Set Up Match With Cody Rhodes (The Onion)
I agree, and from what I know our asteroid detection system is very lacking. However, the Starship might be be great for launching space telescopes dedicated to this purpose. As far as deflecting an asteroid, the starship again would probably be the best option as it's all about payload capacity and thrust. I don't think it would take a major program to have some Starships equipped for this. However, I think his Mars habitation idea is impractical. Mars really isn't that much different from the moon in all the bad ways: radiation, bleakness, and practically a vacuum. But at least the moon is much much closer. Better chances for permanent, self-sustaining colony on the moon (not that this would be easy either) unless you geoengineer Mars with nukes... and then maybe a breathable atmosphere appears at some point 500 years later. Hmmm, maybe do both....;-)
David, if billionaires like Musk and Bezos, only interested in further inflating their egos, were really interested in protecting Earth’s population from mass ecocide, they wouldn’t be investing in planetary exit routes like inhabiting Mars, but in ways to detect and deflect the trajectory of asteroids, because the government has not invested anywhere near enough in doing so, as astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson has repeatedly warned.