Congress hears options for asteroid defense: Pay now or pray later
Source: NBC News
Congress got the word from NASA on Tuesday about its options for dealing with the threats posed by asteroids and comets: Lawmakers can either provide adequate funding for detecting and characterizing near-Earth objects, and diverting them if necessary or they can pray.
Threats from space are generally the stuff of science-fiction movies such as "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact," but members of the House Science Committee took a hard look at the realities during Tuesday's hearing, which came in response to the Feb. 15 meteor explosion over Russia as well as a close encounter that same day with a much bigger asteroid known as 2012 DA14.
The lawmakers didn't always like what they heard. The committee's chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, told the panelists more than once that the progress report they delivered was "not reassuring." But representatives from both parties were receptive to the idea of putting more resources into the effort to counter cosmic threats.
White House science adviser John Holdren noted that the funding devoted annually to cataloging potentially threatening asteroids has risen from $5 million to more than $20 million over the past couple of years. But even at that level, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden estimated that it would take until 2030 to catalog 90 percent of the near-Earth objects between 140 meters and 1 kilometer in width, as mandated by Congress.
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Read more: http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/19/17373781-congress-hears-options-for-asteroid-defense-pay-now-or-pray-later?lite
There's another hearing Wednesday.
Links to the webcasts are at http://nasawatch.com/archives/2013/03/asteroid-threat.html
valerief
(53,235 posts)Auggie
(31,184 posts)DRoseDARs
(6,810 posts)...on speed dial? My god Lamar is an idiot.
bloomington-lib
(946 posts)aimed at mining asteroids? Basically setting up the infrastructure, and then turning it over to private companies to profit from the research paid for by taxpayers?
I do believe we should know what's coming at us and how we could protect ourselves, but a part of me believes many motives are created by greed disguised as humanitarian.
DRoseDARs
(6,810 posts)The government doesn't mine anyway, and private enterprise is already working on developing and deploying fleets of small observer probes whose primary purpose would be to look for promising mining candidates, but they could also serve as a watch net for potential threats until a proper system is set up.
Life dies if it stays in one place. Human endeavour should be to spread life as far as we can as fast as we can. We've only just started this process and it is far too easy to end it abruptly.
maxsolomon
(33,384 posts)for the next 6 billion years.
Just in case...
DRoseDARs
(6,810 posts)...no matter how many trees we hug. Remaining here is the single most stupid thing we could do, and there are a lot of stupid and avoidable ways to die as a species. And due to solar evolution, our current understanding is such that the Earth's biosphere most certainly does NOT have 6 billion years (aside, I think you mean 5 billion - we're roughly halfway through Sol's lifespan). It has maybe another 100 million years before the amount of incoming solar radiation is too much to effectively handle by higher-order lifeforms. Without significant technological intervention well-beyond our currents means, the deep future on Earth belongs to bacteria and fungi.
Hence the need to start taking these first steps towards spreading our civilization off-world.
Nihil
(13,508 posts)> Remaining here is the single most stupid thing we could do,
The single most stupid thing we could do is to continue to repeat what we have
been doing over the last couple of decades: increasing our consumption of fossil
resources (not just coal, oil & gas but also water), increasing our consumer-oriented
societies (global) and increasing our wilful dismissal of the scientific warnings
of the emerging situation.
Fuck the "move into space" dreams - get focussed on "surviving long enough
to move into space" ...
DRoseDARs
(6,810 posts)And as if we can't address more than one issue at a time. Please.
Nihil
(13,508 posts)You have successfully proved that you *can't* address more than one (trivial) issue at a time.
QED
Fuck. You haven't even managed to move beyond single-party politics ...
(PS: If you think that my thinking is somehow supporting "capitalists" then you are pretty damn ignorant)
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)There's no point in debating people who "don't see the point". Enough people do, and that's what moves humanity forward.
DRoseDARs
(6,810 posts)Thanks for reminding me. I just hope we aren't too late. So much time and opportunity squandered in the second half of the last century, so much could go very wrong making this our final century. We're so close to ensuring our survival and yet simultaneously so close to ensuring our extinction. It is suicidal insanity to stop progressing upward and outward...
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)I just look around; I know from certain traditional space exploration standpoints, it seems like we've been in limbo for 40 years... still, the difference in distance between LEO and the moon, is huge. Between the Moon and Mars, even more exponentially huge.
And yet, here we are, we've discovered something like 700 exoplanets, we have sent spacecraft to every real planet in the Solar System (sorry Pluto, but you're still next, at least after Ceres- which I am actually pretty curious to see) our knowledge of the universe is growing by leaps and bounds and the visionaries are doing what we sci-fi nerds always dreamed the visionaries would do.. I look at a guy like Elon Musk and I think, wow.
I think it's a VERY cool time to be alive.
bananas
(27,509 posts)Climate impact
With the increased surface area of the Sun, the amount of energy emitted will increase. ...
Within the next 600 million years from the present, the concentration of CO2 will fall below the critical threshold needed to sustain C3 photosynthesis: about 50 parts per million. At this point, trees and forests in their current forms will no longer be able to survive.[69]
... multi-cellular lifeforms may be extinct in about 800 million years, and eukaryotes in 1.3 billion years from now, leaving only the prokaryotes.[78]
Nye Bevan
(25,406 posts)DRoseDARs
(6,810 posts)Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)The people who get there, particularly the ones who stay there, will make their own damn rules.
Powerful motivator for the people who want to see it done right.
Nihil
(13,508 posts).. given a choice of "Pay now or pray later" which do you really think that the
current crop of brain-dead sell-outs would choose "Pay now"?
Way to fuck up your funding proposal guys ...
lbrtbell
(2,389 posts)...but could this mean that Ronald Ray-gun was right about *one* thing while he was President? The so-called "Star Wars" plan?
magic59
(429 posts)or money pit, big waste of money.
neverforget
(9,436 posts)Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)We have learned more about the universe we live in in the last 20 years than all of human history combined up to that point. Whether or not you realize that, it's a fact. And a large amount of that knowledge has come from the fucking pittance NASA gets.
Knowledge is NEVER a bad investment, or a bad bet.
Celefin
(532 posts)How many times would NASA's budget fit into the MOD's?