[r9etb]

But many specialists are worried that little sustained effort is being made to spot smaller space wanderers, which could still unleash the energy of an arsenal of nuclear bombs if they collided with our home.

Translation: Here are a bunch of guys who are lobbying for a lucrative future in asteroid-spotting.

I'm not ignoring the possibility of asteroidal devastation, mind you. But having seen the specialist-driven hoo-raw about not one, but two Leonids meteor showers ("satellites will be destroyed!!!!"), I'm mighty cynical about guys like this.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Sounds like a job for Jessie Ventura...

[cogitator]

But having seen the specialist-driven hoo-raw about not one, but two Leonids meteor showers ("satellites will be destroyed!!!!"),

Well, even if there are a bunch of Leonid sand grains in space, space is still mostly empty. But the Leonids we saw in the last couple of years were not the maximum that the Leonids are capable of. If we had run into the mainstream, satellites would have been in jeopardy. Particularly big ones like the Hubble Space Telescope.

[snag_matic]

Translation: Here are a bunch of guys who are lobbying for a lucrative future in asteroid-spotting.

I'm not ignoring the possibility of asteroidal devastation, mind you. But having seen the specialist-driven hoo-raw about not one, but two Leonids meteor showers ("satellites will be destroyed!!!!"), I'm mighty cynical about guys like this.

Money spent looking out for asteroids, our potential doom, is better than spending $500 million on African AIDS cases.

[RightWhale]

a bunch of guys who are lobbying for a lucrative future in asteroid-spotting

There are already such careers underway in Europe, especially England. They have, of course, failed to spot most of the asteroids that have whizzed by close until 3 days after the event.

In any case, spotting asteroids won't do any good at all unless there is a program to actually do something about such asteroids. That is the problem: there is no action plan. Put anti-asteroid hardware in space and don't wait until the last minute.

[537 Votes]

The 'Tunguska Event' actually happened, July 30, 1908, in Siberia.

In late 1991, then-President of the Soviet Union/Russia Boris Yeltsin was informed by his advisors that a missile was headed toward the Soviet Union, and he was asked whether he wanted to launch a nuclear war against the United States. Yeltsin made a gut decision, and declined the offer. It turned out that the 'missile' was really just a sounding rocket launched by the Norwegians, whose letter of notification had been lost by the Soviet bureaucracy.

Imagine if a city-sized explosion occurred in Russia in those days. If it occurred today, would it be that much easier to stand down from a full nuclear alert?

It's estimated that 'Tunguska'-type impacts happen about once every century. So we're due for another one.

It would be nice to be prepared, rather than panicked.