Should we prepare for mass Euthanasia?

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We pretty much already have the technology to deal with most asteroids. Surplus H bombs. Rockets. Just nuke them. They will get deflected out of the earth colliding trajectory, or get pulverized. If an asteroid stays on collision course after being pulverized its tiny powder pieces will have a thousand times more surface area than the original asteroid, so will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere- because they will have a thousand times more friction with the atmosphere than the original asteroid.

Already have the technology, or we will develop the technology in a few human generations.

Asteroids are not the problem.

And its likely that in coming generations we will be building Gerard O'Neil type space colonies (cities in space), or colonies on planetary surfaces, which would require us to strip mine and take apart our near earth asteroids for mineral ores anyway.

Its not asteroids, but the Earth itself... doing us in.... with things like super volcanoes...that is the problem.

While its easy to imagine humans eliminating six mile wide asteroids (like what killed the dinos) with rockets and H bombs, its impossible for me to imagine how humans could do anything to stop, or even mitigate, an eruption by Tuba, or by the Yellowstone, supervolcanoes.

What Mt St. Helens did to a few hundred square miles of Oregan...that's what Yellowstone did to the entire length of the USA in an euroption 30 million years ago. Its due to happen again.

And there are other coming attractions:

There is an island in the Azores that will have an undersea landslide ...that will kick up a tsunami...that will basically drown all of western Europe and the eastern USA.

let us hope we finally can graduate to Kardashev level I before all that happens.

Fixed it for you.

I think that you have the "Kardashians" confused with the "Cardassians" .

Cardassians are space aliens with ridges on their faces.

Kardashians are space aliens with large rear ends.

Cardassians maybe more dangerous to the Federation than Kardashians, but they are more accomplished than the Kardashians in space technology.

the Kardashians have their own kinda "space displacement" tech going.

I'm not convinced. An H bomb on the surface would do little more than paint some radial scorch marks. On earth they can vaporize a city centre while doing significant damage to the surrounding suburbs because they explode in atmosphere and generate heated shockwave (for best results, detonate a few seconds before it hits the surface, this will generate a bigger shockwave).

In a vacuum an H bomb can't do much more than vaporize itself and whatever rock happens to be in direct contact with it.

Armageddon suggested drilling into the asteroid. This would be beyond our current technology. We haven't drilled more than a few centimetres into celestial objects. Transporting a tunnel boring machine to drill a long way into an asteroid and operating it onsite would be a difficult undertaking.

Even then, depending on the size of the asteroid, our largest H bomb might not do much more than produce a few new fault lines or fracture it into large chunks rather than itty bitty little pieces that burn up easily. A few hundred H bombs could destroy all life on the surface of the earth but they don't have as much of an effect on a volume of a few hundred cubic kilometres of rock that was already devoid of life.

Attaching rocket thrusters to divert it's course would be our best bet but even then, even if you have ten years warning and you only need to alter its course by a tiny fraction of a degree, that maybe difficult when you're talking about a medium sized asteroid with a mass of a few billion tons.

Also, not all asteroids have stable surfaces. An attached rocket thruster might just drill itself into the asteroid or detaching a small of it rather than transferring its force to the entire asteroid.

Wouldn't it be 'funny' if the asteroid was nudged *into* a path that would make it hit the earth?
That is the story of my life.
It is best I don't have anything to do with the project.

i trust the scientists' math on this. my brother, as opposed to my innumerate self, is one among the pencil behind the ear brigades that get this stuff.

prolly right.

Nukes do act different in the absence of the earth's atmosphere. have learned that from some Utube vids. Lol!
A nuke on the moon would not make a mushroom cloud, for example. But it would make a new crater in the moon.

But in the future maybe it could work. Maybe they could figure a way to transfer the nuclear energy of an H bomb to the kinetic energy of a projectile. A space rail gun using a nuke to fire a cannonball type projectile at the asteroid at extraordinary speed which blows up the asteroid on impact by shear force. Maybe.

C'est la vie!

Now you're thinking!

With or without the homogenisation of the data?

Is that a simulation of Theia Impact?

Yeah. I don't think anyone was living on earth back in those days but if someone was it would have been pretty bad news for them. It probably caused more than just fires and tsunamis.

At the time when it happened, planet orbits weren't really settled yet.
No more free bodies of that size in Solar System any more.

That's probably for the best.