Scientists are Meeting to Discuss How to Stop a Giant Space Rock That Would Kill Us All

Source – Here’s a hypothetical: a telescope detects an asteroid between 100 and 300 meters in diameter racing through our solar system at 14 kilometers per second, 57 million kilometers from Earth.

Astronomers estimate a one percent risk the space rock will collide with our planet on April 27, 2027. What should we do?

It’s this potentially catastrophic scenario that 300 astronomers, scientists, engineers and emergency experts are applying their collective minds to this week in a Washington suburb, the fourth such international effort since 2013. …

The idea that the planet Earth may one day have to defend itself against an asteroid used to elicit what experts call a “giggle factor.”

But a meteor that blew up in the atmosphere over Russia on February 15, 2013, helped put an end to the sneers.

On that morning, a 65-foot (20-meter) asteroid appear out of nowhere. …

What about bigger objects? Trying to nuke them to smithereens like in the movie Armageddon would be bad idea, because it could just create smaller but still dangerous pieces.

The plan, instead, is to launch a device toward the asteroid to divert its trajectory — like a cosmic bumper car.

NASA plans to test this idea out on a real asteroid 492 feet across, in 2022, with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.

Well, so much for everybody’s dream scenario of saving the world by making astronauts out of a ragtag bunch of eccentric wildcat oil well drillers. Or even the much simpler solution, of teaching actual astronauts how to use wildcat oil well drillers’ equipment. But we can forget both ideas. Hold off on the Aerosmith, Rockhound. The 300 most brilliant minds on the planet are telling us to scratch that idea because the instead of being powerfucked by one big rock, we’ll just be getting powerfucked by a thousand also big rocks. Great.

I don’t want to come across as ungrateful. Because I do appreciate the fact that these science geeks are at least trying to brainstorm ideas. It’s nice to hear someone who’s good at STEM is doing something besides trying to improve the design and performance of sex robots. But isn’t this too little too late? I mean, we’ve been going into space since the late 1950s. We’ve spent trillions sending people to the moon to hit golf balls and into low Earth orbit to experiments on crystals and whatnot, and we’re just now addressing this massive-chunks-of-hot-celestial-death issue? Shouldn’t that have been like Priority 1? I could live without DirectTV (but not SiriusXM – listen to Barstool Radio and buy all our sponsors’ products!) for a while if I knew we’d solved the Giant Hurtling Space Rock problem instead.

Here’s the thing: We are on borrowed time with this thing as it is. Nobody likes to admit it, but Earth has already had five mass extinction events. FIVE:

–End Ordovician, 444 million years ago, 86% of species lost.
–Late Devonian, 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost.
–End Permian, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost.
–End Triassic, 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost.
–End Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, 76% of all species lost.

Which tells me we way overdue for another one. And I for one don’t intend to be one of the ones lost just because our scientists were spending their time working on boner medicines when they should’ve been building a deflecting space laser. Like that one in the “Star Trek: TOS” episode where they visit a planet and Kirk thinks he’s an Indian but then the strange obelisk turns out to be an asteroid deflector. (I am not making that up.)

So this “bumper car” idea of theirs had better work, because it’s about the only hope we have. And I for one don’t want the planet wiped out at least until I find out what Marvel’s post-“Endgame” phase is like and the Patriots stop winning championships. It looks like we’ll know for sure in about three years when they test DART. But until then, keep talking, nerds.