United Nations to Adopt Asteroid Defense Plan | Hacker News Reader

United Nations to Adopt Asteroid Defense Plan

scientificamerican.com

57 pointsLibertatea63 comments

The United Nations is not a world government. Please keep repeating this until it sinks in.

It's a treaty organization designed to prevent another world war. As such, it's worked kinda sorta okay. Not great, but you could argue that it worked, so that's something. It's also provided somewhat of a permanent diplomatic forum, that's pretty good too.

There are a lot of technical reasons why the UN is not a world government and can never be. The biggest is that there is no representation of the actual people being governed there. Because it's a treaty organization, it just has the representation of the world governments. Unfortunately, we live in a world where your government's interests and your own do not always align very well at all. It's also bound by treaties. Treaties have a tendency to be interpreted all sorts of ways by the various parties involved. The more parties, the more room for interpretation there is.

There's also no feedback loop for the possibility that they might do something wrong. There's no independent judiciary, there's no rule of law.

I could go on, but it should be obvious. The UN isn't a world government. Folks can pretend that it is, and the UN itself can labor under the illusion that it is, but structurally it isn't made to be one.

So sure, let WHO do it's thing and let various nations pitch in to put those little blue helmets on guys to try to prevent conflict. Lots of good things for the UN to do that kind of fall under the "treaty org to prevent future world wars". But asteroid defense? Not even close. Not unless there's a chance the Russians might start lobbing asteroids at the US or something.

I'm not sure why, if the WHO falls under the UN's mandate, that asteroid defense wouldn't. They're both collective efforts to monitor and combat things that aren't human.

Moreover, there are obvious military applications for certain asteroid defense techniques. For example, if the U.S. was planning a Bruce Willis-style nukes-in-space approach to deflecting an asteroid, I guarantee the Russians would care (and vice versa).

I think there are a lot of things the UN ends up doing simply because it provides a somewhat permanent diplomatic forum for nations of the world. That's fine.

I'm not saying that the UN won't end up handling asteroid defense, or various other world-government-ish things. I'm saying it wasn't designed to do so. Big difference.

I don't know how far you stretch the intent and structure before something breaks. If I had to bet, that's a long way away. But still, people should be aware of what's going on. The results you get from UN programs are not always going to be what you expect, and there's good reasons for that.

Or to put differently, if the UN evolves into doing something for everybody, it stands a significant risk of losing focus on its initial mission. Over the next few decades, the organization could easily become a destabilizing force in the world instead of a stabilizing one.

There's no corrective action to tell the UN that it's a victim of scope creep, so they could decide to try to do dang near anything, whether it's a good idea, whether the tools exist, whether it's just some half-baked crackpot idea, or whether it's just an elaborate bribery scheme. There's no feedback loop -- one of my initial points. Anything you can imagine, you can imagine the UN doing. That's not a recipe for a healthy future for the world.

Indeed it is neither necessary nor appropriate that the UN itself take on the job of asteroid defense. What it can reasonably and appropriately do is say to national governments such as the US and Russia, which possess space agencies, "hey, it would be good if you guys could get something moving on this" and "if it would help to have a forum for international coordination of efforts, that's what we're here for".

>International Asteroid Warning Group” for member nations to share information about potentially hazardous space rocks. If astronomers detect an asteroid that poses a threat to Earth, the U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

I suggest the "U.N.'s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space" be immediately renamed to the "Civil Coordinated Committee on Peaceful Outer Space" (AKA C3POs.)

This is a bit ridiculous, knowing that the UN is already mostly incapable of dealing with any kind of serious humanity threat such as conflicts killing tons of unarmed civilians, now who seriously expects them to have anything robust in place to protect the whole planet?

Besides, it does not matter if "NASA has not been appointed" to deal with this - the day we notice a large object, it's pretty obvious one country or organization, somewhere, is going to try something about it if it means human race survival. There's no need for the UN at that level.

Moreover, the article mentions colliding a spacecraft with an asteroid to deflect is orbit, but this is actually not very efficient. There has already been other propositions such as orbiting a small spacecraft around a large asteroid to deflect its orbit in a much more effective way over time.

"knowing that the UN is already mostly incapable of dealing with any kind of serious humanity threat such as conflicts killing tons of unarmed civilians"

This is an example of what is known as "false-consensus bias" - you believe people agree with you (without any evidence that they do) because you believe in your own argument so strongly.

At least until a couple of years ago, the approval rating of the UN was pretty good globally, especially in places they act directly - http://www.gallup.com/poll/147854/gets-approval-disapproval-...

The "false-consensus bias" pretty much describes this the modern internet we know today. There's always a few other people who believe the same things you do. And finding them on the internet is way to easy.

There was no implied consensus in what you quote. It wasn't even about approval or people's opinions of the UN. I think you read this statement as something like "everyone believes that the UN is mostly incapable" (which would be about popular opinion) rather than "the UN is mostly incapable" (which can be measured, in this case, by reduction of deaths after the UN gets involved (or lack thereof, if that's the case)).

The following bit -- "now who seriously expects" -- makes clear the author's intent. The expected answer is "no one", in conflict with reality.

Well that survey is very choice in its terms. As another posted, there are more than enough countries where the UN has an active role where they are not high on everyone's list. Haiti comes to mind very quickly to me.

Remove countries where the UN is not serving in some capacity and I wonder how many approve of it. Its easy to approve of the UN until a) your putting up with them in your backyard, b) your country pays most of their bills.

> At least until a couple of years ago, the approval rating of the UN was pretty good globally

Oh, like in Rwanda ?

The WHO is pretty damned good at preventing the outbreak of new contagious diseases, so much so that people make jokes about how overhyped things were.

This. Also, remember that infectious disease called smallpox?

yet, for some reason the WHO is really sucking at finishing off polio.

eh, it's taking a lot longer than they expected, but they've done pretty well so far.

http://www.unfoundation.org/what-we-do/campaigns-and-initiat...

> Polio, which can cause lifelong paralysis, can be prevented with a vaccine that costs only $0.50. In the 1980s, polio paralyzed at least 1,000 children every day all over the world, but today, after international efforts to immunize every child everywhere, 5 million people are walking who would otherwise be paralyzed and the world is almost polio-free.

> Since the Initiative’s inception in 1988, the number of polio cases has dropped by 99 percent.

It's not entirely their fault. The places where polio still exists are very isolated, and often actively hostile to Western medical teams. Matters have not been helped by the CIA (and others) using vaccination operations as cover for their spies.

isnt that the desease that basically only exists in Northern Nigeria and the Gange Valley ?

They have a lot more to fight than the desease to win in those places.

Playing Devil's Advocate here: what UN entity, besides WHO, has a track record of accomplishing something positive?

Off the top of my head: IMO, ITU, UNESCO, UNICEF, Chemical Weapons Ban Org, IAEA.

Also there is the no world war 3 thing, which is obviously over-simplifying but the UN probably should get some credit for.

The UN is a mess but it does do a lot of good, the world needs a forum for international multilateral discussions and coordination, it ain't perfect but it sure could be worse.

FAO, UNHCR

UNFPA - http://www.unfpa.org/public/

United Nations Population Fund is doing good work to reduce obstetric fistula, and other poor outcomes from giving birth; also about FGM.

> how overhyped things were.

It's rather because of mainstream media that the hype occurs.

The UN is an interface that allows willing governments to interoperate.

It fails when various governments fail to reach an agreement.

That being said, I believe it would be a good idea to have cooperation on that matter via the UN considering that it could mean deploying weapons in space which is quite controversial.

The UN is what it is, not what you want it to be.

The individual countries which you expect to stop an asteroid get a free pass for not intervening in genocides, while the UN gets the blame.

And suddenly you're also an expert in asteroid mitigation. Your knowledge is so shallow that the only one impressed is yourself.

> The individual countries which you expect to stop an asteroid get a free pass for not intervening in genocides, while the UN gets the blame. And suddenly you're also an expert in asteroid mitigation. Your knowledge is so shallow that the only one impressed is yourself.

What's wrong with you ? You have a problem with my comments? Care to come back with arguments instead of shallow "i don't like what you say" void comments?

Of course the UN gets the blame for not intervening in genocides, since the UN was created to avoid conflicts. That's their mission and they have been incapable of showing any authority to prevent or mitigate wars where they occur.

And I never claimed to be an expert in asteroid mitigation, but mind you, I read a lot and I have seen a lot on this subject. Why do you assume I am ignorant? Do I have to show my credentials every time I post something?

sigh

This is not the pub. You can't dismiss something with the wave of a hand just because you heard about an even neater idea. Because we all have Google at our fingertips, and personally I have 'Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids' ( http://www.amazon.com/Mitigation-Hazardous-Comets-Asteroids-... ) on my desk.

Things are just not as simple as you present them, and I hope you'd realize that if you put in the time and effort.

Yeah! It's also ridiculous because of the quote at the beginning: " When a meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February, the world’s space agencies found out along with the rest of us, on Twitter and YouTube. "

which totally demonstrates how unnecessary this is and how " it's pretty obvious one country or organization, somewhere, is going to try something about it if it means human race survival"

I guess the organizations that will be doing something about it will be either 'Twitter' or 'youtube', my money is on Twitter. Have you tried Bootstrap, they will totally be able to handle this issue.

Chelyabinsk-type cases are exactly why this is needed. Asteroids big enough to cause mass extinction events are rare, and hardly worth talking about except in the extreme long term.

However, much smaller asteroids that could potentially destroy a city are more common. If it struck in the right place during a contentious period of international politics (say, the Cuban Missile Crisis), it could easily be mistaken for a preemptive nuclear strike. Of course, the radiation pattern would quickly disprove this, but such evidence is not likely to defuse the situation if there's a lot of hot-headed people running around.

In such a case, just knowing ahead of time that it's coming would prevent a catastrophic loss of civilization. That's not even counting the humanitarian effects of evacuating the people in the predicted strike zone.

> Yeah! It's also ridiculous because of the quote at the beginning: " When a meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February, the world’s space agencies found out along with the rest of us, on Twitter and YouTube. "

It's because an asteroid of that size usually goes undetected and it's not the UN involvment which is going to change that. This was a very small piece of rock, it would have never destroyed the whole human race. This kind of asteroid is relatively frequent. They just don't fall next to populated areas very often, that's all.

However, NASA is closely watching and building a database of the most massive rocks out there (and they are still doing it, if I recall correctly).

Any opportunity for international cooperation should be taken, even if you believe it is frivolous.

International cooperation already exists, and outside of the UN scope as well.

  There has already been other propositions such as orbiting
  a small spacecraft around a large asteroid to deflect its
  orbit in a much more effective way over time.

Any citations on why this is more effective?

I don't think they're guessing on how to mitagate. The US has spent some effort to simulate exactly how to get rid of asteroids. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOcNbAV6SiI

> Any citations on why this is more effective?

From what I remember, it's because you change the center of gravity of the whole system, not just once at impact, but constantly since it continues orbiting around it.

But how much further out do you have to detect it to do this?

Here's a piece of a paper on this :

Deflecting a larger asteroid would require a heavier spacecraft, more time spent hovering, or more lead time. However, in the special case in which an asteroid has a close Earth approach, followed by a later return and impact, the change in velocity needed to prevent the impact can be many orders of magnitude smaller if applied before the close approach5. For example, the asteroid 99942 Apophis (2004 MN4), a 320-m asteroid that will swing by the Earth at a distance of about 30,000 km in 2029, has a small probability (10-4) of returning to strike the Earth in 2035 or 2036 (ref. 6). If it is indeed on a return impact trajectory, a deflection of only about 10-6 m s-1 a few years before the close approach in 2029 would prevent a later impact (A. Carusi, personal communication). In this case, a 1-tonne gravitational tractor with conventional chemical thrusters could accomplish this deflection mission as only 0.1 newtons of thrust would be required for a duration of about a month. Should such a deflection mission prove necessary, a gravitational tractor offers a viable method of controllably steering asteroid 99942 Apophis away from an Earth impact.

Coming from this article : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7065/full/438177a...

I'll need to look into that. Obviously not just before impact, this is something you would have to do several months of maybe years before it is expected to hit, I guess. I'll come back when I find it again.

> "the UN is already mostly incapable of dealing with any kind of serious humanity threat"

This is an argument for making the UN stronger, not stopping it ever acting.

See also: Ed Lu's excellent Long Now seminar. http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/jun/18/anthropocene-astron...

Short version: Stopping an asteroid is more about early detection than anything else.

This is how the International Fleet begins. First asteroids, next Buggers.

I was more thinking about the opening of "Rendezvous with Rama":

"Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On 30 June 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometres - a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. Again, on 12 February 1947, yet another Russian city had a still narrower escape, when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less than four hundred kilometres from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivalling that of the newly invented uranium bomb.

In those days, there was nothing that men could do to protect themselves against the lst random shots in the cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of the Moon. The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twety-first century there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice. The human race had spread from pole to pole and so, inevitably, at 09.46 GMT on the morning of 11 September, in the exceptionally beautiful summer fo the year 2077, most of the inhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball appear in the eastern sky. Within seconds it was brighter than the sun, and as it moved across the heavens - at first in utter silence - it left behind it a churning column of dust and smoke.

Somewhere above Austria it began to disintegrate, producing a series of concussion so violent that more than a million people had their hearing permanently damaged. They were the lucky ones."

Rama and "Hammer of the Gods" both were evoked for me during the Chelyabinsk event. Another world-shattering celestial event that could have altered human history if only it's million year journey had been off by just a few seconds.

Finally! It always frustrated me that this threat was never taken very serious, even though it could wipe out humanity.

Considering the fact that in billions of years of evolution only a few meteors have caused mass extinctions I have always been confident that we will not just happen to live in a time when one of the big ones hit. Human civilization has only existed for a very short time and I think it really would be like winning the lottery to get hit by a civilization ending meteor even in the next 10,000 years (although I'm no expert in the topic, simply looking at Earth's past).

Talking out of my ass here, but I'd assume the problem is one of resources. While unemployment may be high, demand for "smart" people (which you'd need to work on anti-human threats) is way to high. Combine that with technological feasibility, and the resources could probably have been spent elsewhere better. Today though, the technology is probably "common" (relatively speaking) enough to spend some resources on the problem.

Interesting to do a thought experiment on what it would have been like if humanity had known that the Russian meteor was coming a few months in advance. maybe they would have said there is a 20 percent chance of it coming down and causing major death and destruction. governments would have invested millions in trying to stop it. will smith would have been sent up in a rocket to stop it. everyone would have had big parties and said their last goodbyes.

Couple months? You could maybe track it and predict a large impact zone, and evacuate if needed. No chance to move it; nobody has a rocket that can be ready in that timeframe, much less a vehicle to intercept and move the rock. And even if you could, it was such a small rock that it's probably cheaper to let it hit and replace everything on the ground. For launch alone: F9 is $54M, Proton $72M, and SLS $1.5B (should it ever exist). There's not much the Chelyabinsk could have hit that would cost as much as trying to stop it. Even pretty big rocks have to get lucky to cause much damage, as sparse as development is, but since you can't tell where exactly they will hit until quite late, it may be better to move any sufficiently large Earth-interceptor to avoid the possibility of an unlucky hit.

Apparently, a few reporters were able to lay their hands on some early sketches of what the system may look like, which had previously been under wraps due to the obvious potential for offensive warfare, rather than just asteroid defense:

http://bit.ly/VmUtoj

Edit: I guess you had to be born before 1980 to get it.

I'm early 80's, while I get the cheek ;) I can't see that working on a serious level.

Neil de Grasse Tyson has a great view on this problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaW4Ol3_M1o

Edit: And more detail on methods that may actually work... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-ReuLZ2quc

I'm all for private solutions. Leave my money in my pockets.

If there are no solutions, so what? face it like a man. If you're so scared to die, then you'll donate YOUR own money.

Not mine.

As a moderate libertarian, I think most things should be handled by the free market and the government should play a smaller role in our lives, but some important things like basic scientific research are undersupplied by the market and government intervention is a reasonably effective way to solve this problem. Asteroid defense would seem to be a textbook example.

Private solutions? You think that Asteroid defence has a business plan? How would a private solution generate a profit?

private != profit.

Agreed. But given the enormous expense involved in constructing a private Asteroid defence system, what would the motivation be for the private organisation(s) involved?

i don't know. Living to see another day? And long before the threat of impact - feeling good about contributing to something positive for the Earth? I don't understand this obsession with the neoliberal idea that money is the sole driving motivation for everyone in the world - and I'm worried that it's going to be a self-fulfilling model.

Just FYI, there already is a private foundation that is trying to do this very thing:

http://b612foundation.org/

Then I'll do nothing, because I know I'll get the benefit of someone else spending their own money to save me, no matter what I do. But certainly I'll not expend my own money or effort to save the world, because I definitely don't want to spend it saving you and your ilk.

thankfully, not everyone on this planet is as morally bankrupt as you, nor does charity require full participation of the populace to function adequately.

On the contrary, it is my morality that makes me content with a cosmic death sentence for any race to commit the crime of endorsing your intensely evil version of morality.

If your views are to prevail, I eagerly await the universe's judgement, sentence, and punishment, for the human race is irredeemable.

Please, close the UN.

I'm sure they are going to send a strongly worded letter to those Aliens just a few month after they have arrive. Just about in time as they are right now only a few month away from condemning the Obama administration for the NSA spy program.

Nice way to allocate money extracted from taxpayers. Asteroids almost never visibly hit Earth, it's impossible to seriously protect yourself when it hits you or your neighbor, and it will sure take hundreds of billions of dollars to build some space equipment to "deflect" asteroids. It's way more profitable than the war with mythical terror.

Suggestion for UN, Obama or pretty much any government: go with your awesome idea on Kickstarter and spend your donations on presentation, video, blueprints, prototypes etc. If people like it, they'll send you money to implement it. If they don't, then please shove your rifles down your totalitarian ass instead of pointing them at the peaceful citizens.

Edit: downvoters are invited to explain how exactly UN earns money. Who has the freedom to give or not give money to UN based on its performance and where does this money come from?

I didn't down vote you. Nor do I think people are down voting you because of what you said in your edit (about where the UN gets their money).

I think you're being down voted because you said Asteroids almost never visibly hit Earth. It might be true as far as extinction events, but when (not IF) it does happen and it's the right size we'll all vanish.

IMO it's prudent to at least have these discussions and have something in place. If the UN is capable of the undertaking is a different story.

If we see it coming in time, deflecting an asteroid requires a nuclear bomb mounted on a rocket of the kind we use for launching space probes; not petty cash, but nowhere near hundreds of billions of dollars either.

The "if we see it coming in time" part is the key.

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