Earth Is Stupid, Throw Rocks At It

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With all the press that unknowable horror from outer space has been getting of late, you may find it reassuring that scientists haven’t forgotten about knowable horror from outer space.

Chief among these more mundane, non-Lovecraftian space horrors, and please forgive me if I resort to using obscure scientific jargon to fully explain this, is the constant threat of giant space rocks smashing into the Earth and fucking a bunch of shit up.

Our solar system may seem like a tidy, well-organized place to live but it’s actually teeming with annoying space junk like asteroids. Normally these space rocks are content to orbit the Sun along with their bigger, more atmospheric cousins the planets. However, some asteroids are pretty crappy neighbors and feel compelled to pay unannounced visits to the planets they cross paths with.

When it comes to the Earth, a surprising number of asteroids decide to hit on us. Most of them are small enough that they explode in our outer atmosphere, but about once a century an asteroid shows up that’s large enough to cause serious damage. The last such asteroid impact was in June of 1908, when an asteroid around 300 feet in diameter exploded several miles above the Earth in a remote area of Russia near the Tunguska River. This explosion was equivalent to a 10-megaton bomb going off, and would have wiped out a major city, so you may have less than a year left to finally summon up the courage to ask that cute girl at the copy store out for a date.

Once every 100 million years or so, the Earth gets smacked around by an asteroid that’s as much as six miles in diameter. While a Tunguska-sized asteroid impact means bad news for a city or two, an asteroid impact of this magnitude causes what are known as “extinction level events”, as the environmental changes they suddenly bring about lead to massive numbers of plants and animals dying off. The best example of such an asteroid impact is the one that killed off all the dinosaurs roughly 65 million years ago.

In case you were afraid that our only defense against the threat of asteroid impact was attempting to run like hell from the flaming cosmic death boulders plummeting towards us, science has advanced far enough to give us mammals the fighting chance that the dinosaurs didn’t have.

Not only have our clever monkey brains developed methods of detecting asteroids and predicting the likelihood that they’ll pay us a visit, we actually have the hubris and the bountiful free time to contemplate methods of preventing large asteroids from hitting the Earth at all. Take that, Brontosaurus!

Speaking of bountiful free time, recently researchers at the University Of Glasgow’s Space Advanced Research Team (or “Space ART”, which sounds like they should be airbrushing the covers of Yes albums onto the sides of vans) tried to predict just how theoretically effective some of the more rational-sounding asteroid defense proposals would be. They compared such factors as warning time required, technology readiness level (also known as the “where’s my flying car?” factor), and ability to alter the orbit of the current boogeyman of asteroids, 99942 Apophis, a large hunk of space rock which currently has a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting the Earth in 2036.

Method #1: Mirrors.

An array of giant floating orbital space mirrors known as a “solar collector” would focus sunlight into a flaming death ray aimed at the asteroid in question. Getting Archimedieval on a bad asteroid would cause part of the asteroid’s surface to explode into a plume of dust and gas, the velocity of which would nudge the rest of the asteroid out of our way.

Pros: Adheres to the long-standing scientific principle that adding “giant floating orbital space” to anything makes it exponentially more awesome. Amoeba? Yawnsville! Giant floating orbital space amoeba? Hand me my telescope! Monkeys? Hilarious! Giant floating orbital space monkeys? So amazingly wonderous my brain would explode. Also, what is science good for if not creating flaming death beams? What could possibly be the downside of the government building a solar-powered death ray that can instantly vaporize things from outer space?

Cons: It’d take 5,000 space mirrors over three years to move an extinction-causing asteroid out of a collision course with Earth. Generations of Star Wars geeks would comment that the solar-powered death ray is still not as cool as the Death Star.

Method #2: Nuclear Explosion.

Also known as “The plot of that '90s disaster movie, but not the one where Morgan Freeman is President, this method involves detonating a nuclear bomb near enough to the asteroid to alter its orbital path or at least break it into smaller chunks.

Pros: Steve Buscemi.

Cons: Michael Bay will get an executive producer credit. Smaller chunks of a giant asteroid can still fuck shit up, scientifically speaking, if they hit the Earth. Hiring Aerosmith to play a power ballad for the entire time it’d take for a bomb to reach the asteroid and explode could be prohibitively expensive.

Method #3: Kinetic Impactor.

Which is really a fancy-pants science term for “throw something like a spaceship at the asteroid and hope that’ll it’ll knock the asteroid off course.” Also known as the “Wow, you really suck at playing Asteroids” method.

Pros: Refreshingly low-tech. Would hopefully involve a giant space cannon, preferably on the moon.

Cons: Could perhaps just make the asteroid angry.

Method #4: Low-Thrust Propulsion.

A spacecraft would be sent to intercept the asteroid. Then either a team of astronauts or some really cool-looking robot would install a solar sail that would use the Sun’s energy to gently move the asteroid into a different orbit.

Pros: Method least likely to be used by a supervillain to hold Earth for ransom.

Cons: Installing a giant sail onto a hunk of space rock may tempt astronauts into becoming space pirates. Solar sail technology doesn’t actually exist quite yet.

Method #5: Mass Driver.

Entails sticking a big-ass, Quake-style railgun into the side of the asteroid. A chunk of the asteroid’s surface would then shot out of the railgun like a bullet. The velocity of the blast would shove the asteroid out of its collision path with Earth.

Pros: Allows videogame geeks like me to make Quake references out the wazoo. “Mass Driver” is a great pseudonym for a gay porn actor.

Cons: Once again, the technology to create a Mass Driver on such a massive scale doesn’t really exist yet.

Researchers concluded that the first two methods were at the moment our best possible options, but then again I’d consider it a failure on science’s part to not endorse massive explosions and orbital death rays.

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