The View from Mudsock Heights: What Do We Do About the Asteroid Problem?

By Dennis E. Powell | Jan 7, 2010 at 19:52:21

The article caught my attention — how could it not?

It seems that the Russians are going to get busy and, if they work hard and fast, they will push an asteroid away from Earth before it comes close — maybe too close — in 2032.

Every time a story like this pops up, I remember a conversation I had with the physicist Edward Teller in 1988. Teller, you may remember, did much to bring about the hydrogen bomb. (No, he did not go on to join Penn Jillette in a comedy magic act.)

Teller’s concern at the time, and he felt very strongly about it, was this: it is a certainty that someday an asteroid or some other huge rock from space will fly smack dab into the Earth. The destruction will be unlike anything ever experienced by humans. We ought to do something about it, he said.

Not long thereafter, The New York Times did a story on the subject. It was the lead item in their science section. It made the unusual claim that a person is more likely to be killed by an asteroid than in an airplane crash.

That seemed mighty odd. There are fatal airline crashes pretty much every year. We hardly ever hear of anyone getting squashed by an asteroid. Come to think of it, we never do, though a few decades back a woman was hit on the thigh and bruised by a meteorite, and a car in upstate New York got ruined by an even bigger meteorite. But, taking the long view, the numbers are right, sort of. Every so often — once in 50,000 years, plus or minus a few thousand years — a big space rock hits the Earth. Fair enough. And if such a rock were to hit the Earth now, it would wipe out millions and millions of people — more people than would die in that 50,000 years in plane crashes. Hence, you’re more likely to get pulverized by an asteroid than be the victim of a plane crash.

Of course, there’s a lot wrong with this. It presupposes that the safety of aviation — and aviation was only 85 years old when the article was written — is constant. We know it’s not. Flying in 1950 was not as safe as it is now. But the point was made: if an asteroid hit the Earth, it would be very bad.

Several fairly awful movies to the contrary, changing the course of an asteroid is not an easy thing. It’s not a matter of pointing a rocket at the asteroid, lighting the fuse, and letting it fly. For one thing, the rockets that carry weapons that powerful cannot fly far into space. For another, their navigation systems are designed to hit things that are sitting still, like cities. Asteroids move.

Nor does one plop Bruce Willis into a space shuttle that now inexplicably handles like a sports car and send him to the asteroid to blow it up as Steven Tyler sings a song that makes one wonder if the Earth is worth saving. (Just to be safe, maybe we should launch Bruce Willis into space anyway.)

Though it doesn’t pop up every day, the inevitable asteroid strike does pose a real threat in all kinds of ways. I once published a short “what-if” piece: Let’s say the president were informed that there was a one-in-three chance a smallish but significant asteroid would strike somewhere in the northern hemisphere in a week. The location of the strike — or even whether it would hit Earth at all — would not be known for a few days, but if any lives were to be saved action would have to be taken now. If it hit an ocean, coastal cities would be wiped out. If it hit the center of the country, it would not have been good to move people there. And there was only a one-in-three chance it would hit the Earth at all. What does the president do? There’s really not time to appoint a commission.

People have been thinking about it, about what to do if the Minor Planet Center — yes, there is such a thing — reported a major uh-oh. There is even some debate: supposing that we could blow up an approaching asteroid, wouldn’t that only make pieces of the thing hit more areas? Is it possible to give it a little nudge, send it whizzing past, maybe to splash into the Sun? Some of the scientists get very excited when debating this.

So it is nice, I suppose, that the Russians are at least looking into it. Over the next few years there will no doubt be even more “documentaries” on the subject on the Discovery-History-Learning-National Geographic-Weather channel. It is interesting to ponder our reaction to the very small likelihood of a very big problem.

I am simply sorry that sound does not travel in the vacuum of space. Otherwise, we could build huge speakers. Then we could aim them at the asteroid and play Steven Tyler.
That would be enough to chase it away.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.