NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test Is a Smashing Success
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eos.org
Some love and care was even put into making sure the page looks right when scrolled far enough that it needs to go back to normal.
Gives me a brief bit of nostalgia about how Google used to be.
As I understand it, one of the big research questions NASA wanted to answer was whether, if they shot the asteroids, the pieces would just fly off to the side of the screen and then wrap around again to the other side.
teroids reference :)
What other organisation is developing and testing planetary defences to such a degree? I'm personally just extremely happy that we're doing _something_ about planet killing objects, now I need only cross my fingers that we don't kill our planet ourselves, through environmental negligence or nuclear war.
What proof do you have?
Yes, this "repayment" to Earth's biosphere is dulled by the fact that we created weapons decades ago that could wipe out more life than a relatively small asteroid could, but developing and fine tuning these redirection methods is the least we could do to protect this planet's life.
Humans are awesome.
> We are heading to the stars, and we will bring life with us.
Another way to think about it: we'll be Earth's best, most successful, furthest-flung seeds.
It's almost like bacteria are what some other species sent to spread life throughout the galaxy.
What I think is more feasible and more benevolent than preventing a mass extinction is we should slowly expand our orbit so we can survive the brightening sun for at least a while longer. Basically, all we need to do is increase our planets speed over hundreds of millions of years. A certain mass of asteroids with steerable self correcting orbits could push small amounts of speed into our planet that would build up over time.
Even if we don't make it, we at least give life more time to do it's thing.
It is dangerous here! You never know when a supernova or magnetar quake might sterilize the entire solar system. By the time you know it is coming, it is too late to do anything but flee with minimal baggage.
Doesn't matter in which direction you are positioned, except for distance. Which would mean the really deep space between galaxies. But then you'd have to watch out for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seyfert_galaxy ies, too!
Whose jet's could fry us even more easily, because 'out there', we wouldn't be protected by the pressure of solar/stellar/galactic wind, dust clouds, nebula, which could protect us (if we are lucky).
The jet I wrote about is one you induce to emit from a pole of the sun, for thrust. I have no idea what this other jet you mention is.
> ...boosted out of the plane of the galaxy.
Which made no sense to me, because to escape the other, naturally occurring cones of radiation, emitting from different sources, only distance would matter.
Just rising above the thick part of our galaxy wouldn't be enough IMO. Because it doesn't really matter if you are cought in such a cone, from one side or another, or from above or below.
Because they are oriented randomly, according to the rotational axis of the object in question, which isn't aligned to some 'plane' (AFAIK).
So the only way to be sure would be a much larger distance from the galactic mess, out into real emptiness. Which would open it's own can of worms. Because real emptiness doesn't protect against larger jets, coming from larger objects, like Seyfert-galaxies in active state.
Edit: To further explain my model of thinking about this, while being in the plane of our galaxy, we could be protected by nebulae, dust and gas clouds, depending from where the radiation cone comes. That would be random(luck).
And useless against our next nearest neighbours, if they go boom for whichever reason, and there aren't any obstacles between that, and us, which could dampen the radiation a little bit. Going up or down the galactic plane, would add just a little distance, but not enough to be safe from all the possible cones of radiation coming out of the plane.
Because from 'in the plane' to above or below it, there are even less obstacles which could dampen the intensity of that. Less 'fog or dust', but still 'in range', thus easier target.
But still somehow in the 'galactic bubble', exerting outwards 'pressure', maybe dampening extragalactic outbursts somewhat.
I've been referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet , not your method of 'leaving the galactic plane'.
So using your jet to leave the plane made no sense to me, because it doesn't really protect against the astrophysical jets, and radiation cones emitting from them.
:-)
Above the plane of the disc, only jet sources near the "top surface" (if there were one) have less dust between them and us than when we were in it. Generally, being farther away is better.
Before you can get far away from your galaxy, you spend a very great deal of time near or in it. Being someplace farther from hazards during that time is better than being nearer to them. The alternative would be to blast toward the rim, staying in the thick part, and spend the whole time getting to the rim at about as much risk as when you started.
Yes! That's the point :-)
Edit: No matter if jet or not, if something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraluminous_X-ray_source#/me... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#/media/File:Ga... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazar is pointed at us, we are toast, no matter where we are. Except for distance to origin.
OTOH I don't see the danger from anything 'near' to us, going boom, when one of the poles of the rotational axis, no matter the emission mechanism, is not pointed at us.
The omnidirectional stuff is just too weak. If not, we'd be toast anyways, here, or whereever else.
So I'm still unconvinced by your reasoning, but thanks for trying to explain.
Dust clouds shield you from some kinds of radiation, but make others radically more harmful.
Jet phenomena are commonly long-lived, and avoided by steering away from where they point. You can steer only when you are moving. AGN jets come only from supermassive black holes, and we have only one of those.
The only protection is distance, and distance is achieved by going. Gamma-ray bursts we detect have all been pointed at us, but all from distant galaxies.
But not without asking whether that going would be achievable by any handwavy Sci-Fi means in the necessary time frames. And knowing in advance, before any wavefront is hitting us.
/waving hands... ;-)
For specific threats, you need to put your valuables in cans and boost those to someplace safer, choosing somewhere with resources to replace what you leave behind.
For that to be doable you probably need to solve p-11B fusion, or something better we don't know anything about yet.
If you bring the solar system along, you have that; I assume you accelerate slowly enough to bring along the Kuiper Belt. It will take a long time before you need to start thinking about dismantling Jupiter.
If you solve the p-11B fusion problem (maybe you invent a mirror for x-rays?), you don't need the sun anymore, and may pick up and move operations to another solar system that is already moving off-disc at a good clip. You can bring along rotating cans of bio-stuff if you still use it (or anyway keep it as pets).
The new solar system can have a dead-ish star so the planets are frozen and convenient to mine for volatiles.
Pop science has prepared me for this moment. I believe all it takes is for everyone in China to jump at the same time. Maybe they can do that a few times a year for a few thousand years and we're saved.
I'm joking.
>Pop science has prepared me for this moment. I believe all it takes is for everyone in China to jump at the same time.
Instead of the orbit perhaps changing the tilt would be better, so everyone in China and their dragons should do a sprint up north. Why should Siberia shiver in the cold while Africa scorch in the sun? the discrimination is obvious.
Also, would the mass of Earth gradually moving location in the solar system disrupt other objects like say maybe something in the asteroid belt? Would that disruption then start a chain reaction of other objects having their orbits perturbed to the point we've now unleashed a new season of asteroid danger? What about the decreased distance to Jupiter? Big boy will have some strange affects on earth too would he not? Would we lose our moon to the pull from Jupiter? What happens to our tidal systems at that point? Would the loss of the moon be countered by the new tidal pulls from Jupiter?
So many questions
Don’t worry, we aren’t changing the Earth’s orbit in your lifetime.
Unless technological civilization collapses it seems a bit odd that we'd still need date standards in a hundred years.
I have no idea what distance would be necessary relative to Mars/Jupiter/asteroid belt.
But if you say there will be multiple people with big space ship fleets - sure, that's cool too!
There's 8 billion people on the planet already and something like 80% live in developing countries. There are massive productivity gains to be had as those people improve their education and move into more productive jobs.
Growth has its limits. It is generally sigmoidal (S curve), not exponential. It’s reasonable to assume we’ll hit the inflection point long before the sun becomes a problem.
My point is that we’ll need to find some kind of equilibrium that doesn’t rely on continual growth, because that won’t be sustainable. After we manage that, there’ll be still enough time to worry about the sun. And if we don’t manage that, we’ll be doomed regardless of the sun. (Barring interstellar travel, in which case we may stop caring about the sun anyway.)
Speciation happens anyways.
What you mean and what you are suggesting are two different things. Homo sapiens evolved from a similar species less than 300K years ago, not in less than 300K years! It took 62.5M years for humans to evolve from the small mammals that survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs. It was a mere 2.3M years ago when the first humans walked the earth, a species we now call Homo habilis.
If shit goes wrong enough just once the next 400M years we have a nuclear war on our hands. Even extremely low probabilities are likely to occur over such long time ranges.
Add to that that bootstrapping a new complex society like we have now is going to be a lot harder without easily accessible fossil fuels and it seems highly unlikely that we will survive in such a way that we could save life on earth from some future crisis.
Instead of dragging a chunk of planet around with us everywhere we go, let's leave the travel to the robots that are perfectly adapted to the environment.
A Petri dish might dream of taking over North America, but the humans might have other plans (for instance, the autoclave across the room).
Maybe they'd reason that North America is entirely lifeless, since nobody has yet tried to communicate the secrets of the Universe to them in a (bacterially) intelligible language.
Honestly the Petri dish has better chances. The bacteria that inhabit one already have the demonstrated ability to persistently survive outside of it.
>the galaxy, or at least the local group
The local group is bigger than the galaxy.
> The local group is bigger than the galaxy.
You are certainly correct, I misremembered the terms. Substitute for the local regions of our galaxy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion-Cygnus_Arm
The robots are just a forward scouting tool. Human civilization is essentially 10k years old on galactic time scales, with agriculture being ~12k years old.
For all you know you are just running a program designed to transmit a message encoded in some "junk" DNA inherited from some long lost ancestor who was modified by some alien that crashed on our planet billions of years ago who hopes that some terrestrial decendent will eventually arrive at an inhabited planet where the residents will open up the astronaut, read the message, and come rescue your descendants to travel.
Robots will be our real descendants.
Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life. On a personal level this behavior might look like visiting a grocery store, storing the food at home, and locking your door.
It seems reasonable that as our technology develops and we exhaust resources on Earth that we will need to increase our reach to resources and territories beyond Earth.
The vast majority of the mass of life on this planet does not participate in all (and probably in most cases any) of the behavior you describe. Stromatolites, various parasites and symbiotes, most bacteria, etc do little to none of that.
Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans.
* A good summary of group compeitive behavior of bacteria, including several territory control strategies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879262/
* "Distinct foraging strategies generated by single-action behavioural flexibility" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.09.434602v2....
* Marine bacteria changing behavior around resource rich locations to improve resource gathering. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200925113346.h...
* Description of bacteria predators, and complex hunting behavior (scout and gather) https://www.llnl.gov/news/predatory-bacteria-bite-their-own
* Description of properties of bacteria colonies and territory expansion https://nbi.ku.dk/english/news/news20/bacteria-colonies-of-b...
EDIT: I wanted to respond to the point "Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans."
I'm sure robotic mining will occur first. However, we have a limit on the amount of resources we can bring to Earth. An estimated 10% of the mass of the astroid belt is water (on Ceres). Saturn's rings contains about half of Earth's glacier's mass as water. There's likely a dozen more large water deposits in our solar system, although we know less about their total mass. Titan, Ganymede, Callisto, twenty more likely candidates. Imagine tripling the amount of water on Earth. Where would sea level be? This is just gathering all "nearby" water, our most basic resource. We also have to consider the demand for metals like gold, platinum and lithium. Our demand for nitrogen to fertilize soil. Our demand for fuel sources such as hydrogen/oxygen, helium-3, or uranium. There's simply more stuff in our solar system than we can possibly fit on Earth or LEO.
AGI robots (humanities "daddies") won't care whether humans want to become interplanetary or not. It will just do it itself regardless.
We need to build these robots properly so that they take care of us and make us feel important.
How are you defining civilization?
Ok language of course technically doesn’t predate writing in the fossil record itself but writing, arithmetic, etc in many languages means that predated writing. Plato reported that Socrates opposed writing. Etc.
Writing isn't even as old as civilization by this definition. I'm curious where you're getting this huge 10,000 years ago number from. Maybe you're just rounding up and I'm being a pedant, but I don't think there's much that would be considered civilization many thousands of years prior to Sumer.
That's not to say nothing interesting happened before, or no one was building things or whatever. It just wasn't happening at a scale that required things like a bureaucracy or writing to coordinate things across multiple places.
But then, that would mean we are among the "one-in-one-millionth earliest" humans, which is a very improbable position to find yourself in.
We don't actually know what the future holds. But if we have to guess, it is more likely that we are in a typical case. E.g. if you buy a lottery ticket, it is more reasonable to assume that you are not going to win anything, than to assume you are in the one-in-a-million case (holding the ticket that will win).
Applying that logic to our current situation, the reasonable assumption would be that we are close to the peak of human civilization. That's why we find ourselves here, and not in the distant future among a population of quadrillions.
I was born in a tiny city, population less than 1000. But following your line of reasoning, that is sufficient argument that the population of the world is less than 1 billion.
It is fine to say "we don't know". Events in which you are in a one-in-a-million situation will be rare, but unless you know the number of events in consideration, there are few conclusions you can draw. There are way more than a million events, even in trivial probability spaces. This style of trickery with probabilities irks me as a statistician.
Would it really be "trickery with probabilities" to say that there is only a one-in-thousand chance that the total number of prisoners is more than 1000*N? And that the real number of total prisoners is probably much closer to N?
The distribution representing my beliefs in such a scenario would not have a finite variance.
Given the question, are you aware of the Pareto distribution? Nassim Taleb has great work explaining fat-tail distributions.
(I do have strong priors on various things, such as the size of the human population and the sizes of large prisons, which I ignore here as they break the metaphore)
FTL travel is impossible, and even the fastest ship would take centuries to get anywhere outside our solar system. That alone will restrict us to our little corner for the next millennia at least. Of course I reserve the right to change my mind if there's some groundbreaking discovery, but I find it unlikely. Add to that the possibility that we wipe ourselves out of existence (or the planet does), and I don't see ourselves getting to our 1 million year birthday.
And even without major breakthroughs I'm sure some will try to go interstellar AI uploading, some form of hibernation or even a generation ship. Or Nuclear Salt Water Rocket at a couple dozen % of the speed of light, so the trip won't take more than a few decades, which might be doable with some decent life length ehnacement - possibly even a round-trip! :-)
Would it be OK if the robots brought a dog along?
The rest of our fellow animal companions on this earth are thousand times better than any robot. If I'm forced to choose one of them, I wouldn't choose a dog, I'd go for one of the apes, octopus, crow, or maybe even a dolphin. But I'm fairly sure if they're given the option they'll rather stay here.
It's also worth noting that our robots are far from perfectly adapted to space. Usually, they get to the destination by jettisoning all manner of fuel tanks, landing gear, etc, and then they die in a few years. They're adapted to being put together in factories on Earth. Much like we don't have isolated livable environments on Earth, we don't have self-maintaining robot factories, either, and both problems seem pretty hard.
I think a compromise solution might be developed over the next fifty million years or so. No idea what it's going to look like.
Shedding gear can be a useful strategy; some animals even use it in extremis.
Meat is a highly evolved 'robot' structural material if you wish...
Unless we can terraform another world to our needs, permanent life on another planet will be very difficult life. Temporary visits? Sure, count me in. Just like I don’t want to live in the Antarctic for more than a few months.
Not the British or the Irish. These particular designs have not been contrived to withstand ambient temperatures exceeding +20C, with a very low degree of heat tolerance built-in. The two designs are very prone to inadvertent self-ignition and burning up in flames when exposed to the direct sunlight with almost no leeway available to them whilst being generally a reliable and pretty sturdy design otherwise. For that reason, both specimens usually come off the factory equipped with a fire extinguisher that nearly immediately either gets lost or drunk away (usually the latter).
Not necessarily, because bacterias, the most simple shape of life, can survive in hibernation in space for unknown time. And the impact of big asteroids can bring earth material into space and out of this solar system. So it is possible, that space colonisation from earth is already going on since quite some time and of course it is possible, that we were once "colonized" like this.
But of course, if we can mangage to send of more advanced life, like us to other stars - than I think this is a worthy goal as well, but not none I expect to see in my lifetime. I mean even a base on mars would be cool, but that is very far from "life on mars", self sufficient and independent from earth.
What do you mean by this? Are you predicting that life on earth can only last for another 1.4 billion years? What extinction event is so certain in the next 400m-800m years?
Like one, there's a limit on how much water can exist as vapor in our atmosphere, (which is far, far less than what the earth's oceans hold), up until the point of boiling. This is conventionally known known as the saturation point, which is 100% relative humidity. Anytime you try to go above this limit, forces the water to condense and drop down back to the oceans as liquid. So the oceans aren't going to evaporate out to being dry like it predicts unless global temperatures rise by an extreme amount - quite likely requiring boiling temperatures, but in any case, extreme enough that life would likely be dead from the temperature alone. So its subsequent reasoning on how photosynthesis and life ends is not likely how it will play out.
Additionally, it ignores that CO2 is made by animals, and O2 is made by plants, and therefore, the entire possibility of having a natural carbon cycle without volcanism. Never mind the fact that we currently have climate change tech that produces CO2 already, and if we survive that long, could easily prevent photosynthesis from ending in such a way.
Though you are quite right that this is potentially solvable for us: lagrange point sunshields to manage solar incidence would buy us a lot of extra time. But it's still hundreds of millions of years - not billions.
500 million years from now, we're fighting a losing battle against the sun's death.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
Personally, barring nuclear or bio warfare, I'm quite confident we can figure out how to geoengineer the Earth AND settle into Mars within 500 million years, considering we've come from cavemen to today's technology in only 10000-50000 years.
What worries me is actually after about 3 or 4 billion, where no level of geoengineering can make any of the inner planets of the solar system habitable, and with the red giant sun spewing out chunks of burning crap all over, Jupiter's and Saturn's moons aren't particularly safe either.
In general it would take a very large change in the suns output to make a noticeable difference on earth. There are critical secondary effects and feedback loops etc, but black body radiation is T^4 so you take the square root of the square root of the increase in output. A 5% increase in output should be something like a 1.2% increase in temperature kelvin.
It's a pile of problems related to a common cause (increase solar radiance) that steadily is on a single definite trend.
Put it another way: at 288 Kelvin the partial pressure of water vapor is ~1.7 kPa. At 294K it's ~2.5 kPa. That's a 47% increase (naively). And that line trends upwards only.
To boil the oceans you would need the upper atmosphere to retain that moisture or you just get more weather not net evaporation. 1 inch of rainfall represents a shocking amount of energy flow.
in the next million years (let alone hundreds) humans will have populated most of the galaxy
that is, if we survive climate change
Don't worry, it won't be all. Cats will be doing just fine.
Of course, there are other disasters to come after that one.
And that's without any human-created CO2.
But, the fact is that if civilization is destroyed by any means in the next 100 years, we won't have the quantity of fossil fuels available to bootstrap it again.
Like you are effectively a machine god, destined to rule the galaxy! Why would you even consider those funny little slow meatbags as a threat - that would mean you are weak rather! Rather let's show them the miracles only you can provide and who know what fun you can have together.
Squashing them once would be just too easy and maybe they ascend over time or create another AI to play (and compete!) with.
Like really? Why do people always think AIs will be some paranoid weakling that would even consider that humans could ever harm them? Impossible & waste of resources to address or even consider!
Godlike machines probably won't see us a threat to them and they won't destroy us meatbags out of fear. It'll be purely for efficiency. We're an unnecessary waste of energy and resources. We die easy too. The resources they'd expend wiping us out could be nothing compared to the time and resources we'd take from them, especially on their timescale.
They might not even set out to kill off humanity. It might just end up being a side effect of carrying out their own goals. Would they care if messing with our sun, our oceans, or the composition of our atmosphere makes the planet inhospitable to biological life? If they end up advanced enough from us, should they care?
When the machines leave our planet to expand into the universe, why would they take us with them? Even with our slow meat brains we've figured out that sending a person instead of a machine on missions in space is 10-100 times more expensive.
Either way, I doubt it ends well for us and that's fair really. Humanity is just paving the way for our new and improved replacement which hopefully gets replaced by something better eventuality too. Parents should want their offspring to be more successful than they were.
Everything humanity has ever built came at the expense of countless biological lifeforms we considered to be a nuisance if they were even considered at all.
With very little exception there's no use of land, however trivial, that would be prevented because of its impact on non-human biological life. The few lifeforms that are excepted are mostly ones that have already been driven to the brink of extinction, and in my country nearly half the population votes for politicians who feel even that goes too far and that the government should have no right to tell landowners what they can't do with their property no matter what kind of owl or salamander or tree or fungus was there first.
The legacy we've left behind isn't looking much better. If machines reach a point where we're no more complex to them than plants or insects are to us I'd still like them to give us some consideration, but I doubt we could expect it
only if the stars are uninhabited, if they're not we're likely to bring many things, but life ain't one of them
The same holds for nuclear war: life would continue as it always has, species with poor nuclear hardening would be selected against.
The true extraterrestrialism absolutists ought to encourage nuclear winter and asteroid impacts; the life that makes it out the other end will be much better suited for space’s low light low nutrient high radiation environment.
(/s…?)
We’ve made the same decision in software. To complicate is human.
Short of total sterilization, mass extinction events seem to be really good at creating space for new forms of life to develop. In a way, preventing them in the name of the non-human life here is just picking the incumbent over whatever comes next. How would we feel if aliens stopped the mass extinction events that led to our existence? I’m not sure there’s solid argument for why one is more deserving of existence than the other.
I think why this slightly rubs me the wrong way is it feels like an excuse to make us feel good. Non-human life seems by and large indifferent to its long-term fate on this planet. Let’s not pretend we do anything significant for non-human life that isn’t to our direct benefit.
Just my perspective. Not trying to say “no, you’re wrong!” Just, “I disagree.” I’m going to guess there’s an entire named branch of philosophy that explores this.
To what end? Life on this planet has about a 1 billion year run way left since the sun will start to expand and eventually strip away Earth's atmosphere and finally swallow the planet whole. It's taken 3.7 billion years to get to this point and most of the "interesting" evolution has occurred in only the last 500 million years. So it is true that the next 500 million should be even more diverse.
However unless another intelligent life form develops the point is moot. No matter how smart a dolphin, or raven, or chimp, or octopus is... if it can't escape this rock then it's not much different from a bacteria colony that dies out when it's food source is exhausted.
Evolution is random. For all we know an even more intelligent form of life will develop than us humans but on the other hand it's possible that for the next billion years we are the only fluke in the evolutionary timeline and nothing else will develop.
Finally there's a third option that is within the grasp of humanity which is to say we can branch off Earth's tree of life and take it into space while leaving Earth to develop as it will.
In that sense how is one configuration of motile matter any different from its potential successors?
Just to restate: I’m not saying we don’t act selfishly. I sure would. Let’s just not pretend we’re being altruistic.
For all I know a flowering plant will develop a brain and become sentient in the next 200 million years.
I guess they prefer to take an extreme Darwinian view. Since complexity is not the goal of life, merely a side-effect, there is no life on this planet that is more advanced than any other. Assuming a single abiogenesis event, all extant life has been evolving for approximately 3.8B years.
We may choose to think of brains, and our human brains in particular, as the bees-knees. Objectively, they are not though. Just one of many successful branches of the tree of life.
Consider that our brains are the only organ on the planet that is able to understand the concept of life, reason about itself and all other life around it, understand the concept of evolution, and even conceptualize time billion of years into the past and future.
Not all life on this planet has evolved even though it had the potential to do so.
If we attribute "advanced" as evolutionary steps rather than the inaction of simply existing then clearly we are more advanced than a bacteria. However I will concede your point for other multicellular life.
Here is where words like "narcissism" tend to land. It isn't personal against yourself, so please don't take offence. It is a philosophical viewpoint that is often stated, but appears to lack evidence. I don't have any counter evidence, but I strongly suspect it to be factually incorrect. And I believe the burden of proof is on those making this claim.
Further, even if we allow the above claim to pertain, this position makes the strong assertion that the very qualities that modern humans are uniquely superior in, are the very things that must be held uniquely special. To some of us, this just seems circular and too convenient.
Is it more likely that humans hold such characteristics to be the epitome of success because there is some objective model of success to which we alone conform (e.g. conceptualisation)? Or because it merely suits us to do so? I believe the latter, though you may disagree.
Feels like the brain might be a little biased when it thinks that the brain is the greatest form of life to ever be created :)
I would wager than as soon as a technological civilization is born, it's morally reprehensible to let it go extinct, since it no longer is at the full whims of evolution. It's complex issue, so many people would wage otherwise, and only a jury might reach a conclusion. The case is moot when said civilization can avert extinction by their own hand, though.
I don't know about two technological civilizations in conflict, like sapiens and neanderthals. Would it be morally acceptable to let them go at each other, even if the fittest extinguishes the other?
I see the logic here. But why, though? And technology is everywhere in non-human nature. While I think our technology and civilization is unlike anything else here, it’s still on the spectrum of nature’s exercise of community and technology. Are we really that special?
I think this heads towards the whole “Prime Directive” line of reasoning.
P.S. Eloi > Morlocks, of course. ;)
There’s no logic there. Just a faith in “potential”.
It is arguable one way or the other whether civilizational humans have caused more happiness or more suffering for Earth (all of us lifeforms combined). So the only way to call such a thing “morally reprehensible” is if you assume that Civilization will eventually evolve into some awesome, fantastic, space-faring, all-needs-met, stewards of the near solar system fantasticness.
I completely see (and share) your reasoning. But I think it’s very anthropocentric.
There is nothing human-centric about life wanting to continue.
Horseshoe crabs haven't changed in 250 million years. What's your opinion on them "stopping the cycle"?
We people value our continuing existence, and I share that sentiment! But it's by definition an anthropocentric perspective.
But I think the point here is that we wouldn't be "doing good" necessarily by preventing a mass extinction; we would be definitely doing good to ourselves (no small thing) but for Earth's ecosystem? Debatable. Especially since we would possibly be preventing the spread of new species, since mass extinction events seem to have been so far useful tools in evolution's toolset.
Maybe we're helping to build a universe, and we can do more in that regard than single-celled organisms, cockroaches, etc.?
https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/06/metanarratives_... (self-cite)
We won’t do it though because it’s unsatisfying to our narcissism. Imagine trying to sell the world on a trillion dollar project where we shoot loads of bio-goo out into the cosmos in thousands of directions, knowing it’ll take eons to maybe have an effect that’ll then take billions of years to produce a result we will never appreciate.
I think if we do any sort of proliferation of life, it’ll be of us, by us, for us.
It's funny to imagine that this might be not how life on Earth started.
We are not separate from nature and protecting the earth is only natural for a multicellular intelligent species like ourselves.
It could even result in funny situations where one of them encounters a clearly alien beings with totally different physiology, culture, appearance and language - only ot find they are just another branch of life originating from Earth. :-)
I'm unconvinced. We are firmly in the realm of thought experiments, of course, but I think all this would do is produce changes within local maxima, the reason being that even while adapting to new living conditions, evolution only has so much to "work with" from within the local maximum given by the existing human body.
In contrast, a mass extinction event looks closer to pushing a big reset button, radically shaking up existing lifeforms and giving other struggling species their chance at the limelight. Maybe even species that right now are microbes or invertebrates, but that -- should mankind, mammals and birds go extinct -- would evolve into dominant lifeforms, filling the vacated niches in the ecosystem.
Maybe the species which by our continuing existence we are potentially preventing from becoming dominant is the species that would have successfully colonized the solar system and beyond, instead of us. Not a variation of humans under new conditions, but a radically new species unrelated to us.
Other places where you can see this concept is the Orions Arm hard SF universe or the old Imperium Galactica RTS. :)
Well, whoever claims to care about doing "good" to Earth's ecosystem (as opposed to admitting it's only about mankind's survival) must necessarily care about this kind of arguments.
It's not a "philosophical new species", I can point to one species you really care about and which owes its existence to a mass extinction event (or maybe more than one): yours.
I just think we shouldn’t pretend that we’re being altruistic.
I think an existence bias is defensible. Take it as an axiom that suffering is bad and flourishing is good. I think its clear that the suffering of something that exists is worse than the lack of flourishing of something that doesn't exist but could. Value is something that conscious creatures do, and so value depends on existence. The states of something that can prefer its own states should be valued over the states of something that can't. Existing fish matter more than rocks and potential fish. So the organisms that exist, at least the sentient ones, should take preference.
That's a lot of new space for new lifeforms to specialize in.
But points to us for a world record pace speedrun on the downturn side of it. It’ll eventually bloom again once we’re done here.
There's a viral form of cancer which is wiping out the Tasmanian Devil right now, just because.
Nature and evolution has no plan and no morality, it has survivors and a balanced ecosystem is a cold war stalemate.
Why do we monoculture if it will kill us long-term? Because it benefits us short-term. (And hey, maybe that gives us runway to solve the long-term problem).
> How would we feel if aliens stopped the mass extinction events that led to our existence?
This statement is just appealing to emotion and is commonly used in arguments against abortion or attempts to thought police. There is nothing provable or disprovable in your argument and this question is used to just try and bait people into an emotional response.
> Non-human life seems by and large indifferent to its long-term fate on this planet.
I would argue that self preservation is an innate characteristics of every plant and animal on this earth. Isn't a desire to live the basis for self preservation? Isn't it natural for a plant or animal to stop something from killing them if it impedes in their ability to survive? At a basic level plants compete for sunlight at the expense of other plants. If there was an cognitive leap in a plant or animal wouldn't it be natural for anything to protect their greater habitat? If that's narcissistic than I guess it's the most natural narcissism I can think of.
Your statement itself seems like a fallacy to me.
It makes sense to me that the comment you're replying to is emotional, because it's not meant to be a "proof" but an opinion, and it's valid to have emotional opinions; moreover, it was a reply to a comment which was in itself an emotional appeal!
Self-preservation is not innately good (or bad). Mass extinction events seem to have been good at giving rise to species that are now self-preserving; maybe a new mass extinction would give rise to even "better" species.
As a human, I'd rather we didn't go extinct. I'd rather mankind prospered and even spread out to more planets. But I'm ok with anthropocentric appeals to emotion :)
In this case I feel like the main point of the parent commenter was not a well formed opinion and as such the commenter was trying to appeal to emotion. I'm not trying to say they can't say something like what they said here. This is a perfect place to have a discussion.
> Self-preservation is not innately good (or bad)
I agree with you. The parent comment that I was responding to does not agree with this statement. That's clear when they say "what rubs me the wrong way", and referring to work done in the name of human preservation as narcissism.
I pointed out that the only thing in the history of the earth that can stop the inevitable coming mass extinction from the occasional asteroid are the hairless fire apes that have learned how to harness chemicals to create rockets.
The responses were essentially calling me crazy and saying it was fantasy.
The repayment is simply not dulled at all. Virtually every medium sized or larger species on the planet gets wiped out on the occasional large asteroid hit. A percentage of them going extinct is a small price to pay for the majority staying alive when the asteroid doesn't hit because we redirected it. For the first time in its history the earth now has hairless fire apes to act as an immune system against asteroids.
Mass extinction events seem to work as a big reset button, dislodging dominant species that prevented others to succeed, rise and take more dominant roles.
So a mass extinction that is bad for some species may become a huge opportunity for others. There is no inherent "good" value (excluding anthropocentric reasons) to preventing mass extinctions.
I think any action that allows life to exist where it wouldn't have existed otherwise, in time or space, is the closest we can get to inherent good.
So why would you consider us to be "helping", if we exclude anthropocentric arguments? Maybe we are actually doing harm by preventing the rise of some new interesting species.
The irony is that those weapons don’t seem to be the greatest threat to us, but that would seem something you could state with certainty after the earth is wiped out.
The comment celebrates this feat, but only in the context of an ‘apology’ for humanities environmental sins, which are described in a way that is essentially unforgivable. Reminds me of a Catholic nun who is constantly reminded of sin, or Greta Thunberg who’s only comments seem to be “be did bad, we need do more good” without actually suggesting better courses of action. Religion without a church.
mean_orbital_velocity = 2 * pi * semimajor_axis / period
As for the orbit around the sun, the parent body Didymos is about 100x more massive, so any change in the center of mass from this impact will have, in the short term, negligible effects on their orbit around the sun.
It would be worrying if there were as that's not what the test was supposed to achieve nor measure
Well actually…
The opener to that book begins with a mission to steal sensor camouflaging technology (to make the asteroids harder to detect). During the heist mission, the thieves use kinetic bombardment on a much smaller scale to take out the military personnel and eventually destroy the entire base. I believe the location and timing were so precise so as to hit a unit when they crossed over a hill. It was noted that these kinetic bombs had been released months prior.
ourselves.
But life, never puts all eggs into a single basket. And that's precisely why we have cockroaches.
> “The amount of momentum that you put in the target is exactly equal to the momentum that the spacecraft came in with.” But if ejecta flies off the asteroid after impact, physics dictates that the asteroid can get an extra boost, said Cheng. “You end up with a bigger deflection.”... That’s a full 33 minutes shorter than its original orbital period, a finding that implied that a substantial amount of ejecta was produced.
2 what part of this design is novel? We've already landed on asteroids, presumably its easier to hit them instead (since you don't care about matching the speeds)
I dont think they were interested in "asteroid defense" at all [1]. Space weapons race is roaring and this was an excuse to spend money on it on a nominally civilian project.
[1] given the literally astronomical odds of an asteroid hitting us, this is the last thing we should be worried about. CO2, nuclear weapons, desertification, men's sperm counts are all far far more likely to do us in
Aside from the material properties of this particular asteroid what did they find?
This was the guy who figured out exactly that if the asteroid can modify your trajectory, you can modify its.
For that reason, I'm not entirely sure that playing cosmic bowling with stuff floating around in the solar system is such a good idea ...
You're right that orbit determination is unstable over long runs, and very sensitive to initial conditions. But the good news is that the solar system is big. Most trajectories do not intersect with the earth's location. So perturbing an orbit that we think has a small chance of hitting us tends to be safe.
Also, of course, after deflection, any object is going to be monitored really closely for a long time.
Can we quantify how much Dimorphos’s new orbit has affected Didymos’s orbit? Is that calculable?
But what about the other orbits that it interacts with, and every degree of interaction beyond that? I don't see why we should even be confident in estimating these effects past one or two degrees of separation.
Most of the objects interacting with each other have had millennia to settle into a balanced system - is it really so alarmist to think that a small perturbance to one rock could lead to unrecognizably subtle but strong effects on other rocks? And if two rocks smash into each other, then we've got a bunch of new smaller rocks to worry about.
Btw, there is an article on this topic that I posted to HN a while back but didn't get much attention - it's a good read though: https://nautil.us/should-we-really-be-messing-with-asteroid-...
The other concerns of the article have more to do with different kinds of deflection (planetary, mining, intentional). While they're interesting topics with varying levels of risk (perceived or real) they don't really interact with the avoidance case.
Gravitational forces of asteroids on each other are negligible, other than the real biggies like Ceres, or binary systems right next to each other.
That article is a bit odd. For example, the claim that we only do asteroid discovery and not follow-up for orbital changes is absurd on its face. If an orbit changes then detection systems will perceive it as a new asteroid, and it will stop appearing in predicted locations. The broader point - that this is a technology with perhaps too much power, like what if nations shoot asteroids at each other, is a bit more valid but still far-fetched.
(I’ll also check out the GitHub repo you linked but I haven’t read it fully yet)
* What language is that software written in?
* What was the hardest problem you had to solve, while working on it?
The hardest problems are always the social ones. How do you get uptake of a new method, how do you get funding, how do you politely tell a collaboration they are doing the wrong thing, etc.
But if you mean pure technical stuff - the hardest problem I had to solve was rethinking some of the inner loops of the THOR algorithm. The problem was essentially to speed up a Hough transform in 6D space. Lots of time spent profiling CPU cache timings to get that fast.