I haven't had much hope that if there was an major asteroid racing towards earth that there could be much done about it, but I also know that likelyhood of it is very small so there is no need to lose sleep over it.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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"Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events," the report says.
First administration: "We must do something about the asteroid. I've started a plan to divert it, but it'll take several years."
Second administration: "The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office."
Third administration: "Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there's just too much political resistance to solving it. Let's focus on other priorities that we can solve."
Yea that and panic at the end !
Sorry don't you mean let's fund AI?
/s
We've already solved this. We just need to train a team of dysfunctional oil drillers to send up to the asteroid.
🎵 Don't wanna close my eyes 🎵
I don't even remember what movie that was
Armageddon, the mega block buster hit movie of 1998
Thanks! I can't for the life of me remember when I watched that, especially since I wasn't even alive when that came out. Maybe we watched it in school or something
Not to be confused with the other mega block buster hit movie about an asteroid hitting earth released one month earlier in 1998, Deep Impact.
Deep Impact is to Armageddon as Volcano is to Dante's Peak.
almost forgot about Dante's peak. that was the shit!
Superior?
Yes
I would have sworn it was Space Cowboys. Shit.
That's okay, humanity had s good run. I imagine we'll have extinctified ourselves way before a space rock could do it. A+ for trying though.
Don't look up
That's the last three words of the article. The author didn't miss the connection either.
I always wonder when people repeat something from the article or ask a question that's answered in the article: did you not read it or did you just want to start a discussion about this connection and are somehow constrained in the number of words you can write per day?
I didn't read it. The Register has a drier tone than I felt like reading today. I mean seriously, putting the word tabletop in quotes? I am NOT the target audience for that writing style.
It was a great movie - sadly, because it was so accurate. Provided that you can call a sci-fi movie accurate. But after the pandemic and shit, "don't look up" looks like a playbook for a meteor extinction level event
What's funny is that movie released during the pandemic, so it seemed like that was the thing it was commenting on, but actually it was filmed before the pandemic and was originally meant as a commentary on climate change. What it shows is that humanity's modern tribalism is remarkably predictable. No matter what the problem, we will turn it into an us versus them situation where getting anything meaningful done becomes an uphill battle.
Actually they say that Comet Dibiasky is twice the size of the dinosaur killer, but they also say it's 6-1 9 kilometres wide. 10 kilometres is the size of Chicxulub. Scientifically it was very inaccurate. But politically it's flawless.
We are not at a point where the "global community" is more than a few competing, egoistic and greedy tribes with clashing world views, so that's no surprise.
Yeah, I think that really it wouldn't be the "global community" that ends up saving the world in an asteroid impact scenario.
It would likely be an organization that could operate on its own without endless committees. Say, the Chinese space agency, or SpaceX, or the Indian space agency. Someone would decide to just do it, without getting the whole world's approval for the mission. Then the whole world would complain that the effort was made without any international cooperation or oversight. And the organization that literally saved the world would get chewed out by everyone because inevitably the plan will not have worked perfectly.
But I'm not worried, because even billionaires don't want to die. Someone would do something.
would you trust Boeing to save you from an asteroid?
I'd trust them to try to intercept an asteroid... It'll be harmless when they miss and achieve nothing, but in the off chance that they pull it off, yeah sure Boeing, go for it.
Achievement unlocked: discovering the Great Filter.
If an asteroid were to hit the Earth large enough to cause human extinction, it would save us the embarrassment of killing ourselves from poisoning the climate or microplastic pollution.
I'm pretty sure we navigated nuclear holocaust, but we haven't fully ruled it out either.
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