Until recently, nearly all the thinking about the risks of space-rock strikes has focused on counting craters. But what if most impacts don’t leave craters? This is the prospect that troubles Boslough. Exploding in the air, the Tunguska rock did plenty of damage…
That is Gregg Easterbrook in the latest Atlantic Monthly, June issue, "The Sky is Falling," not yet on-line. Here are previous MR posts on the asteroid problem.
I don’t doubt the brilliant scientific achievements of NASA, but won’t they all go to waste if an impact kills us? If I was president, I would devote 90% of NASA to creating a space rock detection system. The last statistic I read said currently, we are capable of viewing 1% of space. I do not know if that is at one time, or a scanning technique, but asteroids move. If we had 99% of space covered, we could still miss one or two million, space is very large. This may be why we just leave it to fate, and work on trying to send people to the moon. But seriously, with the computing power we have today, can’t we find 40,000 NASA employees(the number that worked on the shuttle(airplane) project that were just fired) to create a system that at least gives us a year notice with 100% certainty?
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