The latest cause of my growing ire with government-funded agencies (other than that whole global climate change censorship thing, of course) is that there isn’t enough money to pay for detecting asteroids/comets/objects that could be a threat to our planet. Plenty of time and money is spent on the exploration of space, and that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t mean a whole lot if we’re wiped out because of a meteor or comet that couldn’t be detected. Granted, the plan to detect such bodies would cost over $1,000,000,000 for 1st-choice methods, but the government denied funding for cheaper alternatives (costing $300,000,000), so as one scientist said in the Yahoo!News article
The decision of the agency is we just can’t do anything about it right now.
Great news right? Especially considering that there are large bodies that do pose a potential threat, and although chances of a collision look slim at the moment, if nothing else it is a reminder that we are not in a safe-little biosphere that will never again experience a mass-extinction induced by an impact.
Leave a Reply