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| Meteorite entering earths atmosphere |
The recent meteor that exploded over Russia had 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion – and it was only one-third of the size of another asteroid that nearly grazed the Earth, according to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who recently spoke in a CNN interview.
This is a very concerning situation. It's even more concerning when you realize there's no global organization to handle the prevention of a meteorite strike. According to Tyson, while organizations such as NASA have the ability to detect and track asteroids, there is no organization – nor a plan in place – that would prevent such a catastrophe of an asteroid impact.
"We have no capacity to protect Earth from something that small,” he said, referring to the asteroid and meteor.
Tyson suggested that we, as a species, need to get some sort of global plan together to prevent our extinction.
What you really want, I think, is a world organization, maybe every country chips in, in proportion to their GDP, something sensible like that. And then there's a pot of money, and whoever has thespace-faring resources at the time it's necessary – space-faring know-how – would then tap into that money, and then you save the Earth,” he said.
But, in politics, people generally don't group everyone together as “species,” they think of each other in terms of countries, races, classes, ideologies, and any other divisions they can come up with in pursuit of political gains – which was something Tyson mentioned:
“When do we start concerning ourselves with a budget to handle it? If it's going to come in a 100 years, what do you say? 'Oh, let our descendants worry about that and their Congress.' Eighty-eight percent of Congress faces re-election every two years. That's not a long enough time scale to match the time scales that matter for our survival,” he said.
More on this Story about Meteorite Earth Collisions
1 comment:
You are dead on. Resources could be devoted to: 1) prevention measures in place for asteroids detected in time (I think you need a two years' heads up, or something like that), and 2) more importantly, a long term plan for off-planet survival. It's time to stop thinking about this as just science-fiction. Ours is a delicate snow-globe of a planet being tossed about by the forces of physics in a maelstrom of debris - way too chancy to keep all of our eggs in this one basket.
The politics are obstructionist as usual. It's just something you have to work around. If the twin towers had been brought down by an asteroid instead of radicalized terrorists, you bet there would be a lot more political will behind this. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
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