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« Blogging and religious politics | Main | Deck the Halls with Boston Charlie » Tuesday, February 20, 2007Attack of the real Mooninites?According to news reports of the last few days, a group of scientists and astronauts are warning that there is a chance that Earth will be struck by a large asteroid on April 13 [naturally], 2036 -- a mere twenty-nine years away. What kind of chance are we talking about? Well, maybe 1 in 45,000, says the group. But they still think the UN needs to take action as soon as possible. A spokesman for the group says it's "important to start the search for asteroids now, to allow enough time to effectively deal with them." And what do these astro-guys propose we do? Not entirely clear, but theoretically we could use a weapon on the asteroid's surface or pull the asteroid off course with the force of another object's gravity. "Another suggestion," says ABC News, "is to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid in the hopes of changing its direction." A multibillion-dollar spacecraft sacrificed "in the hopes" of a good outcome. On the face of it, there's nothing absurd about this call for evasive action, and especially for more study into other flying threats. But it is almost charmingly naive to think the UN is going to devote itself, for many billions of dollars, to preventing a 1-in-45,000 event when it can't seem to halt certain climate change and definite genocidal killing in Darfur. Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:44 PM
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