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Comment by module0000 | Hacker News Reader

I'm ready. An asteroid is an alright way to go out for me, everything else seems lackluster by comparison. This would be an acceptable early-ending to my normally schedule programming of marching endlessly behind the other humans towards oblivion.

In all seriousness, what can be done about this sort of thing(mitigating it)? Opinions(albeit ones from the internet) range from spacecrafts intercepting and mounting thrusters to divert the object's course, or planting nuclear bombs, and other "fantastic" sounding solutions. Is there anything to be done other than expect the unexpected?

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It's very easy to avoid asteroid impacts. You do lots of observation, so that you can tell decades in advance, that the asteroid is an imminent threat. Then you build spacecraft which intercept it, and use some type of engines (probably ion engines) to slightly change its orbit. You don't need extremely powerful ones, you just need them to operate for a long time. A very small orbital change will result in it completely avoiding the Earth decades later.

The key, of course, is being prepared well ahead of time, and looking for these things. We're doing a terrible job of these.

If you're a stupid species like the dinosaurs and don't bother to prepare for these things decades in advance, then there's nothing to be done; just let it happen.

Agreed. To elaborate, if you have enough advance warning, you can also dodge all the questions about asteroid composition and what happens if you impact it, etc., by using a gravity tractor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor

If you can lob one at an asteroid with a multi-year period as it passes near Earth, you can totally, reliably solve the problem for quite cheap. I'd like some significant redundancy in the mission just to be sure, but it wouldn't be that hard, inasmuch as one can say that about anything in space.

The situation gets once worse once that ceases to be an option. When you're back to using electromagnetic forces by touching it in some manner, by landing, pushing, exploding, whatever, you've suddenly got a lot more problems.

Eh, that all assumes the object has a relatively short orbital period around the Sun. None of that would work for an object with a very long orbital period, which would have a very high velocity in the inner solar system and likely would not be observed until it was already on its way here. Then there are objects which are not in orbit around the Sun, with even higher velocities.

>and likely would not be observed until it was already on its way here.

That's my whole point: if we were more serious about this, we'd have orbital observation platforms looking for all these objects and keeping track of them all, so that we aren't surprised by anything short of another asteroid from totally outside the solar system like that one a couple years ago.

> In all seriousness, what can be done about this sort of thing(mitigating it)?

The most important thing would be to make sure that we can see these things well in advance. No defense is going to work if you don't see the threat at all. Currently we can't see well in the region enclosed by Earth's orbit, in the direction of the sun.

The B612 foundation was going to launch the Sentinel Space Telescope for that purpose, but they lost their funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_Space_Telescope

Agreed. If one must die an unnatural way, then it is better to die in an interesting way such as by asteroid strike than to die in some mundane way like a car accident or getting mugged and shot point blank in a parking lot.

It doesn't matter to me. Those who survive me might prefer an interesting story, but once I'm gone I don't care how.

Asteroid strikes are natural, unless you're alluding to someone flinging them at Earth.

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