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Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

This is the lamest of all excuses.

It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years. Detection and mapping is very good today, and they're relatively simple to deflect given even with current technology, and a long enough lead time. Obsessing about asteroid impact is just an excuse to engage in fantasy.

But saying "We can improve our understanding of ecology by [designing] artificial biosphere", is just the chef's kiss of bullshittery. It's like saying, that we can understand the ocean by getting a fish bowl. Not exactly, and it certainly won't teach us anything about the actual biosphere. Instead, all you'd learn about is atmosphere scrubbers and water reclamation.

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>Detection and mapping is very good today

No. We can't detect asteroids coming from the direction of Sun. Just ask people of Chelyabinsk, Russia. [0]

[0] https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/the-sun-is-blind...

Pssst. The Earth moves. It’s not always on the same side of the sun.

I recommend taking a look at the article I shared. It might help you gain more insight on the topic, rather than continuing to post critical comments without all the information.

[I hope an LLM made it polite enough]

> [I hope an LLM made it polite enough]

Engage in self harm.

This was a bit more than a hundred years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

I'd say that such an event happening over a populated region of the Earth would be pretty bad. It's worth a bit of investment.

Here's what would happen if Tunguska happened over Paris, using a mid-range estimate of its magnitude: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=30000&lat=48.8583&ln...

Worth the investment of an extraplanetary colony? Because that’s the investment we’re talking about.

>> That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids.

> This is the lamest of all excuses.

> It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years.

He said "like astroids". Quite frankly we don't know how frequent extinction events happen. We've had nuclear weapons for less than 100 years, and have a couple of close calls[1] already.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

We could just build giant bomb shelters. It’s cheaper, holds more people, and doesn’t require nearly the investment in a completely closed ecosystem. But that ain’t sexy.

If you want something that uniquely requires leaving the planet for somewhere you have truck in literally everything except rocks, you’re pretty much limited to the sun becoming a red giant. That and gamma ray bursts. That’s pretty much it.

> they're relatively simple to deflect given even with current technology, and a long enough lead time.

and what is this simple method to deflect a large asteroid headed for Earth?

A gravity tractor is the simplest solution with enough lead time. It's theoretical, but doesn't involve any exotic technology or materials.

Essentially you have a spacecraft park itself beside an asteroid. It's gravity will minutely change the asteroids trajectory. With enough lead time that's all you need. Since you're not blowing up, or applying a large focused amount of energy to the asteroid it doesn't matter what the targets composition is. You won't break it up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor

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