Really cool though, like something out of Dwarf Fortress. I’d never heard of these so thanks for sharing.
Obviously we can't deflect Earth from its orbit. This project showed we're able to deflect 'small' asteroids. In time, we may be able to deflect bigger ones.
@ Some point, there will be an incoming asteroid that's too big to make it avoid collision. When (not if!) that happens, only option might be to escape into space, watch Earth being hit, and maybe return there some day.
Chances are this will happen so far in the future, that humans don't exist any more, or have moved to other planets or even star systems, with Earth being just one of many homes.
So... who cares. As long as we can avoid species-killing event long enough for significant numbers of us to get off this rock, our species could survive. That is, if we don't nuke ourselves first.
There are two things that could actually end us. One is a celestial disaster powerful enough to sterilize the terrestrial part of the planet. That’s very unlikely, but not imposible. The other is we replace ourselves with a competing organism, either biological or mechanical that’s not human, doesn’t need us, but is so much better than us at life that we can’t compete. Like general AI with a physical presence, or a genetically or cyberneticly modified super-human that lacks humanity, that we wouldn’t consider human. Those are highly possible scenarios over the next 200 years.
Like, reasonable scenario: Climate change causes mass starvation and environmental inhospitability. Mass-deaths and some very violent migration happens. The last few years have showed us how fragile our infrastructure is, right? Between covid-shutdown supply-chain problems and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we're seeing how fragile civilization is.
It's not crazy to imagine privation leading to violence leading to destroyed infrastructure leading to more privation in a vicious cycle.
This ultimately could lead to a return to a comparatively primitive society where anything that relies on sophisticated supply-chains is out of reach. Like moving 100 years back in time. But the tech of the day depended on far easier mining, sources which are now mined out. So we've destroyed the bottom rungs of the ladder that we no longer need... until we do.
And also, industrial-age tech is carbon-intensive. Is it possible to build decent solar cells and wind power without a global supply chain? Or will we burn down the world for power, causing even more climate change, which will create another vicious cycle?
So we could be looking at a technological and civilization-level regression that wouldn't be remedied until another geological era.
As for people dumb enough to make the weapons in large numbers (https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-doomsday-status-6-nucl...)
We've already seen localized extirpation of humanity this way--many areas of the New World were depopulated by disease. It was probably not a 100% kill but if the survivors don't have the right skills (and note that most people do not have the right skills to survive in a collapse scenario) they'll die anyway.
Survivalists always are about maintaining existence at a lower tech level--but that's relying on things they can't replace. That's not going to be viable in the long term. Not to mention the problem that sufficiently hungry people will go after any stores of food they're aware of.
Obviously. That’s very low though. From history we know we survived a near extinction event where the human population declined to the neighborhood of ten thousand.
It would be extremely unlikely.
10,000 spread over the planet--extinction.
More likely we never make it there because of a host of other, more boring reasons, mostly; we won't need anything like it.
Who, exactly are we defending ourselves against? A once-in-a-million-years impact that this very test showed we have a conceptual means of resolving?
Why do it for the masses who are ungrateful and only complain instead of trying to help? They’re welcome to come along for the ride, but they’ll always sit there and cry/complain/be annoying.
So it's technically true, but do you really want to live in a world where we will never explore space or pursue technology that could one day save the species because we're afraid of what the worst of us might do with it? Sounds awfully depressing to me. Might as well consign the rest of humanity to grubbing plants out of the earth for all eternity. I'd prefer to see us blow ourselves to bits with some crazy futuristic technology than have no hope for our future besides running around in fields until the expanding Sun destroys the planet, which we'd have no hope of being able to deal with.