There are few among us who haven’t thought about a shark attack when we have taken a dip in the ocean. We take to the surf in full confidence that we are not on today’s menu, and if someone is going to be lunch, it’s going to be the other bloke. Most of us will, however, choose a beach with shark nets or other safety devices out of preference.

Lightening is known to zap people out of the blue, but we don’t go underground every time there is a thunderstorm. We figure the mathematical probability against getting fried to be stacked in our favour. Yet, we erect conductors.

Countless sunseekers have migrated to high-risk earthquake zones, calculating the odds of living in fair weather versus experiencing a natural catastrophe in their lifetime as acceptable.

Which of us hasn’t dreamed of what we would do if we won a million bucks in a lottery. Just about everybody has spent a few blissful minutes imagining what it would be like to be rolling in it. Millions of people do so each week when they “invest” in a ticket, knowing full well that the chances of winning are about as slim as being hit by a meteorite. So, why do we do it? Simply because we know that somebody somewhere is a winner and that there is a chance.

In life, we are all affected in some way by the odds, the chance of something happening or not.

Since films like Deep Impact and Armageddon, most folks are now aware that at some point in our planet’s future, we are going to get walloped by an extraterrestrial missile. But we figure this is way beyond our ability to prevent, and we put our faith in the odds we have been given and dismiss the subject. In the asteroid lottery, however, there is no selection: everyone “wins.”

But what if one were able to do something about it? Something that would take just a few short minutes, after which one would never have to think on the subject again in the knowledge of having done something constructive and spared a one-off thought for the future safety of Earth from space.

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For instance, if an asteroid were to hit the continental shelf off the Maryland coast, it could produce 23-foot-high (7 meters) waves, causing flooding from New York to Georgia that would take hours to recede. A similar impact off the coast of California could flood major power plants along the coast, the research also suggests.

But not everyone is worried. Many simulations use unrealistic models for how waves break in the ocean, and major ocean impacts in the past haven’t caused tsunamis, said H. Jay Melosh, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in Indiana who studies impacts but was not involved in the new study.

“It’s an overrated hazard,” Melosh, who has developed a calculator to predict the effects of asteroids, told Live Science. [When Space Attacks: The 6 Craziest Meteor Impacts]

Crash!

Credit: Elenarts/Shutterstock.com

Asteroid impacts like the one that struck in what’s now Chicxulub, Mexico, 65 million years ago — which is believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs — occur very rarely. But smaller space rocks, such as the meteor explosion that blasted through the atmosphere in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, can cause major property damage and batter the Earth every few decades.

To evaluate the threat of such smaller impacts to U.S. coastlines, Souheil Ezzedine, an applied mathematician at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and his colleagues used a computer simulation to mimic how asteroids of about 165 feet (50 meters) in diameter crashing into the ocean would affect waves.

In a separate simulation, Ezzedine also modeled the effects of similar impacts on the West Coast. He found that impacts at certain points in the ocean could lead to waves up to 10 feet (3 meters) high.

“That’s not good news. A lot of power plants of PG&E are pretty much on the shore,” Ezzedine told Live Science.

In fact, a 2012 report by the California Energy Commission suggests that a 5-foot (1.4-meter) rise in sea levels — which is predicted to occur by 2100, due to climate change — could flood many power plants. Therefore, the even-higher waves that could come from an asteroid impact would likely flood the power plants as well, Ezzedine said.

Threat overblown?

But many experts think the risk of an asteroid-caused tsunami has been overhyped.

An upcoming study which will be published in the journal Earth and Planetary Sciences found that the Eltanin impact, which left a huge crater in the ocean floor off the coast of Chile 2.1 million years ago, didn’t cause a tsunami. The asteroid that caused this impact was likely 0.9 to 1.2 miles (1.5 to 2 kilometers) in diameter — far larger than the relatively small rocks Ezzedine’s team has modeled. If such a massive rock didn’t cause problems, it seems even less likely that a relatively meager one could, Melosh said.

In addition, past models that found monster wave heights were based on flawed assumptions about how waves break in the ocean. These models predict wave heights that exceed the depth of the ocean at that point — a physical impossibility, Melosh said.

Instead, what would actually happen would be that “a big wave gets made by the impact and it’s a very turbulent wave, and it breaks immediately, right next to the impact,” Melosh told Live Science. “Very little energy is actually radiated away.”

There are other risks, besides tsunamis, that could come from relatively small space rocks like the Chelyabinsk meteor impact. In the Chelyabinsk impact, the space rock burned up in the atmosphere, but air blasts caused significant property damage, Melosh said.

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The Momentum-Exchange/Electrodynamic-Reboost Tether Concept.

His hypothetical solution joins a long list of potential ways in avoiding a future lethal impact. Previous ideas (all covered within this site) include, hitting it with a nuke, landing an engine to thrust it off trajectory, painting one side so the sun’s heat will cause it to shift, attaching space solar sail, the use of a gravitational ‘tractor’ to mention a few.

BUT, if we cannot see the punch coming, what use is even the most innovative defense system? These “comforting” ideas are all very well, and could one day actually save our planet from the inevitable catastrophe it faces; But without the foresight to have an adequate early warning system in place these ingenious ideas could be moot. Funding for this research is still drastically shy of achieving our goal to find all incoming space missiles… never mind turning a blue print into reality!!!

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It’s a subject most of us don’t like dwelling upon, even in individual circumstances, so expiry en masse, total termination, extinction, whatever we call it, is perhaps one of the most difficult subjects to broach … an instant and understandable turnoff.

But one cannot address the issue of asteroids without the subject of massive catastrophe surfacing. What other possible causes could eliminate us in one fell swoop? We can do a damn good job with nukes, global warming could gradually kill millions, viruses and diseases may decimate us, but most will agree that mankind will probably not be entirely wiped out by any single catastrophe … all except one! A big chunk of flying rock—an asteroid or comet.

Science tells us that even a medium-sized meteor impact could block our life-saving sunlight for years.

Fact: It’s happened before, and it will happen again.

We have no idea when, though, because only a percentage of our heavens has been scanned for these NEOs. We have the tools to search; indeed, some of our astronomical equipment can observe distant galaxies. The truth is that the biggest threat to all of mankind is being researched by only a handful of seriously financially strapped scientists.

When one thinks that for the price of one hi-tech bomber, we could have an extraterrestrial early-warning system in place, one could be forgiven for thinking that there may be some disproportionate global spending going on.

That’s how it starts, this inverse contemplation. Why is this science so grossly underfunded? It is necessary to look beyond the here and now.

One reason is simply that current governments and authorities cannot justify spending taxpayer’s funds on looking for a long-odds rock in space. Also, it’s an international issue due to the nature of this concern as flying space rocks are not regionally discriminate.

So, a plan for a website which could channel contributions evolved, a site where Joe public could lend support. Much like a multitude of other similar non-profit organizations.

It seemed simple enough, but the problem also existed elsewhere, I found out. Most folk have a natural mental block when it comes to the topic of a “doomsday” asteroid.

A surprising number of people objected to the spiritual aspect of interfering with an Armageddon rock, although some conceded that not very long ago people put disasters such as hurricanes down to the will of God and that today satellite forecasting is generally an accepted form of intervention. This science tells that a flying space rock is just that, a natural phenomenon, just not an Earth bound one.

To give the skeptics another point of view, it was pointed out that even the highest-tech science does not necessarily contradict forces beyond our control, space shuttles being a prime example.

We have the science for the first time in the planet’s history to research and seek these objects for comparatively little.

Mounting scientific evidence shows that an encounter may occur sooner than we think; yet, we are closing observatories down rather than opening more.

That is simply illogical!

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Given that with current technology it is unreasonable to expect to detect objects smaller than 100 meters in diameter with any reliability, astronomers say these “little” ones with the capacity to cause more damage than the Asian tsunami will remain a threat for decades to come—unless we intensify our research.

Artistic impression by David A. Hardy

Another alarming factor on the bad news side is that these smaller, as yet undetected, meteors are more numerous and, therefore, more frequently impact our planet (i.e., every few centuries).

Astronomers say the reassuring news that larger “extinction-level” objects (those a few kilometres in diameter) are easier to find and that there are probably no undiscovered objects with diameters of 10 kilometres or more left can give us a false sense of security. (The population is dynamic, and new ones will evolve Earth-crossing orbits in the future.)

According to scientists’ best estimates, the current survey to find 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) larger than 1 kilometre in diameter by 2008 will almost certainly succeed. Detection rates are already tailing off as the population of undetected objects decreases. For objects with diameters of less than 1 kilometre, the situation is much less comfortable. NASA has set a new limit of 150 metres, which is encouraging, and recent missions to comets and asteroids have shown that we are on the brink of being able to contend with threatening near-Earth objects of size. It’s the little guys that now pose the biggest threat.

Ask anyone near Perth in December 2005 who witnessed a streaking fireball that illuminated the night sky. An accompanying sonic boom blew dustbin lids off. The fireball was seen by passengers in airplanes and terrified citizens across the region. It was the size of a basketball!

Unlike other natural phenomena, asteroids are rapidly becoming something that is no longer beyond our control but something we can change. All we need is the courage, foresight, and funding to do so.

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It is now widely believed that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid sixty-five million years ago. Something so pre-historic sounds ‘safe’ but new evidence suggests that humans and mammal species were wiped out as recently as 10 900 years ago.

Not by a plague, a previously favored hypothesis, but by a 2-3 mile wide comet. The Clovis comet which resulted in the rapid extinction of North American Stone Age man, the mammoths (amongst other species), and it is also attributed to be a direct cause of the ice age.

Similar to the Tunguska event in Siberian, 1908, except a much larger comet would have exploded in the atmosphere with the force of thousands of nuclear bombs. This would have flattened an area many orders of magnitude greater than the 2000 square kilometers in Siberia, and the ensuing fire storms it created would have had a fall out range that spread from coast to coast. Those that did survive the initial impact would have died in the widespread wild fires or been asphyxiated. The forest and vegetation burned would have left little, for any life left alive, to survive on.

Further scientific evidence from paleontologists and scientists, who drilled into the artic glaciers, show that around the same period a thick layer of soot covered the continent. This would have blackened the extended polar ice cap, and instead of reflecting heat, it absorbed the suns energy, and accelerated the melting process.

“After that maybe we could build a pyramid!”
The Day Before the Clovis Comet

This in turn caused billions of tons of fresh water into the Gulf Stream, which changed the oceans currents and as a direct result, caused the last ice age. The ultimate cause and effect of rapid change to our global environment, which nearly brought early man everywhere to the brink of total extinction.

This leads to an interesting hypothesis as to why the North American continent was so comparatively under developed at the time of Columbus.

In almost every corner of the globe where Stone Age man survived the Clovis event, there is physical evidence of past great civilizations. On the South American continent there were the Mayan and Inca peoples, who built vast stone cities, temple and pyramids. The Aztecs of Central America too left their legacy in stone architecture.

In the Far East there is ample evidence of past civilizations who constructed sophisticated cites and built monuments that stand to this day. The Great Wall of China, in Thailand, Cambodia, Korea, India, everywhere population grew and people developed, civilizations came and went over the next millennia.

In Egypt, Syria, Greece, the Romans, even in England there is Stonehenge.  In Southern Africa where tribes were still slowly in the process of migrating southwards the Zimbabwe ruins are a monument that has stood for centuries. Yet in the lush North American continent nothing similar existed, with the most permanent manmade construction being perhaps a totem pole.

Could this be yet further proof that an extra terrestrial event of magnitude wiped out life on a single landmass? Considering that the rest of the world continued to develop would it be feasible to surmise that early North American man would have at least done something on par with ancient civilizations the world over.

Whilst theories of this nature have yet to be inconclusively proved, neither is there anything to refute this claim. In fact the more one thinks about it, the more obvious this becomes. Civilizations developed where ever populations and societies grew. The exception being the Mungo Man of Australia who were so thin on the ground  and so spread over the vast continent that complex society didn’t evolve.

This hypothesis is also referred to as the Younger Dryas impact event. The debate is still out there, but more and more scientific facts lean toward a comet being the most feasible explanation of why early man in North America vanished so abruptly. It is believed that nomadic hunters eventually returned centuries later with the thawing of the ice age, and began making their way back down from Alaska. Had the Clovis people not been exterminated, it isn’t out of the bounds of reality to think that they would have also developed into a society which constructed architecture which would have withstood millennia.

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Solving these mysteries could shed light on the past, present and future of cosmic impacts on Earth. Among the puzzles:

Missing asteroids

There should be far more asteroids that resemble Vesta, the second largest body in the asteroid belt.

The outermost layers of Vesta are composed mostly of basaltic rock—the same kind that makes up much of Earth’s crust—and theories of asteroid formation suggest more than half of all asteroids should be made largely of either basalt or another common mineral on Earth, olivine. However, roughly 99 percent of these predicted asteroids are missing.

Many of Vesta’s siblings might have disappeared when Saturn and Jupiter shifted their orbits roughly 4 billion years ago, with their gravitational pulls “pulverizing these asteroids against each other, or slinging them at Earth, the Moon and the rest of the inner solar system,” explained planetary scientist Christopher Russell, principal investigator for NASA’s Dawn spacecraft.

This scattering likely caused the series of devastating cosmic impacts dubbed the Late Heavy Bombardment.

“Current research suggests that the present asteroid belt contains only about 10 percent or less of the material that originally formed between Mars and Jupiter, and that the bulk of the original material spilled out across the inner solar system about 3.9 billion years ago to form the Late Heavy Bombardment that cratered the ancient landscapes of the Moon, Mercury and Mars,” said planetary scientist Jay Melosh at the University of Arizona at Tucson.

Russell added that compared with its lost siblings, “Vesta may have just led a charmed life—very nearly the sole survivor.”

Where do meteorites come from?

A number of meteorites on Earth are rocks blasted off the moon and Mars. Still, most meteorites are thought to come from the asteroid belt.

For years, scientists had a hard time figuring out which asteroids the meteorites came from. While researchers can directly study what meteorites are made of, for a long time they could only infer asteroid composition using telescopes, and as far as these observations could tell, the chemistry of asteroids and meteorites often did not match.

Recently spacecraft aimed directly at the asteroids, such as NASA’s Galileo and NEAR Shoemaker probes, helped shed light on this mystery. These findings suggest that stony meteorites come from similarly rocky asteroids, and they probably appear different chemically simply because of weathering the asteroids undergo in space from radiation and impacts with other rocks.

Still, planetary scientist Dan Durda at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said a lot of work remains to be done regarding which specific types of asteroids yield particular classes of meteorites.

Why is Vesta so bright?

Vesta is the brightest asteroid, its surface being roughly three times as bright as Earth’s moon. Its unusual brightness suggests it might possess a strong magnetic field, which could help shield it from particles driven by the solar wind that would ordinarily dirty the asteroid, Russell said.

The Dawn spacecraft is currently venturing to the largest bodies in the asteroid belt—Vesta and Ceres—but it lacks a magnetometer to probe magnetic fields, meaning a future mission is needed to solve the mystery’s of Vesta’s brightness.

Is Earth safe?

Much of the study of space rocks is aimed, ultimately, at the same question: Are there any asteroids aimed at us? Right now, there are no asteroids known to be on a collision course with our planet. It’s the unknown rocks that scientists worry about.

“Statistically, if you go to Vegas to gamble, you know you’re going to lose eventually, and in the same way, we know with at least small asteroids, one will hit the Earth eventually,” Russell said.

Still, Russell noted protecting Earth from asteroids might prove trivial. “It might be as simple as painting one side white and another side black,” he said. This would make one side of the asteroid reflect more sunlight than the other, altering its course. “No need for any nuclear explosion.”

• Video: Asteroid Hunting
• Strange Asteroids Baffle Scientists
• The Strangest Things in Space

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The tricky bit was being able to whack a comet bang on the nose 83 million miles from Earth with a projectile traveling at 23,000 mph. As scientist Don Yeomans said, “it was like trying to hit a bullet with another bullet, while filming it from a third.”

One of the favoured blueprints for asteroid defence is more than halfway there, it would seem. It doesn’t take a wild imagination to foresee that it would merely be a matter of exchanging the payload of the impact probe to convert it into a defensive nuclear missile instead.

Similarly another popular theory for deflecting an incoming asteroid is to attach a booster rocket to a near-Earth object, and in the vacuum of space, its thrust could push the threat off its trajectory. In February 2001, scientists showed they could land a probe on an asteroid, and one assumes current technology must be within grasp of being able to land an engine on one. This all sounds like reassuring stuff, considering that we are talking about protecting our planet from an asteroid when it comes.

But there is one huge flaw in this progress: rocket scientists can only take action if they have a target, and right now the vast majority of our celestial horizons remains unchecked. (Note too, that Deep Impact took seven months to reach its target.)

It’s a bit like a modern warship, where the blokes on the bridge have the weaponry to hit a distant target, providing they have a blip on the screen. But if the chaps down in the radar department only have partial sight, then all their technology is for naught.

Also, both these missions occurred on known bodies: Eros, one of the largest asteroids ever discovered and Tempel 1, like all comets, one of the brightest features in the night sky. However, the real threat still exists in the unknown, the unscanned pitch black of space we haven’t surveyed yet, where smaller, darker, asteroids lurk.

Another misleading aspect about these missions is the cost factor. The $330 million mentioned for sending a high-tech “washing machine” on a celestial suicide mission gives the impression that this science cannot be short a bob or two. Granted, Deep Impact’s mission was focused on investigating matter from the birth of our solar system, and the knowledge gleaned shouldn’t have a price tag, but the truth is that the guys in the radar room are shy on equipment and can only cover a slim proportion of the horizon … and then only for the largest vessels.

It is a common misperception that the science of near-Earth objects is one big body of highly sponsored boffins working jointly on expensive space technology, when in fact there are very distinctive areas to this science.

The truth is that the fellows in rocketry operate under different budgeting and departmental structures to the blokes in “radar,” who, even though they are still a long way from achieving 100 percent coverage of our skies, remain at the back of governmental pay lines.

A flawless defence plan is only as good as its early-warning system; blind spots and lack of intelligence can be the biggest killers. Ask any admiral.

(“Your article is spot on.” Scientist Jonathan Tate, July 15, 2005)

This logic obviously also applies to any blueprint scientists come up with for preventing an asteroid impact as they all require interception coordinates: most recently, a “gravitational tractor.” In November 2005, astronauts Ed Lu and Stan Love of NASA proposed sending an unmanned spacecraft to tug the threatening asteroid off course… [more]

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We know the world was once composed of a single continent and will be again one day as continental shelves continue to shift. Our basic geography is not constant; the map of the world when dinosaurs roamed would bear no resemblance to our maps today.

Politically, too, our maps have changed over time and will continue to do so. Empires have come and gone. Country names and borders of only a century ago have shifted radically.

So, why is it that we generally have difficulty seeing beyond our time?

Time is the one element over which we have no control. We have constructed clocks to measure it. We have broken it up into periods, eras, and calculations in terms of generations beyond “our” time, but reality for us only exists in the here and now. Romantics have written about bottling it like one would a commodity, but physically we can do nothing to stop its march.

Time is the issue upon which current life hinges; we can analyze it but we have no control over it. We can only choose what to do with the time we do have. Focusing beyond our time looses credibility. Another intangible issue that influences our existence is the fact that we possess morals.

The moral dimension is something that invokes heated debate in all manner of topic.

Some theologians argue for instance against the concept of cloning. Many folk are prone to leaping to the conclusion that it is fundamentally wrong to “play God.” Yet, how many of those same people would instantly change their tune if tomorrow they were faced with the prospect of the losing their own lives or that of a loved one due to a disease or ailment that cloning technology could cure.

It has been said, if God is the great creator, that would include us and our ability to create, to solve problems. He gave us the wherewithal, the brain, the intellect to achieve wondrous things with science. Our constant quest for knowledge is our essence. Looking for answers is what we do as a species; it’s the way we are made. We investigate atoms and send probes to distant worlds.

The same, therefore, can be applied to the science of astronomy and, within that sphere, the capability to seek asteroids. But there is a stigma attached to the subject, a mental block that the astronomers themselves have called the “giggle factor.”

Were we to find an asteroid on course with our planet, wouldn’t we do our very best to prevent the catastrophe? We are creating the technology to act upon the threat of extermination by incoming NEO, and it is commonly believed that we would do something about it if we could.

We do not have to go the same way as the dinosaurs. Science shows us we could do something about NEO’s, and we already possess the ability to find them.

Our technology is not infallible; were we to try to stop a threatening asteroid, even our best technology could go wrong. New things beyond our control always crop up, but we work at fixing them so the same mistakes don’t happen again in future.

The future starts now, and in this case, we have the choice to avoid a “mistake” before it happens. There may not be a second chance.

We possess the ability to choose … and generally we choose life!

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The first decent rains at the end of summer are often associated with electrical power cuts on Hydra Island, Greece, sometimes accompanied by pyrotechnics as wiring and water get reacquainted after a long, dry season. People from wet climates regard these high-voltage fireworks with alarm, while those of us accustomed merely shrug and wonder how long it will be before the lights are fixed.

I was walking home through the dark back streets of Kamini village one night when something bright caught the corner of my eye. My first reaction was that an escaped electrical charge was streaking down an overhead wire above me—spectacular stuff, even for the DEH (the Hellenic Electrical Company)—until it disappeared behind the mountain.

I blinked in the gloom and realized that there were no overhead wires or electricity poles in the direction of the display. And it certainly hadn’t rained; stars twinkled.

The light had been falling at speed, almost sparking with intensity as it plummeted across the sky. Another awful fleeting thought was that the space shuttle had met with disaster. I had at the time been following Astronaut John Glenn’s geriatric jaunt into space with interest.

The news on television when I got home proved the power hadn’t been cut and that brave Granddad Glenn was happily floating around the Earth, surpassing weightless fitness tests and things. I concluded that what I had seen was shooting star, a meteorite, just substantially larger than most. I had never witnessed one that persistent in all my years of stargazing, one still so bright when it vanished from view that a small part of me expected to hear a thump.

I remembered an article I had read in Time magazine about asteroids.

At the time, the story struck me not so much for its content but because it hadn’t made media headlines. Life on Earth would have ceased to exist if the asteroid had been on a collision course. A couple of hours difference, and it could have been tickets for everyone, possibly even the cockroaches. It made page 82 in that week’s issue, and there wasn’t even a war on.

The editorial helmets deemed it of subimportance. Why? (This was before the blockbuster films Armageddon and Deep Impact.)

I did some research. Turns out, it’s a syndrome. Tall flightless birds suffer from the same thing; nobody wants to hear really bad news.

But what if, once having heard it, one could make one small positive gesture and never have to think on it again, disregarding all subsequent space scares because of this action? The idea became a project. Finding a legitimate way to put this concept into practice was a bureaucratic maze, but it was eventually achieved. Voila! We have FAIR.

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