Some stories just seem to develop a life of their own. Starting on December 26, 2004, I wrote a few articles on 2004 MN4, an asteroid with a remote chance of hitting the Earth:
Without any real change in the strike probabilities, it has resurfaced again:
Circle your calendar. April 13th, 2036 could be a really, really bad day on planet Earth.
The United Nations? Now, I think I’ve made my position clear on the United Nations in the past:
If not, the propensity of the United Nations to waste huge amounts of resources while not aggressively seeking solutions to impending problems means that I do not trust them with the complicated decision of how to nudge an asteroid. The United States has already made successful contact with a comet via Stardust. It was such a non-event that it received very little media notice. Now, that might have “just” been a comet, but, it proved that we already have the capability of making contact, or nudging, an asteroid. The Japanese actually made contact with an actual comet. So, it’s not like we’re re-inventing the wheel here. The technology and capability are already there. All the UN is is a bureaucracy, that’s all. That’s the very last thing we need in dealing with a life-ending threat that is 2004 MN4, now named Apophis.
The UN can’t save itself from itself. And unfortunately, I think that Bruce Willis’ best flying days are behind him.
Bruce was Hollywood’s vision of how to do anything. Make it more complicated, put people at risk for no real reason, and, of course, get a miner to speerhead the most complex flying machine known to man. Real world style would be sending a series of very simple rockets to detonate fairly large explosions in a series to knock it the other way. This asteroid’s not really all that big. It wouldn’t take much.
I guess the question is why the United Nations is in charge of this instead of someone like, say…NASA. Or even the French space program…or the European Space Agency. But the UN?
To be clear, they are not in charge now. A group is wanting them to be in charge. Right now it would be left up to the individual countries to come up with a plan. That’s fine with me as there are only a hand full of countries that could do anything about it. The rest would just be muddying the water IMO.
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