NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Comments

• TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.

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  • Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Actually we DID. Tho' only for a little while. And the results were enormous. The B/Yamgata Influenza lineage appears to have gone extinct. The cool part is we weren't even trying to do anything with those specific efforts to affect influenza. All of which should encourage us to cooperate more. No less.

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    • Potatisen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Please give us more cool facts!

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    • pop@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Why the change of heart at tha last sentence?

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The cloth does nothing to stop the virus but also completely cuts off oxygen to your brain.

    No I will not explain. It’s your job to educate yourself by watching more Jordan Peterson videos.

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    • illi@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I know it’s stupid but /s really should be mandatory if you arennot serious. Because there are too many prople that are

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    • demonsword@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Poe’s law strikes again

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    • grue@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Goddamnit, stop making me click the downvote button twice!

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    • naught@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Just stopping by to say that I understood the obvious sarcasm/joke

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    • TheKracken@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I hope you’re a troll. That’s just next level stupidity to be real.

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    • Potatisen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Sir, I’m trying to survive a pandemic not learn how to be a lobster.

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    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Did you get the special chloroform-infused masks? I hear they’re the only ones that do the job properly.

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  • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.

    • No one washes their hands — Increased infection rates.
    • Research doctors don’t work — Reduced cure research speed.
    • Sick people given hugs — Infectivity increased once spotted.
      – Plague Inc. description of Easy Difficulty (Written before the 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown)

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• Allonzee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a selfie by the best half dozen humans we can possibly produce.

  As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution.

  We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.

  Master space? Master planetary defense? We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal.

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  • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    We aren’t even capable of caring for one another

    It’s the part that drives me the most wild. We’re all stuck on this shitty rock hurtling through space together, literally the bare minimum we could do to make it bearable is to be kind to one another and supportive of one another.

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    • Allonzee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Same, if we can’t even, in actions not rhetoric, start from a baseline of “we’re all in the same boat, we all have needs and seek happiness, how do we maximize everyone’s well-being to facilitate that?” then we’re still just savage animals wrestling in the dirt, but with the dangerous capacity to devise technologies for selfish ends we aren’t wise/evolved enough to truly appreciate the consequences of using.

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  • cm0002@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Tbf, in order for humanity to get where they’re at in the Star Trek timeline they had to go through WWIII: Nuclear edition

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    • Allonzee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Covid kind of disillusioned me to the whole “all humanity needs is a common enemy/suffering to get right” concept.

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    • grue@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The Bell Riots (and Irish reunification) are due in a few months.

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  • grue@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie

    “Wow, rude!” – Carl Sagan, probably

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  • deadcream@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

    Astronauts aren’t superhumans and there is nothing “special” about their training. They are just pilots with stricter physical requirements. The reason why there aren’t many of them is because there is no need for more. Our technology is not there yet for cheap and “boring” space travel beyond low Earth orbit (and probably won’t be for a century at least). And there isn’t anything worthwhile for humanity out there anyway. At least at the current stage in our “evolution”. So for now manned spaceflight programmes are just vanity projects funded by politicians (for “national pride” or whatever) or some billionaire celebrities like Musk.

    Also I don’t think that world peace would be necessary for space colonization. It could be born out of conflict or for economic reasons, like colonization of Americas. It’s simply that it will take centuries for us to reach a point when the prospect of leaving Earth will become attractive for regular people (if we survive that much of course).

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  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there.

    Well not with that attitude!

    Yeah, space is hard and yeah mistakes have been made along the way. But things are definitely changing. Reusable rockets are nearly here… Between spaceX, rocket lab and stoke aerospace, there is real potential for these rockets to work. Hell, SpaceX has already conducted a successful orbital test flight.

    With reusable rockets we’ll start to see a drastic reduction in the cost to get to orbit, probably by two orders of magnitude, but possibly even more. With the cost down people will reassess the value of space and the resources available there. In other words, people will start doing more in space, and getting more from space. Resource collection, refining and specialized manufacturing are three most likely industries to start expanding into space. Once there is work to be done there it will begin to make sense for people to live there.

    As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there.

    Not today, no. But within my lifetime, I expect we will.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    While everything living grows old and dies, and has its limits, we separate “<T> revolution” from “<T> normal development” for a reason.

    I mean, what currently exists (with consumerism, incredibly wasteful production of electronic devices doing mostly useless work, less efficient production and organization being preferable when it allows someone to preserve power, Ponzi schemes of various kinds, ignorance and tribalism) is sometimes just a culture, not basic instincts (which have their downsides, but those are solvable). It’s not all cultures.

    That culture has brought us revolutions unseen before. Then it stagnated and may die, but the humanity may survive and have more revolutions in the future.

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  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it.

    I would argue that having 8 billion people in the same place makes earth the hardest place to live in some ways.

    One of the options that space habitats would allow for is smaller communities. What if you lived in a space station with roughly the population of a city? Your community wouldn’t necessarily need to be affiliated with other communities to make up a “country”, but it could be. Your community would have that option. And if the community is not geographically connected to the other members of its nation, there’s no reason they couldn’t change their mind, join a different country if you’re views seem better aligned. For the first time humans would have opt-in governance.

    Would opt-in governance lead to a more stable society? Would not being stuck geographically near communities with opposing views lead to less violent aggression? I don’t know, but I hope so.

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• PenisWenisGenius@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Congress is making laws about bathrooms and genitals like a bunch of 3rd graders. Of course we can’t handle fucking asteroid defense.

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  • teejay@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It reminds me of how tech companies are all scrambling to use AI. There was a funny article recently where the author pointed out that these companies are struggling to do very basic things, so the idea that they could somehow tackle AI in a way that’s useful and profitable is silly.

    Here’s the article, very entertaining and worth the read.

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  • Allonzee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Maybe the 10 commandments posted in every Louisiana classroom will stop the asteroids.

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• Leg@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Real talk, an asteroid wiping us out would only expedite the inevitable. If we could pull together and deflect an asteroid, there’s hope. If not, we failed the test and die with the consequences. But we don’t need the asteroid to fail this test. We’re making great strides towards destroying our home with home field advantage.

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  • LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Gotta give it to humanity, though. We’re damn good at ruining everything we touch.

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    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      We’re also the best around at improving our environments.

      I know it’s easy to be pessimistic about these things, but humans are evolutionary badasses. We’re capable of amazing things. I wouldn’t count us out just yet.

      Besides we haven’t really ruined anything. We haven’t done any damage to the earth that won’t heal eventually. The earth has seen plenty of mass extinctions before and it will again (with or without humans).

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• mriormro@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  We’ve already solved this. We just need to train a team of dysfunctional oil drillers to send up to the asteroid.

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  • EddoWagt@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t even remember what movie that was

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    • Button777777@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Armageddon, the mega block buster hit movie of 1998

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  • Buttons@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    🎵 Don’t wanna close my eyes 🎵

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    • mriormro@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Image

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• MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Don’t look up

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  • Jackhammer_Joe@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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

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    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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    • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Actually they say that Comet Dibiasky is twice the size of the dinosaur killer, but they also say it’s 5-10 kilometres wide. That’s only half the size of Chicxulub. Scientifically it was very inaccurate. But politically it’s flawless.

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  • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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?

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    • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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• MonkderDritte@feddit.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  We are not at a point where we are more than a few competing, egoistic and greedy tribes, so that’s no surprise.

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  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • MeThisGuy@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      would you trust Boeing to save you from an asteroid?

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• rsuri@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  “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.”

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  • Dark_Dragon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yea that and panic at the end !

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• Boozilla@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Achievement unlocked: discovering the Great Filter.

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  • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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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• sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Don’t Look Up!

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• Etterra@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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• WatDabney@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.

  It’s a science fiction story about the end of the world. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  In an exercise involving multiple US government agencies during April 2024, NASA conducted a so-called “tabletop” game in which participants plot their response to a 72 percent chance that an asteroid may hit Earth in 14 years.

  Underpinning a bewildering number of moving parts is the likelihood that space agencies are not ready to implement the operations needed to find out more about the threat and mitigate it, even with more than a decade to prepare.

  The game also found that the “role of the UN-endorsed Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG) in an asteroid impact threat scenario is not fully understood by all participants.”

  “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.

  It recommends “periodic briefings and exercises to continue to raise awareness of planetary defense and increase readiness for preparation and response to an asteroid impact threat.”

  Speaking to US public radio service NPR, Terik Daly, planetary defense section supervisor at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said experts didn’t know of any asteroids of a substantial size that are going to hit Earth for the next hundred years.

  ---

  The original article contains 610 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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• EvilEyedPanda@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  We’d rather bomb each other than save the planet.

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  • OsaErisXero@kbin.run ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If ace combat has taught me anything, it's that there's no reason we can't do both

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    • EvilEyedPanda@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Ace combat 4 is still on if my favs

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• peanuts4life@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Call me an optimist, but I think that if an android was actually going to destroy life as we know it, nations would do everything in their power to advert the disaster.

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  • polonius-rex@kbin.run ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    you really think ONE android could wipe out life as we know it?

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    • ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, I mean it’d at least need to be two androids, right?

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    • Allonzee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      “According to The Atlantic, an asteroid that weighs more than 1.7 quadrillion metric tons could sterilize Earth by raising the temperature of its water above 100°C. This asteroid would be 10–1,000 times heavier than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and would be between 60–96 kilometers (37–60 miles) wide.”

      The Atlantic article itself is lay walled, but yes, and it’s entirely dependent on the mass of said Asteroid.

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    • peanuts4life@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      🤣 just visualizing the United Nations Assembly talking turns curb stomping some poor android.

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    • KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I know one that definitely can.

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    • rtxn@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Now, if we were talking about one Nokia…

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    • Land_Strider@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Well, if you allow CELL to gobble up that one android…

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• wafflez@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Sorry don’t you mean let’s fund AI?

  /s

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• hperrin@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Half the population would believe the asteroid is a hoax spread by the [insert ethnic or religious group here].

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  • c0smokram3r@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Thanks Obama

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• Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Also there's this survey that shows we actually would prefer stopping climate change instead of war.
  https://kbin.run/m/climate@slrpnk.net/t/505138/Most-people-in-petrostates-want-quick-switch-to-clean-energy

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• tacosanonymous@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m not sure I learned anything new other than I want to play the tabletop game they created.

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• themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  No shit.

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• Korkki@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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• macarthur_park@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Link to the NASA study

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