Chinese boffins advocate nuking nearby asteroids – it’s the only way to be sure Chinese academics have suggested nuclear weapons are the only effective way to destroy an asteroid that threatens to collide with Earth – if it's detected at short notice. A paper published in Scientia Sinica Technologica argues that nukes are needed when humanity has little warning of an incoming space rock. If we spot such …
I worked for BT years ago. I visited a major datacenter and interviewed the site manager. Every year they had a 'turn off the mains power' test, to check that the emergency generators really would start up and keep the whole site running. He would invite a major customer to come along and literally 'press the Big Red Button' (BRD) that turned the power off. Half of them simply would not do it.
Conversely, I visited a very important computer room (where a major oil company ran its geological modelling system). There was a BRD in that room too, and I kept my hands firmly in my pockets to avoid the strong urge to press it.
Icon, 'cos, well, that is what this this is all about really, a very big bang (for mankind), a minor blip for the solar system.
Someone reading your comment may or may not have, as a very small child decades ago, innocently asked his grandma and grandpa “what does this red button here by your front door do?” and pressed it just as Grandpa was uttering the words “DON’T PRESS IT!”.
It may or may not have been an alarm panic button wired to the local police station, and aforementioned incident may or may not have gone down in family lore.
(*looks innocent*)
"International laws currently do not allow the use of nuclear weapons in space, though one imagines that weighed against the extinction of humanity an exception could be made."
- a body that would cause human extinction is unlikely to be taken care of by any reasonable number of nuclear weapons we could send up in time.
- what about a body that doesn't cause extinction, but is just really bad? I can certainly see lots of people arguing over the precedent it would set, and who actually suffers more harm and whether it's worth it to mitigate that. Meanwhile of course, the cost to send the weapons goes up as it gets closer...
- what about a body that doesn't cause extinction, but is just really bad? I can certainly see lots of people arguing over the precedent it would set, and who actually suffers more harm and whether it's worth it to mitigate that. Meanwhile of course, the cost to send the weapons goes up as it gets closer...
Feel free to draw comparisons with our collective approach to anthropogenic climate change.
[quote]what about a body that doesn't cause extinction, but is just really bad? [/quote]
and what if this non totally lethal object was going to impact, say, China, would the West still push the launch button to save them ?
what if the impact zone was North America / Canada, and the optimum launch date would be for Russia / China to do the good deed, can we trust them to do so ?
would anyone actually care if the target was South Africa ........................
I truly believe that even in our darkest moments, humanity WOULD work to solve the crisis, but am also afraid that HUMANS would still put their personal beliefs in front of the consequences :o(
maybe we would need an international overseer, a body that controls ALL space launched missiles, and I can also see that NOT getting off the launch pad as it were :o(
as a last thought, maybe we need to REMOVE this from the control of people with MONEY, as they NEVER have the best interests of all at heart
A BBC Radio 4 programme this morning claimed that using an AI tool to do something when there is a dedicated app for that uses 30 times the electricity. One father presenters said one of her friends uses ChatGPT as a calculator. Which it can, apparently, mimic, but at enormous energy cost. MicroSoft has admitted enormous increase in electricity consumption for AI processes. It is on a par, I believe with Crypto currencies using BlockChain.
We're doomed, aren't we? You can tell me, I can take it.
That depends a LOT on the composition of the asteroid, and how the nuke is delivered.
Ideally, you figure out you have a problem 50+ years in advance. In that case, you fly a small mining/manufacturing plant, and throw rock off the asteroid until there is no problem. Or maybe just a bunch of white- & black-sided fans that play "whiteside" "blackside" for a few years.
If there is no time for that, then an exploratory mission to figure out if we have a rock pile, a big rock, or something in between can be sent for a quick & up-close flyby. We use THAT to plan our strikes.
Yes, strikes. I can think of no good reason to deploy an all-or-nothing solution when extinction looms. For maximum boost for the buck, you want to mostly bury the bomb & thereby generate a strong kick when the atoms reform into a very hot gas cloud. But you don't do just one. You line up perhaps dozens. Timed an hour or two apart, and with autonomous final approach.
I want LOTS of chances to get this right.
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