If I read this table correctly it seems that only eight days ago a fairly chunky rock passed within 60,000 miles of us:
Edit: changed mph to km/s
No way. It was 24 km/second.
"V relative (km/s) Object velocity relative to Earth at close-approach."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
Well, thats bad for sure, but far from humanity-threatening, I guess.
As far as my understanding goes, space is very unevenly distributed, with lots of debris and asteroids in dense (well, humpf) parts of space, but the vast majority of it is just... empty space with so little matter in between that it is basically negligible. To mine an asteroid likely means going to where it's more probable to find a suitable one, and also more risky. Asteroids around us are few (IIUC).
It really does only take one and costs little for us to prepare. We want to mine asteroids and further science anyway, so we are going up there already. It's not like the cost of the whole space program is dedicated to defending from this. We just need to have a few plans ready to go when we do find it.
It would cost millions of dollars, compared to the billions already in space and trillions we spend in defense. What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation?
EDIT - Wording and spelling.
Depending on how rare and difficult to tackle would be, we probably also cannot afford to do anything about it.
If we have as much as 1% or even 0.1% possibility of one hitting earth in the next 100 years, we would have rallied to build something even if is very costly and difficult.
In 0.00001% chances or less, there's no way any country is gonna's devote any significant resources...
>What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation?
Still very important?
(We have a much more concrete and possible chance of billions of deaths from nuclear arms and/or global warming, but we still don't do anything about it).
Spending in one area does not prevent spending in another. we have many dollars and some problems require more than others. They can even work together, perhaps a tax on CO2 release can fund diplomatic and scientific missions to help mitigate or prevent the other two catastrophes.
Every day that you commute to work, you have a higher then 0.00001% chance of dying in a traffic accident.
Yet, you still roll the dice, and go to work. Presumably because you get paid.
For a more global catastrophic event, consider that the odds that you will die in a catastrophic nuclear war between Russia and the United States are far, far greater then 0.00001%. Yet, we all carry on as if its business as usual. (When we could take steps to reduce how catastrophic such a war would be, or how likely such a war would be.)
If all of humanity got in the car with me as I went to work, I'd be much more concerned about the odds.
The if the odds of dying in an auto accident for one person are 0.00001%, then the risks of the 7.5 billion souls on this rock dying simultaneously in an auto accident are 0.00001% raised to the power of 7.5 billion. That's basically 1 * 10^-45% odds.
The comparative risk posed by the asteroid is approximately 1 * 10^40 times greater.
Which paints a rather different picture.
This is a point at which conventional models of risk start falling apart. There's a meaningful difference between small events randomly distributed, and massive large impacts occurring everywhere all at once. Also between small events with no interconnectedness, and with systemic failure.
Simple incident occurrence rate fails to capture this.
Of course we continue on, we hope or expect that we will still be here. Rather than just lob missiles or give up, we took a stance and many active and expensive steps costing the equivalent of trillions of modern dollars. We definitely took real action on the Threat of Nuclear war.
We don't need more then a hundred nuclear weapons for MAD to work. Meanwhile, Russia and the US are pointing thousands of them at each-other. (And in the US, at least, the minimum number of people required to authorize a launch is tragically small. In a time of escalated tensions, a president can bring about the end of the world, without the consent of anyone else. There is no law or military process that can prevent it.)
Even if the odds of nuclear war were 1% in my lifetime, it would be an unacceptable level of risk. I wouldn't be surprised if it is, in reality, much higher.
Even the "asteroid belt" is really empty. It's not like you see in science fiction movies where asteroids are hitting into one another continually.
Curious about your parenthesized addition. How do you deflect an asteroid non-peacefully?
Technically this is something that could be done today with gravity tractor [0] or an ion beam deflection [1] system, both of which are being developed by NASA.
[0] - https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/mitiga...
Can you? Are you sure? My understanding is that it's not possible to predict the trajectory at less than the size of a continent. Much less actually control it.
For example: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/09/falling-s...
If you're dropping an interplanetary asteroid on an enemy, it won't be in a slowly decaying orbit. It'll spend a few seconds within the atmosphere, which won't mess up predictions that much.
It occurs to me that we just had a great example of the ability to predict where big rocks will be in space long in advance. People were able to predict that the Moon's shadow would cross from Oregon to South Carolina decades ago, and of course the predictions were spot on.
Don't forget that it's very unlikely you will be able to guide an asteroid perpendicular to the earth (which would give you the most accuracy, and the most velocity, which also helps with accuracy). Most of the asteroids obit more or less in the same plane as the earth, so you will have to settle for a more shallow impact, which will magnify atmospheric effects.
> example ... moon
We have had thousands of years to precisely record the orbits of the moon and earth [sun]. That is the only reason we are able to predict it. And despite that, past a few hundred years accuracy goes down, and past 1 thousand or so it's mostly impossible to predict eclipses.
And that's for bodies we have very accurate data on, and who have no atmospheric drag.
The inaccuracy for eclipses is because we can't predict how fast the earth will turn (to an accuracy of a ppm) more than a few months out, and because of tidal effects changing the orbit of the moon.