NASA scientist warns Earth is due for ‘extinction-level’ event
December 15, 2016 Apocalypse
December 15, 2016
Editor’s Comment: So if we can’t do anything to stop it, why worry about it? Nuth’s idea to build an interceptor rocket makes me wonder if he has been spending too much time binge watching Deep Impact and other movies like it that were popular in the late nineties.
A NASA scientist is warning that Earth is due for an “extinction-level” event like a comet or asteroid strike — and claims there won’t be anything we can do to stop it.
Joseph Nuth, an award-winning scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told attendees during Monday’s annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco that policymakers should start preparing for such a possible cataclysmic strike, despite the extremely long odds of it happening.
“But on the other hand, they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially,” Nuth said. “You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”
Making matters even worse is Nuth’s claim that humanity isn’t close to being prepared for such a threat, The Guardian reported.
“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” Nuth said.
Nuth is calling on NASA to build two spacecraft: an “interceptor” rocket and an observer spacecraft. If a comet or asteroid poses a strong enough threat to Earth, the rocket — which would be capable of carrying a nuclear bomb — could “mitigate the possibility of a sneaky asteroid coming in from a place that’s hard to observe, like from the sun,” he said.
But NASA would need to drastically reduce the typical five-year span between mission approval and launch to make any such last-minute deflection attempt a possibility.