Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it.Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere.
And, scientists insist, there is actually very little time left to decide. At a recent meeting of experts in near-Earth objects (NEOs) in London, scientists said it could take decades to design, test and build the required technology to deflect the asteroid. Monica Grady, an expert in meteorites at the Open University, said: “It’s a question of when, not if, a near Earth object collides with Earth. Many of the smaller objects break up when they reach the Earth’s atmosphere and have no impact. However, a NEO larger than 1km [wide] will collide with Earth every few hundred thousand years and a NEO larger than 6km, which could cause mass extinction, will collide with Earth every hundred million years. We are overdue for a big one.”
Apophis is the same asteroid that caused so much concern last year about a possible collision on Friday the 13th of April, 2029. At one point, scientists said there was a 1 in 37 chance of impact… but further data ruled it out entirely. However:
Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer from Queen’s University Belfast, said: “When it does pass close to us on April 13 2029, the Earth will deflect it and change its orbit. There’s a small possibility that if it passes through a particular point in space, the so-called keyhole, … the Earth’s gravity will change things so that when it comes back around again in 2036, it will collide with us.” The chance of Apophis passing through the keyhole, a 600-metre patch of space, is 1 in 5,500 based on current information.
Regardless of what Apophis does, the scientists are right: governments need to take this threat seriously, and provide the necessary funding so we can prepare for it. If there’s one lesson we should take away from Hurricane Katrina, it’s that threats which are unlikely to come to fruition anytime soon, but are certain to come to fruition eventually, should be treated as if the danger is imminent — because, generally speaking, it won’t actually be imminent until it’s too late to do anything about it.
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December 7th, 2005 at 2:51:05 am
only so much money to go around though, terrorism and bird flu are both real dangers that need $$$. 1 in 5,500 thirty years from now doesn’t sound that bad. i’m sure 20 years from now with better data and better technology we’d still be able to get something done in time.
December 7th, 2005 at 3:05:01 am
Yeah, and as of a few months ago, the odds that New Orleans would be destroyed by a hurricane were such that other priorities seemed like they should come first too. Hence the levees not being shored up. There was “only so much money to go around,” and there were other, more “real dangers” to worry about. Sure, the killer hurricane (like the killer asteroid) might come next year, but it probably won’t come until next decade, if not next century. So why worry about it? We have more pressing concerns!
I’m not actually so much concerned about this particular asteroid (which, if the 1 in 5,500 chance happens, would kill millions but not wipe out the species) as I am about the inevitable larger one that, if not detected and deflected in time, would cause a mass extinction. It’s happened before, and it WILL happen again.
You “bet” we’ll be ready by the time it threatens? That’s one helluva high-stakes bet. Personally, I think it’s fairly obvious that, if we don’t invest in the research and development necessary to get ready, then of course we WON’T be ready. And if your short-sighted line of thinking carries the day — as it almost always does, since politicians serve 2- and 4- and 6-year terms, not 100-year or 1,000-year terms, and thus have no incentive to think long-term — then calamity could very well sneak up on us and, quite literally, kill us all.
December 7th, 2005 at 3:08:07 am
P.S. Admittedly, the odds of a killer asteroid hitting Earth in any given year are much, much lower than the odds of a killer hurricane hitting New Orleans were. But the potential for destruction is also much, much higher. We’re talking about the difference between the destruction of a city vs. the destruction of whole countries, or in a bad enough asteroid, our whole species. Thus, whereas I probably wouldn’t have argued for worrying about a 1 in 5,500 risk of a New Orleans landfall, I sure as hell am arguing for worrying about a 1 in 5,500 risk of a hit from this thing… not to mention the risk of impact from a bigger one we haven’t even detected yet (the detection of these things is really in its infancy, and it too needs more funding).
December 7th, 2005 at 3:09:28 am
P.P.S. Also, if we start funding it now, the amount of money we need to spend per budgetary year will (in theory at least) be less than if we have to throw a multi-billion dollar effort together at the last minute.
December 7th, 2005 at 4:03:12 am
Absolutely spot on, Brendan ~ Post & Comment both.
I think that perhaps the Big-Ass Asteroid (among other Threats) represents God’s Quality Control.
Here He has Intelligently Designed an Evolutionary mechanism, which in due course produces a living biological intelligence capable of apprehending both (a) the potential agent(s) of its own collective Extinction, AND (b) the possible means of Preventing such catastrophe(s) from occurring in some Era of our Descendants yet unborn.
So, His Test is this: is it for Us, the Living, to Give a Tinker’s damn? / OR, do we just Fluff it off, a la economist JM Keynes’s supposed rejoiner rejoinder to the objections re Long Run effects of Budget Deficits, namely that “In the Long Run, we are all Dead”?
(How the Scoring goes, of course, is Thusly: if we DO give a Hoot, then we get the Grace to proceed with the longterm Plans. / But if we Stick with the Short-term Schtick, then our Spawn & our Species get what We deserved: namely, Obliterated. // Then, the Lord starts over. (Perhaps with Crustaceans, I dunno. :> )
December 7th, 2005 at 6:00:37 am
Great post Brendan,
You bring up detection, and the funding for it. That, it seems to me, is the key. Noone knows exactly what a mission to divert a really big asteroid would involve, or how much it would cost. I don’t think it’s totally crazy to imagine something that would take 20 years and cost half a trillion dollars. (The bigger the asteroid, the harder it would be to divert it, and the more it would cost.) If we had to do it in less then 10 years, I don’t think we could. Not for any amount of money. That’s just a gut feel, but it’s a gut feel that comes from working in cooperation with NASA for several years.
We’re not going to embark on a 20 year, 25 billion dollar a year project right now. But what about a 10 year, 500 million dollar a year project. That’s not chump change, but it would be enough to wildly advance the techniques we use to detect and track these things. Actually, 5 billion might be overkill. I’m not sure. The point is, it would enable us to know when and if the really big, expesive, time consuming diversion mission is needed. And hopefully before it’s too late.
Remember, asteroids in space aren’t like hurricanes in the atmosphere, where a practically infinite number of variables combine to make predicting where they’ll go so diffucult (but fun;). An asteroid is basically going where it’s going. When we hear “1 in 5500,” that just represents the uncertainty in the measurement of the asteroid’s deterministic path. It’s that uncertainty we need to reduce with better techniques. (There is a very tiny possibility that I’m wrong about this, and that something like, I don’t know, solar wind, creates semi-random motions similar to hurricanes that accounts for the “1 in 5500.” But I don’t think I’m wrong.)
None of this should be taken to mean I object to getting started with the preliminary (research, planning) stages of a real mission. I think we should. I said before, “when and if.” Of course, as you mention, there really is no “if.” It’s just a question of time scale. If it’s 10 years, we’re screwed. If it’s 10,000 years, we’ll probably be able to brush away asteroids like annoying little flies.
December 7th, 2005 at 8:24:18 am
I guess “global warming” is waning, so we need a new disaster. What’s wrong with bird flu?
Anyone else remember Reagan’s SDI? The man was ahead of his time.
Bob
December 7th, 2005 at 10:12:53 am
I’m sorry, but in the end the human race is part of the Earth like every other animal. Sooner or later we will be extinct and nothing is going to stop it. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to prevent something that most likely won’t happen 30 years from now doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Hate to sound like a nihilist, but humanity is eventually going to go the way of the dinosaurs regardless of what we wish to do.
December 7th, 2005 at 10:29:27 am
First, a quibble with the statement “We are overdue for a big one.” Unlike volcanoes, there is no “asteroid pressure” or any such thing building up that increases the probability of a strike with the passage of time. To my understanding, asteroid impacts are “memoryless”, meaning that the fact that we have not been hit for a while does not make us “overdue”. We face the same probability of being hit today as if we had been hit last week.
Separately, I am fascinated by our inability as a species to properly price outcomes that are remote in time or probability (research topic?). From Katrina to asteroid impacts to global warming, we seem to not want to insure against “out of sight, out of mind” type of risks.
December 7th, 2005 at 11:10:37 am
I doubt that any appreciable increase in funding will be forthcoming. There is no villian to crucify if an asteroid hits the earth. No one can be blamed for it. It cannot be averted (unlike hurricanes, which are spawned by the Russians and steered towards poor blacks by Bushitler via the Haliburton Hurricane Steering Apparatus)
If there is no villian, and no one can be blamed for it, then it will not get as much attention as it deserves by the MSM. Although, like the old saying goes, if an asteroid did hit the earth, the NYT headline would read “Earth to End Tomorrow: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit”.
December 7th, 2005 at 11:50:39 am
“It cannot be averted (unlike hurricanes, which are spawned by the Russians and steered towards poor blacks by Bushitler via the Haliburton Hurricane Steering Apparatus”
Ha!
December 7th, 2005 at 12:02:45 pm
Like the conspiracy combo there. ;)
Anyone else think of Stargate with the name Aphophis? Maybe that isn’t an asteroid, but a Go’auld ship!
December 7th, 2005 at 12:13:43 pm
a 1 in 5,500 chance of being hit 30 years from now is nowhere near the same as a hurricane hitting a gulf coast city. the engineers and other planners were obviously foolish for not taking precautions there. using that an example does little to prove that we should start asteroid proofing when there are so many other causes that need money. the liklihood of birdflu causing a rampant outbreak is much higher and sooner to occur than that specific asteroid hitting. there are only finite dollars available, any single dollar spent on asteroid proofing could better be spent on preventing a global pandemic.
December 7th, 2005 at 12:23:12 pm
B. Minich, an early comment thread actually linked to information that this asteroid was specifically named for the Snake lord himself :-) Apropos given that he tried to off earth with an asteroid himself.
December 7th, 2005 at 12:29:10 pm
I’m sorry, but in the end the human race is part of the Earth like every other animal. Sooner or later we will be extinct and nothing is going to stop it. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to prevent something that most likely won’t happen 30 years from now doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Hate to sound like a nihilist, but humanity is eventually going to go the way of the dinosaurs regardless of what we wish to do.
How about just sounding completely dumb. The difference between the dinosaurs and ourselves is that we are smart enough to come up with a way to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Unless there was some sort of Jurassic Space Agency that we are unaware of t-rex and tricerotops didn’t have this option.
Will humanity become extinct eventually? Possibly. Does that mean we should just give up and die at the soonest opportunity? No, that would be idiotic (although if we chose to do so i dare say we would ignore it).
But if that is your philosophy I have a question for you. Eventually you will die right? I mean all people die, thats a given. Yet I imagine you eat food every day. Well, I ask, what the hell is wrong with you? I mean honestly, you are just putting off the inevitable. I think you should let yourself starve to death.
The prospect of agreeing with people like Alasdair scares the hell out of me, but with comments like the above I wonder if he has a point about you being one banana short of a bunch…
December 7th, 2005 at 12:35:00 pm
Casey, the idea that we are overdue for a big one isn’t just predicated on the idea that a phenomenon builds up preasure like a geyser and will eventually burst. Often it is more that the incident in question has a statistical history of happening and therefore a probabilistic likelyhood of happening again.
Geological evidence suggests that the earth has been hit by large extra-planetary objects in the past, and based on that, and the make up of our solar system that it is likely to happen again. Its just a matter of odds really. Like rolling the dice. If you and i take turns rolling a pair of dice, odds are that one of us will roll double 6’s before long. If we roll the dice 100 times a piece and double 6’s never come up, then from a statistical standpoint we are overdue for box cars (since long run shows that double 6’s should average out to once ever 36 rolls). The same with asteroids really. Although its possible that the earth will never ever get hit by an asteroid, the longer the earth exists, the less likely that possibilty is.
December 7th, 2005 at 2:19:26 pm
David-
If you look at the history of the world, 99 percent of all species have become extinct. It doesn’t matter how smart we humans are. Eventually something - Yellowstone erupting, catastrophic climate change, an asteroid - will wipe out humanity. It is inevitable. Is it going to happen 30 years from now or 100,000 years from now? Who knows. But it will happen some day.
December 7th, 2005 at 2:32:11 pm
“But if that is your philosophy I have a question for you. Eventually you will die right? I mean all people die, thats a given. Yet I imagine you eat food every day. Well, I ask, what the hell is wrong with you? I mean honestly, you are just putting off the inevitable. I think you should let yourself starve to death.”
David-
You have a greater chance of being killed in a car accident than by being killed in a mass extinction brought on by an asteroid. Why don’t you lobby Detroit to build a $1 million car that doesn’t come apart in a crash and then buy it?
I’m being realistic. I would rather have a system for producing a flu vaccine in six weeks instead spending tens of billions of dollars trying to come up with something that may not work to move an asteroid that probably won’t hit us.
December 7th, 2005 at 2:57:44 pm
I disagree with your statistical reasoning, David, but that’s probably just an effect of semantics. To my mode of thought, overdue connotes both that something hasn’t happened in a longer time frame than expected and that it is therefore more likely to happen soon. The asteroid really is more like the dice analogy than a volcano. The mere fact that you haven’t rolled a pair of 6s in 200 rolls doesn’t increase the probability that you will do so on the next turn–if anything, it decreases the probability, as it increases the odds that you’re using weighted dice that have a less than 1 in 6 chance each of hitting a 6. With volcanoes and earthquakes on the other hand, pressure is able to build up that, if it isn’t bled off, increases the probability of a major event. That fits the term overdue much better, at least to the way I view the term.
December 7th, 2005 at 3:28:19 pm
David’s take is similar to a technical reading of the stock market as opposed to a fundmentals read of the stock market. When you look at the stock market using fundamentals, you look at economic data, earnings reports, etc., to estimate moves in the market - not unlike pressure building over time to force a volcano to erupt. With a technical reading of the market, you look at the historical trendlines of the market indices to determine that a correction of X percent will occur when the market approaches Y level, regardless of fundamentals. Both are accepted models.
December 7th, 2005 at 3:42:25 pm
Angrier and Angrier, quick question: If we’re all going to be extinct eventually anyway, then why is it such a waste to spend the money? As far as I know, humans are the only species who have established a monetary system, and in an actual survival situation, it’s useless, except maybe to fuel a fire. I’m not trying to say that the money should be spent on asteroid research rather than bird flu prevention because I’m not sure where our money should go, and I don’t really want to quibble about it. But academically, let’s just pretend that this thing is going to happen. Would you rather a) not spend the money trying to develop a defense because the human species is going to go extinct someday anyway; or b) throw everything we have at this on the off chance that we might pull it off and push back our own inevitable (according to you) extinction that much further? If we’re going to be exterminated by this asteroid anyway, what difference does it make that we spent 5 billion dollars or 5 trillion dollars on it? Just a thought….
December 7th, 2005 at 4:04:30 pm
Kristin-
My point is you can’t prevent everything. It seems to me there are greater immediate threats, such as bird flu and global warming, that we are doing very little about. I would rather spend the money on that now than worry about something that most likely won’t happen 30 years from now. Besides, I think people should do a better job of living for today instead of living in fear of the inevitable. We will all die one day, better appreciate today.
December 7th, 2005 at 4:08:29 pm
I don’t really want to argue about live for today v. prepare for tomorrow (both have good parts to them), I just wanted to point out that on the epochal scale, money is worthless.
December 7th, 2005 at 4:12:10 pm
There is just as good a chance that Yellowstone will erupt or that a landslide in the Canary Islands will create a Tsunami that will wipe out the East Coast. How much money should we commit to that? Which highway should we unfund, single mother we should throw off WIC or student loan should we cancel to pay for it?
December 7th, 2005 at 5:09:37 pm
AA,
You need to decide what your argument is going to be.
Is it
A) There are more pressing concerns we should spend our money on.
or
B) We are all going to die anyway so why bother.
Your initial post used soley the B argument. When I then criticized that arugment you tried to counter with argument A.
Argument B, frankly, is absurd. Argument A on the other hand seems like a reasonable position to take (although it is not indefensible either).
But trying to claim that you are right about B because of A is just stupid.
December 7th, 2005 at 9:52:05 pm
I vote in favor of risking extinction. What can I say, I’m a cheap-ass Republican.
December 7th, 2005 at 9:52:32 pm
P.S.–I’ll change my mind if we can use sharks with frickin’ laser beams.
December 7th, 2005 at 9:59:38 pm
LOL Andrew
December 8th, 2005 at 9:49:31 am
David-
I’m not making a different argument. I said from the beginning that spending hundreds of billions of dollars to prepare for something that probably won’t happen 30 years from now doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. My argument is that the human race can’t prepare for every possible threat down the road, many of which are simply beyond our ability to stop. Do you want to take money away from things we can deal with now, or spend hundreds of billions of dollars on something that most likely won’t happen 30 years from now?