I have always taken the long view and maintained that we need a permanent, large presence in space to ensure the continued existence of mankind (well, and womankind too!)

Protection from asteroids is only one of the survival enhancing measures our species can take, once we get cheap access to orbit.

Shortest route there: up that initial $20 million budget for Prizes in the new NASA budget to some number north of a billion dollars, and just sit back and WATCH the VC sector respond. Space would become a hot sector, and we'd really get somewhere with cheap launch fast.

And then we won't have to worry about losing all those crappy IT jobs to India et. al. as the one string attached to any such prize money will almost certainly be that the companies be based in the US (dual use defense tech, doncha know...legitimately!)

I saw somewhere an interesting comment to the effect that: once humanity develops the tech to deflect asteroids, the chances of an impact will rise. What can be used to push away, can also be usd to aim towards.

While I agree that asteroid deflection might become critically important at some point in the future, I disagree that it is an example of something the state must do.

Why not contract out the asteroid protection business, with large bonuses if such protection is ever needed and is successfully provided? It would be cheaper than some state-run boondoggle and I would certainly feel more confidence in a privately-run asteroid deflecting business than in some bureaucratically controlled state agency.

"Why not contract out the asteroid protection business"? Because there's no money in it. Oh, I'll sell you all the asteroid insurance you like, as well as second-coming insurance, mega-plague insurance, and thermonuclear carpet-bombing insurance. Guranteed zillion dollar payout. Because hey, I'll be incinerated, and you can sue my glowing corpse for damages when I default.

As the purchaser, I (meaning the agency which grants the contract) will review your proposals for deflecting the asteroid. If they are not plausible or you do not maintain a state of acceptable readiness, you lose the contract. Doesn't really compare well with insurance - think of it as being similar to a road construction contract.

In addition, most of the money could be paid out as the performance bonus - that is, for actually deflecting the asteroid. The chance of winning that bonus would fuel capital investment, while both the chance of winning the bonus and a desire for self-preservation would encourage innovation.

Anyway, who says a typical asteroid impact would destroy the earth?

is this a joke?

No, just go ask the dinosaurs how good it feels to have a giant asteroid smack the earth...oh wait, it KILLED THEM!!!

Asteroids, nuclear war, bioterrorism, eco-collapse, nanotech gone bad...the next hundred years or so are gonna be pretty tricky to get through one way or another, and all of our eggs are in one freakin' basket.

THAT is why I care so much about space, and why it's too important to leave in the hands of government bureaucracy. Prizes and tax breaks and getting out of the way are the most the Washington could do to foster cheap access to space.

Anything else will just be Yet Another Socialist Boondogle.

Why not contract out the asteroid protection business?

I don't think there's any problem in having the service provided by private businesses. The real problem is in paying for it - it suffers from a free rider problem if funded voluntarily. If, say, Bill Gates decides to protect himself from a planet-destroying asteroid, he'll be protecting everyone else as well, but he'll have no way of making them pay for the service.

I don't think that asteroid protection necessarily requires taxes to pay for it, but, if done voluntarily, it is the sort of service that would depend on public spirited philanthropy rather than profit making business.

Once we've got a thriving infrastructure in space, an Earth approaching asteroid changes from 'threat' to 'goldrush'. Some asteroids contain metals; some asteroids are pure metal all the way through (like the one that made Barringer Crater); others are packed full of the volatiles you need for an industrial civilization in space.

It's good to think about defense against them for now, but it is only a short term issue. We'll be turning asteroids into moola before this century is out; and by the time the worry of asteroids as a weapon rears its head, we'll have such a large presence in space that it will be a silly weapon.

I mean, what good is a weapon that takes years or decades to get there, requires a fortune to set up the orbital change and years or decades to accomplish, and at any time the effort is discovered can be stopped with a small bomb on your propulsion system and counteracted? And when we've a civilization in space big enough for moving asteroids, it will be rather hard to change the big rocks orbit without it being noticed.

I only see asteroids as a military/survival threat of any magnitude for the next few decades with the threat declining thereafter so long as we are a spacefaring species.

Asteroids are nature's way of saying 'grow or die'.

Am I slow? This must be a joke, please tell me so, asteroids are even sillier than the population bomb, green house effect ect.

Rene: It's intended to be a little quirky, but no, it's not a joke. The threat that we will all (or some of us will) be killed by an asteroid is small but real. It raises a number of interesting questions, so I thought it was worth throwing up. Is the threat of the Earth being hit by an asteroid large enough that humanity should try to do something about it? If so, what? Learn to detect in advance and deflect asteroids, or simply is it better to ensure that mankind is living on other planets as well as Earth so that if a catastrophe occurs at least the human race survives.

And if watching out for asteroids is something that needs doing, how do you do it? We on this blog would love it if we could assign property rights to every object in the whole universe and demonstrate that as a consequence every problem that has ever existed would go away, but sadly this is a little too optimistic. If you accept that defence is one legitimate role of the state (which I generally do, although not everybody here does) then I think you could at least argue that this qualifies.

This is the sort of pretty extreme example which leads to fun discussions, if nothing else. And asteroid protection is money better spent than most public spending, if nothing else.

No, Rene. Even allowing for the Samizdatista quirk of fondness for whizzy spacey things, asteroids are not remotely silly or funny. (Nor are supervolcanoes, but there's absolutely nothing we can do about those yet.)

Most supposed ecological threats--even though some of them are real--are pretty trivial by comparison to the planetary mechanical ones, and a lot slower.

Mr. Jennings agrees that asteroid protection is a public good.

Public finance economists define public goods as 1) non-rival; and, 2) non-excludable. They consider national defense the best example of a public good in that no one can buy more of it and even the most blatant tax evader banged up in prison cannot be deprived of it.

Asteroid protection meets the economic criteria, I think, even though, as with national defense, there are no guarantees against stupid wastes of money.

I dunno, there is a lot out there that could conceivably affect the earth adversely. I would think it would be more important initially to colonize space and start tapping resources. That would indeed be profittable for private industry and the resources needed to generate asteroid moving power could be drawn from other planets rather than depleting the Earth's resources. Matter is not gained or lost, but if we launch too much of it out of the earth's domain of control, then and only then, are we depleting resources. Lets go get some resources from elsewhere.

As for asteroid protection, its sort of lower on my priority list, you know, risk/reward and cost ratio and all that. I wear my seatbelt, Ill be ok. Dumping massive amounts of money from any source into asteroid protection is too much like spending half my paycheck on what if insurance. There is no risk free life, jsut live it out to the fullest and enjoy the rush of a little risk. We get enough cheap launch and space colonization and other technologies in place that are actually profitable, the idea of asteroid protection will not be nearly as difficult a problem to tackle. Such issues will be far more easily and cheaply solvable with a better infrastucture.

If anyone thinks asteroids are not a threat, try this little experiment. Take out a map of Europe. With your eyes closed, pick a spot in Northern Europe. Draw 50mile diameter circle around it.

That is the area in which almost everyone would have died if the Tunguska impactor's orbit had intersected the earth a few hours earlier on the morning of June 30, 1908.

Actually calling it an impactor is misleading. It was an airburst whose altitude is a matter of great disagreement between groups of scientists. It depends strongly on what the composition was and that is where the argument lies. Stony-iron or chondrite?

Also, there are several multi-kiloton high altitude airbursts detected by early warning satellites every year. They are too small to be dangerous and despite the explosive power are too far up to cause ground damage, and most occur over oceans of course, since the earth is mostly ocean.

We can just think of them as friendly reminders.

I think most folks quite rightly categorize asteroid danger into the same box as space-alien invasion. A disaster if it happens, but it probably won't, and devoting much money or attention to it is a waste. There is no record in history of major human loss-of-life caused by asteroids.

The amount of money we spend preventing a problem should a function of the actual risk, not of the perceived consequences.

Julian,

There is no record in history of major human loss-of-life caused by asteroids.

Were you being intentionally or unintentionally funny?

David Mercer:

"And then we won't have to worry about losing all those crappy IT jobs to India et. al. "

Why should we worry?

Hmm.

There are a number of serious dangers implicit in the world and solar system. They've been around for ages but we've only come to know them recently. One of these is the potential threat of asteriods, planetoids actually. While I'm a little hesitant on supporting programs that are designed to defeat such threats I am fully in favor of programs to *detect* such threats.

Currently the job of skywatching is done almost entirely by volunteers using home-based equipment. A more professional approach would ultimately provide better results than the current hodge-podge. Additionally such a program could give enough of a warning that an effective attempt at defeating such a threat could be practical.

I don't think we're spending enough to deal with the sun going supernova. It's going to happen, folks!

- Josh

I don't think we're spending enough to deal with the sun going supernova. It's going to happen, folks!

No it's not. The sun isn't heavy enough.

A bit late to the party, but ...

1. With apologies for a the self-promotion, I have blogged about this here and here.

2. The short-term risk is geopolitical rather than purely physical, as an airburst from a large meteor could be mistaken for a nuclear weapon if it occurred in a sensitive region.

3. The first milestone in managing the risk is therefore a system for detecting incoming objects of moderate size in time to prevent such disastrous misinterpretation.

4. My analysis, such as it is, indicates that a large amateur network will be up to the task within a decade.