Alex Steffen
See book keywords and concepts |  If you count all the asteroids 150 meters (nearly 500 feet) or larger (which could still take out part of a continent, and perhaps trigger all sorts of climate mayhem), there are over a million nearby. In short, we live in a cosmic shooting gallery.
What can we do to lessen the odds of taking a hit? Hollywood notwithstanding, nuclear weapons don't work. Many asteroids are not very dense, and would be more likely to absorb the energy of a nuke than to be torn apart by one. Our best bet might be to push the asteroid. | | AS
Life in the Shooting Gallery mihi Right now, we know of 1,100 large asteroids a kilometer wide or bigger with orbits that come near Earth. Of those, scientists have studied the orbits of 700 sufficiently to determine that they will not pose a danger to the planet in the next century; 400 remain mysteries. But these are only the planet-killer-size rocks, the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs. If you count all the asteroids 150 meters (nearly 500 feet) or larger (which could still take out part of a continent, and perhaps trigger all sorts of climate mayhem), there are over a million nearby. | | In fact, the biggest barrier
Left: Searching for asteroids using telescopes and satellites now will help prevent the enormous economic and human costs of being hit by an asteroid in the future. Page 537: Nature has a way of reemerging, even in soil that has been catastrophically altered either by man or nature itself. Here a sapling grows in the ash surrounding Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, Washington. to a bright green future may be entirely in our heads—we simply can't imagine it. | | Stargazers, another popular breed of hobbyist, are aiding professional astronomers with the unmanageable task of tracking comets and asteroids. Amateurs of course delight in learning to operate their own sophisticated CCD scanner-telescopes, becoming faithful assistants who scan the sky patiently, in the cold, seeking undiscovered objects that they can name after themselves. What a deal!
Bird and bug lovers likewise perform priceless labor for ornithologists and entomologists. | | We can even help search for alien intelligence and hunt dangerous asteroids. Planetary knowledge can be a playground.
Planetary knowledge can also be a bummer. With our increased understanding of the little rock on which we live comes a flood of evidence that we're royally screwing things up. Ecosystems are trembling. Species that evolved over millions of years are being driven into extinction. The most troubling signs have to do with our climate. | | The best defense currently within our grasp is to crank up the search for asteroids that have Earth's name on them. Doing so would require adding telescopes and satellites to the effort. That takes money, but it would be cheap compared with the cost of being hit by even a minor asteroid. With funding for more observation projects, and with improved telescope technology, a smart mob of passionate amateurs could join the hunt, via distributed online efforts to snoop J out likely suspects. |
James Trefil
See book keywords and concepts |  These schemes include blasting the asteroid with nuclear weapons, shredding it by placing a mesh with tungsten projectiles in its path, and diverting small asteroids to collide with big ones.
How seriously you take the asteroid threat depends on how often you think they're going to hit. Current estimates are that asteroids 300 feet across will hit us every few centuries (by the time such asteroids get through the atmosphere, they will be smaller than the one that landed in Arizona). Collisions with objects a mile across will happen about once every million years. | | Asteroids near the earth are relatively small and thus hard to see, so this job isn't as easy as it sounds. At the moment, a few old telescopes have been converted for use in the cataloguing job. (One of those, on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, detected the near miss in 1991.) The main proposal, called Spaceguard, calls for a twenty-five-year, $50 million study to identify 90 percent of the near-earth asteroids a half mile wide or bigger. There has even been some thought about what to do if a collision becomes imminent. | | Current estimates are that asteroids 300 feet across will hit us every few centuries (by the time such asteroids get through the atmosphere, they will be smaller than the one that landed in Arizona). Collisions with objects a mile across will happen about once every million years. Put another way, there is a 1-in-10,000 chance of such an event in the next century. If an asteroid that big hit, particularly in a populated area, it would surely cause major damage and loss of life. But we are all familiar with natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes) that occur much more often. |
Brian O'Leary
See book keywords and concepts |  Clarke, "Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids", Science, June 5,1998.
6. Eugene F. Mallove, "Ten Years that Shook Physics", Infinite Energy, vol. 4,issue 24,March/April 1999, p. 3.
7. Steven Koonin, at the 1998 Baltimore American Physical Society Meeting, quoted in Infinite Energy, vol. 3, issue 18,1998.
8. Harold Aspden, "Ten Years of Cold Fusion: Or Was it Ten Years of 'Cold War'?", Infinite Energy, vol.4, issue 24,1999, p,15.
9. Randell L. Mills, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics, BlackLight Power, Inc., Cranbury, New Jersey, 2000; www.blacklightpower.com.
10. | | My earlier research on mining the asteroids for an economical space infrastructure has given way to the larger view of a universal ecology which respects all of nature on Earth and beyond. Maybe we could buy some time by moving polluting industry into space, but sooner or later, we shall need to make a set of more fundamental changes that would end all human pollution everywhere. Why not sooner rather than later? Why settle for just moving our garbage elsewhere? We're already doing that with radioactive waste here. | | We discovered that this could be done cost-effectively if we use the resources of the Moon, asteroids and moons of Mars. Their light gravities and the availability of full-time solar energy in high orbits would allow the human economy to expand far beyond its terrestrial limits. Remarkably, we could do all this with today's technology. But from my newer perspective as an ecologist, I now have second thoughts of expanding our polluting enterprises beyond Earth while we keep soiling our own nest. |
James Trefil
See book keywords and concepts | | Current estimates are that asteroids 300 feet across will hit us every few centuries (by the time such asteroids get through the atmosphere, they will be smaller than the one that landed in Arizona). Collisions with objects a mile across will happen about once every million years. Put another way, there is a 1-in-10,000 chance of such an event in the next century. If an asteroid that big hit, particularly in a populated area, it would surely cause major damage and loss of life. But we are all familiar with natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes) that occur much more often. |
E. D. Hirsch
See book keywords and concepts |  A region of the solar system between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. Most asteroids are found in the asteroid belt. astronomy The science that deals with the universe beyond the earth. It describes the nature, position, and motion of the stars, planets, and other objects in the skies, and their relation to the earth. astrophysics The branch of astronomy devoted to the study of the physical characteristics and composition of objects in the sky. Typical concerns of astrophysics are how much light the stars give off, and the size, mass, and temperature of planets and stars. |
James Trefil, Joseph F. Kett, and E. D. Hirsch
See book keywords and concepts | | The region of the universe near the sun that includes the sun, the nine known major planets and their moons or satellites, and objects such as asteroids and comets that travel in independent orbits. The major planets, in order of their average distance from the sun, are Mercury, Venus, the earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. solar wind A stream of particles (mostly protons) emitted by the sun and permeating the solar system. fa Particularly strong bursts of particles can penetrate the upper atmosphere and disrupt radio communications on earth. | | There are nine major planets, including the earth, in orbit around our sun, along with many asteroids. (See solar system.) plasma (plaz-muh) A state of matter in which some or all of the electrons have been torn from their parent atoms. The negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions move independently. fa Plasmas are usually associated with very high temperatures — most of the sun is a plasma, for example.
Pluto In astronomy, the smallest of the major planets, usually ninth from the sun. Pluto was discovered in 1930, and is named for the Roman god of the underworld. |
Alexander Hellemans and Brian Bunch
See book keywords and concepts |  The near future of space (continued)
The Soviet Union and France plan to launch the space probe Vesta, which is scheduled to visit between ten and twenty asteroids and a couple of comets during a period of seven years.
1998 Space probe CRAF is expected to fly by asteroid Hamburga.
In December, the United States plans to launch the Mars Sample Return Mission, expected to do what its name implies. Since this is the only launch window for such a mission for a number of years, the Soviet Union plans to do the same thing. | | Later astronomers were able to arrive at more precise measurements by using the transits of asteroids, which have no atmosphere.
Giovanni Morgagni's De sedibus et causis morborum per anatomen indagatis (On the causes of diseases) is the first important work in pathological anatomy
Pieter van Musschenbroek d Leiden, Holland, Sep 19
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu d London, Apr 29
With John Harrison's marine chronometer Number Four aboard and his son William Harrison to take the readings, the H.M.S. |
James Trefil, Joseph F. Kett, and E. D. Hirsch
See book keywords and concepts | | A region of the solar system between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. Most asteroids are found in the asteroid belt. astronomical unit The mean distance between the earth and the sun, about 98 million miles or 150 million kilometers. astronomy The science that deals with the universe beyond the earth. It describes the nature, position, and motion of the stars, planets, and other objects in the skies, and their relation to the earth. astrophysics The branch of astronomy devoted to the study of the physical characteristics and composition of objects in the sky. |
E. D. Hirsch
See book keywords and concepts | | There are nine major planets, including the earth, in orbit around our sun, along with many asteroids. (See solar system.) planetarium A projector that shines images of the stars and planets onto the inside of a dome; also, a room or building housing one of these devices, with seats for spectators. fa Many large science museums have planetar-iums.
Pluto In astronomy, the smallest of the major planets, usually ninth from the sun. Pluto was discovered in 1930, and is named for the Roman god of the underworld. (See Hades and solar system. |
Thomas S. Kuhn
See book keywords and concepts |  Probably, though the evidence is equivocal, the minor paradigm change forced by Herschel helped to prepare astronomers for the rapid discovery, after 1801, of the numerous minor planets or asteroids. Because of their small size, these did not display the anomalous magnification that had alerted Herschel. Nevertheless, astronomers prepared to find additional planets were able, with standard instruments, to identify twenty of them in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. |
James Trefil
See book keywords and concepts | | So in the future, you can expect to see small missions to Mercury, Pluto, and Venus, and many missions to study nearby asteroids and comets, missions that may even bring samples back. And all of this will be done by a new generation of cheap, "throwaway" spacecraft.
What is the Earth Observing System? one standard criticism of the space program is that it diverts scarce brainpower and financial resources from pressing problems on our own planet. | | Astronomers know that there are asteroids whose orbits cross that of the earth, which means that large impacts could indeed occur again. In 1991 an asteroid passed between the earth and the moon ?a near miss by astronomical standards. And although this one was small (only about thirty feet across), the event reminds us that larger objects could collide with the earth.
This threat to our planet has been recognized only rather recently, and scientists are not exactly falling over themselves to deal with it. The first step is obvious ? |
Rupert Sheldrake
See book keywords and concepts |  If particles correspond to the asteroids and spaceships of a video game, appearing to behave as objects subject to cause-effect, but being in fact virtual displays built up from pulses which bear no translational resemblance to the 'display', Darwinian evolution might well be (some would say, 'must be') a video game of the same order, appearing to follow simple selection-adaptation principles, as the game-pieces appear to collide, explode and so on - but in fact determined by information from an implicate substrate. |
Gary Zukav
See book keywords and concepts |  In this case, the mountain is the sun, the travelers are the planets, asteroids, comets (and debris from the space program), the footpaths are their orbits, and the coming of daylight is the coming of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
The point is that the objects in the solar system move as they do not because of some mysterious force (gravity) exerted upon them at a distance by the sun, but because of the nature of the neighborhood through which they are traveling.
Arthur Eddington illustrated this same situation in another way. |
E. D. Hirsch
See book keywords and concepts | | The region of the universe near the sun that includes the sun, the nine known major planets and their moons or satellites, and objects such as asteroids and comets that travel in independent orbits. The major planets, in order of their
Solar system. The nine major planets in the solar system in order of their distance from the sun. The asteroid belt (not illustrated) is between Mars and Jupiter. average distance from the sun, are Mercury, Venus, the earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. |
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