Zyxpsilon

Actually, I read something in Scientific American about Mars's soil actually being good for growing stuff in..... if your plants were resistant to radiation (which a lot of planets are) and resistant to cold (which a lot of plants aren't, but we can probably genetically-engineer them to be, even with the technology we have now) you could do it...

Pfffffttt, we're SOOOOO lucky we have a spare barely 80 million miles away!

You can prevent & react, but you can't hide an entire planet or its moon from such trajectories.

So, say -- the theorized doomsday asteroid (or comet) isn't grabbed by the gravity pull of Jupiter (and other biggies) and heads up straight towards the sun... all we have to do is watch, cross-fingers & calculate some tricky situations. Duh.

In the meantime, the lucky observer (such as what happened above) can prove the risks, again.

But can't budget a coordinated defense of & by Earth. As if Armageddon & Deep Impact weren't enough, the next comet will obliterate (100% certainty, as of now) humanity unless intercepted.

15 years, that's all it took. Centuries worth of exploration ahead though.

Mars isn't a feasible solution nor is Venus. Earth is.

ET call home. Is it still there?

The 'if this thing hit Earth' speculation is a pretty big 'if.'  Because of it's sheer size and stronger gravity pull, Jupiter is much more likely to get hit by random stuff.

While I am far from well-versed in the area, I'm not even sure if NASA has the funds to properly search for everything heading for Earth, much less be able to spare the luxery of seeing if anything is on a collision course for any other planet.  Their job isn't to idly look out at everything, they have specific goals and purposes and a limited pool of money.  That an amateur astronomer happened to find this while he was looking at Jupiter because he felt like it before those who are don't have any real reason to be watching the planet isn't that surprising.

I'm not saying it's not disconcerting that we don't know everything of what's happening in our own neighborhood, but you can't really make it appear to be NASA's fault.

Zyxpsilon - Can you try to interpret your post into something more coherent?

How do dead spots work when the earth is spinning?  Wouldn't a single rotation give a good sweep of everything?  Is it more of a dead 'stripe', like we can't really see stuff between X and Y latitude lines?

I'd be interested to see how the program works.  Sounds interesting

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you want to write your Congresscritter and tell them to fund NASA's NEA observation projects. As it stands, their ability to detect threats is severely limited by a lack of personnel and instrumentation.

I read another number in "Bild der Wissenschaft" a few Years ago. There they said they would need 1 Million € to obersorve 1 Angleminute in a way that they would detect a dangerous object 1-2 Years ahead. So that would mean they need at least 60*180= 108 Million to cover the sky.. not too bad...

as I recall, they have mapped an estimated 10%(?) of the NEOs (Near-Earth objects), but can only cover 2% of the sky currently.  with another, oh, around a thousand Spaceguard observatories, they might be able to make a dent in that number, but not currently.

oh, and if one were to come from in front of the sun, we'd be screwed.  we'd only be able to see it for that last few days.

Hi!

True, but crunching numbers, or more specifically "bean counting" is the basic moving force of our civilization. Virtually noone will invest 1M$ per year for the next 100,000,000 years, for no return, and extemely low chance of some interesting finding.

Besides, there are more serious and imminent threats to our civilization, than a big meteor impact, and what are we really doing to prevent them?    

BR,  Iztok

I don't care if humanity dies out, what can I do to save the spotted owls?

Seriously though, it is something we should care about even with all the other problems we face. Cosmic impact is one of the few threats we face as an entire species. Wars, disease, climate change - these can all threat specific areas, populations, and ways of life, but not really the survival of the species itself.

One of the best books I've read about an impact is Lucifer's Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle. It was written in the 70s so some aspects will feel dated, but I like the way they addressed societal impacts of such a catastrophe. The impact scenario they chose was pretty good too, a comet on the outbound leg of a highly eccentric orbit. No single mass to deflect or destroy, but "the duck's view of the shotgun blast".

How exactly are you quantizing vulnerability and consequence?  Your statistic makes no sense... (And if you do come back to clarify it, post a source?)

lol, nice.  While I see where you're coming from, with the miniscule chances of something striking the Earth along with total lack of a plan regarding what to do if we even find something, I'm not too sure keeping up the search is worth the expense.  Depends on who's price quote is correct, I guess (trillians for a small portion of the sky or 100 million per year to watch everything).

Vulnerability = Not having the means nor the technology to detect, aim and meet Asteroid X (in 2036, ONE has a shot at us, so far... but this status may change) before it hits Earth. --- EDITED with link.

ConsequenceS = Letting any strike us.

Why should i need to post a source? Truth & theory aren't clear enough to you or anybody else who'd "feel" threatened by such a collision in the future, be it whenever (or anywhere on Earth, btw) from now on?

Definitions don't even come close to indicating how you quantize those two words into numbers to come up with your 2:1 ratio.  Not only that, but it completely disregards any notion of likelihood.  Way to make up stuff and try to pass it off as "statistics."  It's hardly what I'd call 'truth', and no one should be satisfied with no information other than random speculation.