Professional Documents
Culture Documents
and serene above us, has guided our species for millennia, serving as a
source of stories, wonder, and navigation. But the sky is also full of threats.
Asteroids, comets, and meteoroids, traveling at tens of thousands of miles per
hour, completely silent and nearly invisible, crisscross the solar system and
the orbit of the Earth. When the smallest ones, no bigger than a grain of sand,
enter our atmosphere, we watch in delight as a shooting star flies across the
heavens.
But when the larger objects strike, they unleash not marvels, but death and
destruction. When an asteroid several miles wide struck off the northern coast
of the Yucatan peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago, the
resulting impact rattled the Earth to its very iron core, uplifted crustal material
and sent it raining hellfire across the globe, plunged our planet into a
suffocating “impact winter,” and permanently ended the lineages of all non-
avian dinosaurs.
More recently, some 50,000 years ago, a meteorite about 160 feet across
(less than half the length of a football field) struck Earth with a velocity of
29,000 miles per hour. The energy released in the collision was equivalent to
600 Hiroshima bombs. Among other cataclysmic effects, the impact could be
felt in the form of a 1,000-mph wind blast more than two miles from the site.
The crater today, just east of Flagstaff, Arizona, is roughly 560 feet deep and
three quarters of a mile across.
With just a few thousand feet of orbital misfortune, we could lose a population
center at a level unheard of even after the advent of nuclear weapons. We
could see the collapse of not just one, but all human civilization, and possibly
the extinction of our species—or even all the species on the planet. In short, it
would be really, really bad.
The first step for would-be planet-savers is identification. The trouble is, not
only are these cosmic objects relatively small and dim, but their movements
are constantly in flux. Identifying and tracking a small asteroid for a few days
or weeks is enough to reasonably predict its path for the next few decades.
But after that, small gravitational interactions with its neighbors (or even the
motions of the giant planets) and unequal heating from the sun can send it
into a wildly different—and possibly dangerous—orbit. There is no technology,
survey, or program in operation today or even on the horizon to continuously
and comprehensively monitor all the potential threats to Earth.
And to have the best chances at saving ourselves, the object would need to
be spotted years before a potential impact. Even then, it’s not exactly clear
what we would do about it.
But one of the problems is that not all asteroids are monoliths like Dimorphos
(or as small). Many, especially the larger ones, are actually complex
agglomerations of loose rubble. The DART mission worked on Dimorphos, but
a similar approach may not work on a different asteroid with a different
character.
All of these methods are, at least on paper, feasible. But besides DART we
have not yet tested any of them, and so we do not know how effective and
controllable they might be. We also don’t know how much time and money
would be needed to bring any of them out of modeling and into deployable
status. The disparate groups around the globe, pulling on meager threads of
funding and time, are trying to go against the tide of human inclination by
preparing for a threat that likely will not manifest itself in our lifetime, or our
children’s lifetimes, or perhaps for dozens of generations to come. But if they
are successful, some day, our far future descendants will thank them and their
lucky stars that someone decided to plan for the long-shot worst.