In the middle of a rich dinner conversation on the topic of saving the Earth from asteroid impacts.
The latest data show a 1/600 chance of a major impact on Feb 5, 2040 at 3pm by asteroid 2011 AG5.
And we have found only 10% of 100 megaton threats like AG5. For a sense of scale, a 100MT impact is about 10x larger than all wartime bomb bursts, conventional and nuclear, combined (equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT).
People generally have a difficult time internalizing the odds of “highly unlikely”, but devastating events. The emotional fate of individuals fades to the muddle of statistics.
If you live in America, the chance that you will die on any given day in a car crash is the same chance that a 100MT asteroid will hit Earth on that day. We invest in seatbelts and airbags. But we invest nothing in asteroid deflection.
I had lunch with Astronaut Ed Lu today. He recently spoke with Sandia National Labs and asked: “What would you do if a 100MT bomb in your arsenal had a 1/600 chance of going off accidentally?” Not surprisingly, they said they would do everything conceivable to identify and neutralize that risk. They feel responsibility for that arsenal; it’s in their jurisdiction. “Nobody has jurisdiction to protect the Earth.”
Rusty Schweickart presented the risks to the UN Action Team on Near Earth Objects a couple week ago, and highlighted the need to address the trajectory prior to its pass through a gravitational keyhole in 2023.
Schweickart and Lu formed the B612 Foundation to detect and deflect these threats to humanity.
Schweickart summarized at dinner: “We live in a remarkable time in history. We can change the trajectory of the solar system, ever so slightly, and protect life on Earth.”
A documentary film, The Asteroid Effect is underway on this topic.
P.S. I also learned that during Apollo 9, they had the first test of the Lunar Module Descent Engine in space, and they thought it might be noisy. So they trained with hand signals just in case the noise in the LM cabin was too loud. When they hit the switch, there was total silence, and for a moment, they had to check the instruments to verify that it was operating properly (and it was).
Photo by Esther Dyson. On the left is Alex Hall, Director of the Google Lunar X Prize.
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