‘Don’t Look Up’: humanity could avert asteroid Armageddon, say scientists

‘Don’t Look Up’: humanity could avert asteroid Armageddon, say scientists(arxiv.org)

15 points by unklefolk 4 years ago | 11 comments

Comevius 4 years ago |

In the movie humanity was technologically capable destroying the comet, the solution just got jammed between politics, the media and corporate idiocracy.

Our tepid response to another existential threat called the climate crisis suggests that this may be our reality.

Tenoke 4 years ago | |

Climate change while serious is nowhere near an 'existential threat' on the level of a planet-destroying asteroid. It's also harder to understand, and with a longer time frame so it's not comparable.

Comevius 4 years ago | | |

That's fair, but it's still an existential threat. The IPCC numbers are halfway between how could organized society exist within such circumstances and how could anyone survive this. We are practically sitting on a bomb. Scientists dealing with this are also cracking, they are becoming less polite and professional to signal urgency.

The developed world can keep up the facade for a while, but the ship is sinking. Humanity is tough, people will go on, but organized society will suffer.

People will either crack under this pressure or become flexible at interpreting and deflecting it. Some will be able to hide in the gaps not knowing, some are already crushed. Developing countries will be crushed faster, but desperation, thirst, hunger and violence will spiral out. People will start to cling to illusions even more. The downturn will create localized upturns, consuming of what's left, but even that will fizzle out.

So yeah, pretty much an existential threat to organized society, the planet will be fine eventually.

mcv 4 years ago | | |

It's not as immediate, but a slow, gradual threat slowly getting worse over a period of centuries. And that makes it a lot harder to make politicians care.

We're like a frog in water that's slowly being heated. It's never quite urgent enough to jump out.

8n4vidtmkvmk 4 years ago | |

i thought this is what the entire movie was actually about tbh. poking "fun" at how much we suck at dealing with a very serious and similar issue

jfengel 4 years ago |

In what sense is this article new, aside from tagging it with the name of a recent movie (which isn't really about asteroids at all, but an allegory about climate change). We know all that; the DART mission is already on its way to go test the theory.

I get the impression that they're doing something novel here; there's something about "bolide fragmentation". But that takes up about half a sentence in the abstract; everything else seems to be telling us what we already knew about the dangers of asteroids.

Can somebody give me a better abstract of their paper?

T-A 4 years ago | |

"We previously showed that a smallish asteroid or comet can be broken up and rendered harmless using kinetic projectiles. Here we show that a larger (~10 km) comet can also be handled if we add nukes to the projectiles. Probably. It really depends on how well the energy from the nuclear explosions is transferred to the comet."

spiorf 4 years ago | | |

Are nuclear shaped explosive charges a thing?

sjg007 4 years ago | |

The cynic / conspiracy theorist would argue that the DART mission is evidence that something big is headed our way.

genmud 4 years ago |

We could also avert childhood hunger, but humans are notoriously bad at fixing hard problems.