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Comment by GeorgeOrr | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be funny if they nudge it off its current course, onto a collision course with us?

No, actually not that funny.

That would be hilarious, to a sufficiently distant civilization after a respectable amount of time. Maybe there's some kind of award they give out to planets that self-destruct. But instead of the Darwin award, it's called the Fermi award.

It's on the same sort of humorous level as something Douglas Adams might write.

The article states it wouldn't do any harm to Earth if it hit, and a planet is a pretty hard target to hit even intentionally.

What would be ironic given that quote from the article is if we nudged it into the path of a larger asteroid and that collision sent the larger, dangerous asteroid into our path. Perhaps the larger asteroid fragments in a way to increase the probability of a collision with the fragments.

Don't get me wrong... I do agree with you that all of these scenarios are extremely unlikely (space is really big) and I do think the experiment is worth doing. But still, there are failure modes and unintended consequence opportunities that should at least be thought about a bit, even if a very little bit.

In this case, wouldn't any risk of a butterfly effect causing an asteroid to hit us be offset by the chance of a butterfly effect accidentally deflecting an asteriod off of a colission course.

European or African butterflies?

European and laden.

> But still, there are failure modes and unintended consequence opportunities that should at least be thought about a bit, even if a very little bit.

I think it's highly likely that the people responsible for these projects will realize this. Do you disagree?

Given the limited knowledge we have about space, how accurate are the assumptions that no harm will be done? We are still figuring out water on Mars and that is quite near to Earth.

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

- Douglas Adams

Chances of anything striking anything as a result of human intervention are quite slim. Effectively nil.

Or onto a collision course with a different inhabited planet. Who interprets it as an act of war.

This whole comments section is making me want to read some scifi about this. Anybody have any recommendations?

Mix Starship Troopers with The Forever War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_Games

There's some rock throwing in this latest book in the Expanse series. You'd want to read the earlier books beforehand though. (They are worth reading anyway.)

Arthur C. Clarke's 'The Hammer of God'

There is some super nice rock throwing in this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prador_Moon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_Harlequin%27s_Moon

suspended animation interspersed with patiently building a habitable environment out of asteroids & comets.

Neal Stephenson's 2015 speculative fiction novel 'Seveneves.'

The last book of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_F._Flynn#Firestar_seri... is all about deflecting asteroids, IIRC.

Starship Troopers covered it pretty well

"Thirty years before the First Interstellar War, a meteorite from Klendathu System was deviated from its star during the Operation Fedmil, the first contact in Klendathu. Thirty years later, the meteorite reached and hit Earth, destroying Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina, killing over 8.7 Million, and wounding a further 12.5 million."

"However, the United Citizen Federation claimed that the Arachnid launching a "Bug Meteor" by Bug Plasma from the Klendathu system towards Earth and destroyed the city of Buenos Aires."

I would be pleasantly surprised if NASA could nudge an asteroid massive enough to pose a threat to human life on Earth.

If we can nudge it into a collision course, surely we can nudge it out of one.

It's not actually large enough to pose a threat (according to the article), so even if that happened, we'd be ok.

Actually it's funny, just not to us.

My thoughts exactly.

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