Can we really protect ourselves from unexpected falling rocks from space?
Apparently, just hours ago (as I write this) on Sunday, a large heretofore unknown asteroid (2018 GE3) raced across the southern sky, with absolutely no warning. Based on the amount of light it was reflecting, astronomers put its size at somewhere between 50 and 100 meters wide.
For comparison, the “Tunguska” impactor that leveled forests in Siberia in 1908 was 60 meters wide, and the rock that exploded in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia a few years ago was about 20 meters wide.
So, if this thing had hit us, it could have caused a lot of damage. A lot. It wouldn’t have been an extinction-level event, but it could have caused a lot of people to have a very, very bad day.
Keep Watching The Skies! (Please!)
The point here is that this was a very large object, and it managed to go completely unnoticed until less than a day before its closest approach to earth…and, there’s really no telling how many others that are that big (or bigger!) still out there.
As someone with a vested interest in human civilization being around at least until I can upload my brain into an immortal, slightly less buff, android body, this is distressing. Almost no government in the world takes the threat of asteroid impacts seriously, which is astonishing, as it’s the one natural disaster that we as a species could actually prevent!
All we need is a concerted effort to survey the sky looking for these Near Earth Objects (NEOs) so that we can predict which, if any, will ever cross our orbit and maybe impact our planet. That cost, while not trivial, is well within the reach of many world governments, and is far less than the costs that will be incurred in the recovery after an impact by an object of the size that flew past us on Sunday.
And I don’t just mean rebuilding costs. Consider the refugee crisis that might result after such an event. Or, the food crisis that we could face if the impactor took out a huge swath of America’s farmland.
Push It! Push It Real Slow!
Assuming that we put an adequate early detection system in place, and we actually find a large object headed our way, how would we handle it? There are several things we could do, all of which hinge on our (very) early detection of the object. But, assuming we’ve got a few years warning, here are some things we could do.
Nuke it—Despite what Hollywood has told you, this is actually a horrible idea. Simply blowing the thing up will just create a lot of smaller impactors, mostly headed right for us. Yes, there’s a good chance that many of those smaller rocks would burn up in our atmosphere, but any significantly large rocks that are left over (and there will be some), will be that much harder to deflect and could spread damage over an even larger area.
Push it—This technique also sends a missile to the object, but, the objective is to attach one or more small thrust rockets to the object that would begin to constantly push the object and slowly change its orbit.
Pull it—This idea doesn’t require us to touch the object at all. Instead, we send a massive object of our own to intercept the object. The mass/gravity of our interceptor then draws the object slowly out of its old orbit and into a new one that misses the earth.
Paint it—This is my favorite. This solution sends the equivalent of a cosmic graffiti artist to the object. The object is then covered in a highly reflective material (think white paint, or foil). This change in reflectivity causes the pressure of the sunlight hitting the object to slowly nudge it into a new orbit, and miss the earth entirely.
But, of course, before we can put any of these plans into action we have to find one of the things, before it finds us. The only way to do that now is through pure luck. So, if you have a chance to talk with your favorite candidate before this year’s midterm elections, ask them if they have a plan to watch the skies, and if not, why not?
Steven W. Disbrow is the proprietor of “Improv Chattanooga” on the South Side of town. He also creates e-commerce systems and reads comic books when he’s not on stage acting like a fool.