100x Asteroid Declaration signatories, with a Queen and a Lord

An august list of signatories to the 100x Declaration, urging a 100-fold increase in the detection and monitoring of asteroids.

With the Sentinel Mission, for example, you would know the trajectories 50+ years into the future, and with enough years to play with, a small delta-v imparted early on (easily achieved by just rear-ending the asteroid), alters the course of the solar system ever so slightly to preserve life on Earth. Computational power has progressed to the point where we can do this (modeling the three-body problem for many years). It seems a shame to fly blind.

From Spaceref: “The more we learn about asteroid impacts, the clearer it becomes that the human race has been living on borrowed time,” remarked Queen co-founder Brian May. “We are currently aware of less than one percent of objects comparable to the one that impacted at Tunguska, and nobody knows when the next big one will hit. It takes just ONE.”

“The ancients were correct in their belief that the heavens and the motion of astronomical bodies affect life on Earth – just not in the way they imagined,” explained Lord Martin Rees. “Sometimes those heavenly bodies run into Earth. This is why we must make it our mission to find asteroids before they find us.”