After watching it I couldn't believe the world wasn't making preventing this sort of a catastrophe a high priority. Instead, if you talk to most people about seriously funding asteroid impact prevention you're likely to be seen as some sort of paranoid nut.
People think they have much bigger things to worry about. Well, it doesn't get much bigger than this.
In other words we worry more about things that may happen today, and tomorrow than what will happen in the next 100 years.
For example the Cascadia fault _will_ slip in the next 100 years (probably) and cause (probably) millions of deaths, and likely make living on the west coast untenable for some generations. But its (almost certainly) not gonna happen today or tomorrow.
By contrast much smaller events affecting "almost no-one", like say missing stop signs leading to traffic fatilities, will use up significant human hours this week.
Which is to say, we prioritise our lives at "human scale" not geologic scale. Small things, small timeliness, not big things on big time lines.
There's also not a lot of point worrying about things we can't really do anything about. When the next asteroid arrives, or when Cascadia slips, there's not a whole lot you can have done to make a difference. (mostly it boils down to "don't be there".)
That seems hyperbolic to me. The average interval for Cascade quakes has been 570-590 years. It has been 321 since the last. It could happen in the next 100, but it's a stretch to say that it probably will.
I also think the 'millions of deaths' prediction is overstated by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude. And while a 9.x earthquake would be big, making it untenable to live on the west coast for generations is a pretty wild prediction.
So _likely_ 250 till the next big, big one. So who cares right? The very definition of "not my problem". On the up side (referring back to the top of this thread) ELE Asteroids are millions of years apart :)
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...)
It is optimistic to think a massive logistics disruption and severe infrastructure damage won't, without serious mitigation efforts.
They also say we could lose 10-20% of all the structures. No doubt about it, this would be devastating. It would probably be decades before we fully rebuilt everything. But it certainly wouldn't make the west coast uninhabitable, thought it would likely make it very inconvenient for a few months at least.
apples to oranges.
> and likely make living on the west coast untenable for some generations
[citation needed]
My point was that when people wake up in the morning they care more about breakfast than checking the news to see if there was an earthquake. I'm not saying you don't care (at all) but ultimately that the level of caring is crowded out by, well, life.
Alas preparation (as much as you can) is a good thing, but the forces involved, and the sheer scale of the event (assuming a big one of course) will make preparations useful on a personal scale (my house didn't fall on my head, yay) but largely immaterial in the grander scheme of things.
Preparation will save lives. But the impact of the event will change everyone, prepared or not. Infrastructure will vanish, no roads, bridges, harbors, airports, rail. Food distribution, power, water, sanitation will all be off for extended periods of time.
In the long term one can expect large areas of unstable debris, oil and chemical pollution and so on.
Between the earthquake (perhaps a 9) and the tsunami, there's going to be a big mess, over a very large territory.
Regarding the west coast being untenable - mostly that revolves around infrastructure, and the ability to recreate it. Given the impact the event will have on the rest of the country (countries) the ability, or finances, to recreate it will be impaired.
Imagine you wake up tomorrow and Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook are just "gone". What would the ripple effect on other business be? Would that spark a recession? With respect to New Orleans, Katrina displaced 800 000 people, cost $125 billion, and roughly 10 years to reconstruct. And again, with respect, the cause of the disaster is trivial, and the result small, compared to a factor 9 quake, and 100 ft wave.
Imagine that playing out over the whole west coast, from Vancouver to San-Diego. The impact will be national, not local and it will be a long time before life on the west coast resumes in anything like the scale it is now.
I remember reading a critique of conventional risk analysis about a decade ago that said some things were too big to allow to happen even if the risk of them happening by conventional analysis was too small to make the investment worthwhile.
After all, there were many important and also generally useful advancement due to space program.
In my educated opinion, we should focus on climate change first, especially securing cheap food, water and electricity for everyone. Additionally, prepare for the catastrophe that would be 5 C warming since it is likely in our lifetime. The same approaches to survive this lesser ecological problem may prove useful for space travel or terraforming. I don't particularly care under which budget this research is done as long as it commences.
Asteroids can be diverted, given enough warning.[1] There are theoretical proposals for doing so, but its never been tried.
Massive funding of testing, standby spacecraft with asteroid diversion capability, and increasing Earth's early warning system are all realistic things that could be done, were there a political will to do it.
Unfortunately, like COVID, I expect it'll take a devastating asteroid impact that costs millions of lives and trillions of dollars before the Earth wakes up to this threat.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance
On a side note, I didn't find that video particularly impressive–of course the impact of an asteroid whose diameter is larger than the width of bloody Japan would be apocalyptic! I also found it a bit gratuitous when they showed recognisable landmarks looking a bit damaged when the whole world is lava, and pointless that they talked about the effects "a month" later. What is even "a month", if not even the extremophile archaea survive?
However, Earth doesn't have structures designed to withstand Chicxulub, there is no incentive structure to build a substantial number of them and we have no way of testing them even if we had them. Earth without structures designed to withstand Chicxulub is less habitable than Mars during Chicxulub.
And without a substantial atmosphere Mars is much less vulnerable to Chicxulub than Earth is, and the structures on Mars would mitigate it much better than Earth's structures mitigate it here on Earth.
Therefore, (and considering climate change, priority) research should be focused on maintaining large scale artificial biomes for now. We'll need that for space travel and colonization anyway.
The problem of survival after a massive impact on Earth is more readily solved than survival on Mars. Indeed survival on the Moon is easier simply for logistics.
If you want go to Mars. I will stay here. Natural selection will work its magic either way. My bet is on six billion years of priors. Not Mr. Musks Tweets.
Usually it is known beforehand when an asteroid will collide. We might not manage to build structures quickly enough to save all humans, and the resulting scramble for the few spots in the bunkers might destroy them. There also won't be any time to test the design and subsequently improve it. On Mars we have plenty of opportunity to measure the environment. Even if the worst happens, we can still repopulate the colony from earth, as long as our society is not being scared by such failures and stops manned Martian efforts completely.
Yeah, but during the impact we need to be somewhere else.
Making Mars habitable for a year might be better than making Earth habitable during an impact.
Bunkers should be fine, the deep sea may be fine, moon will pretty much certainly be fine, high orbits should be fine as well. If you can manage to be on the other side of the planet, surviving the impact should be quite manageable if you have the kind of resources that can build a deep, shock-resistant bunker, and you should be able to do that much, much easier than build Mars colonies that are independent enough for this, and large enough to not just save a hundred people.
After the initial effects wear off, you're probably facing conditions topside that are absolutely brutal, but still way less so than Mars with its toxic soil and dust, thin, useless atmosphere, supercold temperatures, very low gravity, scarcity of easily-accessible nitrogen (let alone easily accessible metals), high radiation environment, ...
Basically, if you can set up a naval nuclear reactor and some lighting and greenhouses, you should be able to get food production going in spite of any realistic asteroid winter, the air will still be breathable, the soils will still work for agriculture, ... and you can make use of all that survives of our artifacts and civilization, which should be a lot. Mining former cities for resources could be a big jump-start.
It is possible. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance
Fortunately we actually are doing quite a lot about asteroids, since our sky coverage of possible planet-killers is good enough to have reasonable confidence we'd get some warning. The rest is going to be a product of cheap commercial rocketry.
Is the idea of some cold and dark rock hitting fast not dramatic enough?
I'm not convinced. See [1].
Anyway, it doesn't have to be that huge in order to completely devastate the Earth. So even if it was impossible to stop one that large then it would still make sense to prepare to stop smaller ones.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance
Yes, we should still develop the technology to deflect smaller asteroids, but my point was that we're not going able to deflect the earth shattering asteroid like the one in the video so if we really want to make mankind "asteroid proof", then we need a second earth.
With much larger asteroids we could have significantly more warning time, and so the distance that asteroid would have to be deflected could be much smaller to have it eventually miss the Earth.
Other dynamics would probably come in to play too, such as the gravity of other planets in the solar system. Depending on where the asteroid was, where it would be passing through, its mass and velocity, and how much time we had to deflect it, I think even something as large as that might be deflectable.
Also if significant funding and attention was given to this problem, and people realized that the existence of life on Earth depended on it, I'm sure there'd be a lot of innovation, resulting in all sorts of other ideas and technologies that we haven't thought of yet.
It's premature to throw up our hands and give up on preventing this incredibly dire threat without giving it a much more serious try than we've done so far.
Did you just wake up for a coma or something? Recent history has shown that when faced with a life-threatening disaster, half of this country is going to deny that there's a threat at all and an expensive project to ward off a threat that's decades away won't get funded until it's too late.