Earth Unprepared for Asteroid Impact-But there is HopeBy: Kevin McDonald on Thursday, Oct. 9th, 2008 Free World Press According to the US Air force we currently lack the means to defend ourselves from asteroids. According to NASA there is no plan to defend ourselves from Asteroids. There are organizations which strive to make the issue better known, but generally they are completely ineffective. The threat of asteroids became more visually clear on early Wednesday morning, when an Asteroid 2 to 5 meters in length created a so called air-blast over North-East Kenya. The air-blast occurred when the asteroid blew up before hitting the ground and it released the equivalent energy of a 2KT nuclear weapon. This in turn created an immense fireball which lit up the sky. There were visual sightings as far as 1400km away, however there were no reports on damage which occurred, as of yet. While the concern of Asteroids has not yet reached the minds of the average person, the threat is certainly real. According to NASA out of all the means of death, there is 1 in 20,000 chance a person will die from an asteroid impact which is in the same range as aircraft disasters and considerably lower then floods or tornados. With all the recent disasters with floods, tornados and plane crashes, this is certainly a number to be concerned with. With Apophis, the bringer of darkness, scheduled to make its closest approach to earth in Dec. 2012 there is currently little effort which is taking place in the international space community to take care of this threat. Governments and corporations which appear to be working on building up capacity for Apophis, seem to be aiming for the 2029 and 2031 threat zones and note that they really won't know much until it comes by the earth in 2012. Even with a functional detection system, it has been disclosed that the long stand-by method of launching nuclear weapons into asteroids will not actually work simply due to speed. Using chemical rockets, our nuclear payload would only be able to reach speeds of 10m/s which is five times slower than an asteroid traveling at 50m/s; which is considerably slow for an object moving in space. Just when it looked like we were completely lost, and without hope, I stumbled across the Global Asteroid Protection Society. Using a 5 step plan, it is their goal to help defend the properties of its members from the threat of asteroids. Filled with technical details of their plan, I realized that this is humanity's only hope for actually defending ourselves from the asteroid threat and I am glad they are here. Link: Global Asteroid Protection Society (stoprocks.com) Download News Story: .Doc/.PDF |