“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.
First administration: “We must do something about the asteroid. I’ve started a plan to divert it, but it’ll take several years.”
Second administration: “The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office.”
Third administration: “Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there’s just too much political resistance to solving it. Let’s focus on other priorities that we can solve.”
Yea that and panic at the end !
We’ve already solved this. We just need to train a team of dysfunctional oil drillers to send up to the asteroid.
🎵 Don’t wanna close my eyes 🎵
I don’t even remember what movie that was
Armageddon, the mega block buster hit movie of 1998
Thanks! I can’t for the life of me remember when I watched that, especially since I wasn’t even alive when that came out. Maybe we watched it in school or something
Not to be confused with the other mega block buster hit movie about an asteroid hitting earth released one month earlier in 1998, Deep Impact.
Deep Impact is to Armageddon as Volcano is to Dante’s Peak.
almost forgot about Dante’s peak. that was the shit!
Superior?
Yes
I would have sworn it was Space Cowboys. Shit.
We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.
Actually we DID. Tho’ only for a little while. And the results were enormous. The B/Yamgata Influenza lineage appears to have gone extinct. The cool part is we weren’t even trying to do anything with those specific efforts to affect influenza. All of which should encourage us to cooperate more.
Please give us more cool facts!
Doctor Ignaz Semmelweiss in the mid-1800s suggested that obstetricians should wash and sterilize their hands before attending their patients to reduce the chance of postpartum infection. He was rejected by the medical community, ridiculed by colleagues, and eventually locked in an asylum where he was killed.
We’re sliding back in time.
People forget the most important bit. The clapback to Semmelweiss from other doctors was “A doctor’s hands are always clean!”
Humans are irrational fucking idiots and we prove it daily. The number of us who are willing to protect our own in-group over things they don’t deserve to be protected over is too damn high.
Semmelweiss is also partially responsible for the widespread rejection of his findings. He basically called doctors who did not follow his advice murderers which naturally didn’t help his popularity. Antagonising someone who you are trying to convince usually just entrenches their opinions further.
We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.
- No one washes their hands — Increased infection rates.
- Research doctors don’t work — Reduced cure research speed.
- Sick people given hugs — Infectivity increased once spotted.
– Plague Inc. description of Easy Difficulty (Written before the 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown)
The cloth does nothing to stop the virus but also completely cuts off oxygen to your brain.
No I will not explain. It’s your job to educate yourself by watching more Jordan Peterson videos.
Goddamnit, stop making me click the downvote button twice!
I know it’s stupid but /s really should be mandatory if you arennot serious. Because there are too many prople that are
Poe’s law strikes again
Cameron Poe?
Did you get the special chloroform-infused masks? I hear they’re the only ones that do the job properly.
Sir, I’m trying to survive a pandemic not learn how to be a lobster.
Don’t make me tap the sign…
I hope you’re a troll. That’s just next level stupidity to be real.
The second sentence tells me troll/sarcasm. But there are people who unironically believe that
Don’t look up
It was a great movie - sadly, because it was so accurate. Provided that you can call a sci-fi movie accurate. But after the pandemic and shit, “don’t look up” looks like a playbook for a meteor extinction level event
What’s funny is that movie released during the pandemic, so it seemed like that was the thing it was commenting on, but actually it was filmed before the pandemic and was originally meant as a commentary on climate change. What it shows is that humanity’s modern tribalism is remarkably predictable. No matter what the problem, we will turn it into an us versus them situation where getting anything meaningful done becomes an uphill battle.
Actually they say that Comet Dibiasky is twice the size of the dinosaur killer, but they also say it’s 6-1 9 kilometres wide. 10 kilometres is the size of Chicxulub. Scientifically it was very inaccurate. But politically it’s flawless.
That’s the last three words of the article. The author didn’t miss the connection either.
I always wonder when people repeat something from the article or ask a question that’s answered in the article: did you not read it or did you just want to start a discussion about this connection and are somehow constrained in the number of words you can write per day?
We are not at a point where the “global community” is more than a few competing, egoistic and greedy tribes with clashing world views, so that’s no surprise.
Yeah, I think that really it wouldn’t be the “global community” that ends up saving the world in an asteroid impact scenario.
It would likely be an organization that could operate on its own without endless committees. Say, the Chinese space agency, or SpaceX, or the Indian space agency. Someone would decide to just do it, without getting the whole world’s approval for the mission. Then the whole world would complain that the effort was made without any international cooperation or oversight. And the organization that literally saved the world would get chewed out by everyone because inevitably the plan will not have worked perfectly.
But I’m not worried, because even billionaires don’t want to die. Someone would do something.
would you trust Boeing to save you from an asteroid?
I’d trust them to try to intercept an asteroid… It’ll be harmless when they miss and achieve nothing, but in the off chance that they pull it off, yeah sure Boeing, go for it.
That’s okay, humanity had s good run. I imagine we’ll have extinctified ourselves way before a space rock could do it. A+ for trying though.
Real talk, an asteroid wiping us out would only expedite the inevitable. If we could pull together and deflect an asteroid, there’s hope. If not, we failed the test and die with the consequences. But we don’t need the asteroid to fail this test. We’re making great strides towards destroying our home with home field advantage.
Gotta give it to humanity, though. We’re damn good at ruining everything we touch.
I don’t think we ruin everything… We’re also the best around at improving things, certainly improving our environments.
I know it’s easy to be pessimistic about these things, but humans are evolutionary badasses. We’re capable of amazing things. I wouldn’t count us out just yet.
Besides we haven’t really ruined anything. We haven’t done any damage to the earth that won’t heal eventually. The earth has seen many heating and cooling cycles and plenty of mass extinctions before and it will again (with or without humans).
but humans are evolutionary badasses
How so?
How many predators can take down prey 50 times their size? How many species can thrive in tundra, jungles, plains, forests, mountains and deserts? How many species can be found on every continent? How many species figured out how to fly despite never developing wings? How many species developed hundreds of distinct methods of communication? How many species have been to the moon?
Humans are fucking badass…
How many predators can take down prey 50 times their size?
Ants and a couple of Insects I guess. Also Bacteria and Viruses.
How many species can thrive in tundra, jungles, plains, forests, mountains and deserts?
Well, obviously also most Bacteria. If we are speaking more sentient live then the answer is: mot of them. Birds, Mammals, Insects. It might take a generation or 10 to get them adopted to their new envirment, but almost every species. Is able to adopt to their evolutoany niche.
How many species can be found on every continent?
Most of them?
How many species figured out how to fly despite never developing wings?
Technology. Yes, that’s a human thing at last, at least at the level we use it.
How many species developed hundreds of distinct methods of communication
Various species have methods of communicating, from bees dancing to each other to whales having distinct regional dialects. Yes, humans have added some complexity to it by introducing technology, but that’s realy what it comes down to. Technology.
How many species have been to the moon?
Technology, once more.
So your point is that humans have learned to use technology, therefor they are badass.
I disagree. We are living in an absolut singularity tight now. Humans have learned to use finate resources (oil for example) to amplify the energy that we have at our hands. A single humans beeing today can use energy that would be equal to thousands of men’s work every day.
Since we are drawing on finate resources there are two ways how this will go: we will learn to exploit other, less finate sources of energy (say, fusion) and the groth path will continue (to the stars, eventually). Or we will run out of energy or ruin the livable world by doing so and will fall back to an earlier level of development. Since most of the resources needed are used up we will not be able clime back up. At this moment we are on the second of those paths.
And in our way in getting here we have started the sixt mass extinction, accidentaly started turning the climate into something less sustainable for humans and polluted every single space on this planet, including areas like the deep ocean that we have never even touched physically.
Humans are not badass, in my opinion. We are fucking cancer.
Um, I think you’re mistaking species with kingdom.
“Birds” are not a species, “mammals” are not a species. I don’t think viruses are even described in terms of species because they don’t reproduce sexually. I think you’ll find that when you actually consider species, most of my points hold.
Various species have methods of communicating, from bees dancing to each other to whales having distinct regional dialects. Yes, humans have added some complexity to it by introducing technology, but that’s realy what it comes down to. Technology.
Yes, many species have some rudimentary way of communicating some kinds of information. But obviously bee dances don’t compare to any human language, of which there are literally hundreds. A bee for instance has no way to express appreciation or derision for the English language. My whole point here was that humans, on hundreds of distinct occasions, developed languages capable of conveying complex ideas. No other species has developed a language half as capable as any of ours.
Rather than picking the rest of that post apart, I’m just going to stop here. It’s pretty self evident that humans are impressive as hell. Denying that is… pretty dumb, and purely rhetorical.
As a side note, don’t get too excited about fusion, it’s largely a dead end. I expect it will only be really useful in niche applications (like spacecraft). It will be far more expensive than nuclear fision and not really offer any benefits besides abundance of fuel. There’s still a huge radioactive waste problem. On the other hand, the sun provides all the energy we’ll ever need, and we’re getting better at collecting it. I’m really not concerned about increasing energy demands.
Congress is making laws about bathrooms and genitals like a bunch of 6th graders running a minecraft server. Of course we can’t handle fucking asteroid defense.
It reminds me of how tech companies are all scrambling to use AI. There was a funny article recently where the author pointed out that these companies are struggling to do very basic things, so the idea that they could somehow tackle AI in a way that’s useful and profitable is silly.
Maybe the 10 commandments posted in every Louisiana classroom will stop the asteroids.
I haven’t had much hope that if there was an major asteroid racing towards earth that there could be much done about it, but I also know that likelyhood of it is very small so there is no need to lose sleep over it.
Sorry don’t you mean let’s fund AI?
/s
Achievement unlocked: discovering the Great Filter.
If an asteroid were to hit the Earth large enough to cause human extinction, it would save us the embarrassment of killing ourselves from poisoning the climate or microplastic pollution.
I’m pretty sure we navigated nuclear holocaust, but we haven’t fully ruled it out either.
Don’t Look Up!
Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.
As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren’t signals from innumerable civilizations out there.
We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.
Master space? Master planetary defense? We can’t even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world’s owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.
And Reminder, what we’re doing and have been doing in decades won’t be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we’re doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.
I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie
“Wow, rude!” – Carl Sagan, probably
We’d rather bomb each other than save the planet.
If ace combat has taught me anything, it’s that there’s no reason we can’t do both
Ace combat 4 is still on if my favs
