Earth gets a rush of weekend visitors:
“The scary part of this one is that it’s something we didn’t even know about,” Patrick Paolucci, president of Slooh Space Camera, said during a webcast featuring live images of the asteroid from a telescope in the Canary Islands.
At least we’re doing a better job of looking for them now. And crowdsourcing of the amateurs with their increasing capabilities could help. A couple decades ago, hardly anyone was talking or writing about this, though I was.
My interest started in the early 1970’s after I read the Project Icarus study published by MIT in 1968.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/mit-saves-the-world-project-icarus-1967/
MIT Saves the World: Project Icarus (1967)
By David S. F. Portree 03.29.12 1:44 PM
The 1979 movie Meteor was based on the MIT study.
I decided then that Issac Asimov was correct and the surface of a planet was not a suitable location for an advanced society. But O’Neill habitats would be just as much sitting ducks since they wouldn’t be move out of the way either.
Imagine someone doing a similar project today with the limited spacelift capability available…
Asimov? “Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?” is a Gerard O’Neill quote. Did Asimov say something similar?
As for “O’Neill habitats” being sitting ducks, so what? It’s diversification.
Asimov’s contribution was to coin the phrase “planetary chauvinism”.
Trent,
Dr. O’Neill is famous for posing the question to his students with the result being the massive O’Neill habitats, basically recreating an ideal small college town in space with a dome over it 🙂
But the idea goes back into the 1950’s and Issac Asimov first non-fiction article on it was an article in 1960.
Asimov, Issac (1960) “Multi Organismic Life Form” in Analog-Science Fact and Fiction.
Dr. Asimov revisited the idea as a presentation in a conference paper in 1996 and an essay in 1967.
“Asimov, Issac (1967), “There is No Place like Spome,” in “Is Anyone Out There.”
Dandridge Cole also developed the idea of using materials for asteroid to create a “bubble world” in a 1960 article in which he referenced Dr. Asimov’s work and he later wrote a book with Donald Cox called “Islands in Space” expanding on it and discussing the economic and social aspects of such settlements. In it he also discussed asteroid capture and mining.
The habitats themselves were called Spomes by Issac Asimov and both agreed that such habitats would enable humans to eventually reach the stars and expand through out the galaxy even at sub-light speeds. Dandridge Cole coined the term Macrolife for this stage of human development.
If you are really interested in the idea of using asteroid to create human habitats you should read up on what Dandridge Cole wrote on it in the 1960’s. He was also a practical engineer who helped design the Titan while working at Martin in the 1950’s and 1960’s so his work balances the ideas of Dr. Asimov well. Unfortunately Dandridge Cole died young in 1965 and is mostly unknown by today’s space advocates.
” A couple decades ago, hardly anyone was talking or writing about this, though I was.”
A couple decades before that it was even worse. Giving a presentation in front of my 8th grade science club about the subject of asteroids, using Gene Shoemaker’s work as a basis, I maneuvered a young lady into asking “How come we don’t know if one of these things is going to hit us again?” I gave the answer, “Because almost nobody has bothered to look and see!”
The reply was:
“Tommy Billings you’re scaring me, …stop that!!”
Right now, too many are still in that mode, but the ice is creaking, if not yet cracking. How long will it take for people to live their mental lives in a world where massive impacts are actually possible? Dunno, but we get to find out.
I hear there’s a whole section in Encyclopedia Galactica on former civilizations that were so primitive they blew all of their industrial and nuclear age increases in wealth on envy-oriented confiscatory redistribution schemes instead of on asteroid defense.
As the old saying goes, when each of them got hit, it was called … bad luck.
So, do you feel lucky?
We might, just might, get a break in 2014. The near miss by DA14 and the Chelyabinsk near-disaster (500MT, was only prevented from being devastating by blowing up 30km up, still managed to injure 1200 people and break windows over thousands of square miles) were something of a wake-up call; but the distinct possibility of a hit on Mars in 2014 by a large comet, causing something in the region of a 500 million MT blast and a 500km crater afterwards, would really wake us up. In addition, if that does happen we might get a real bonus – because the atmosphere of Mars would be upwards of tripled in density by such a hit and its probable volcanic aftereffects.
It almost makes you wish we could redirect this to a dead center hit!
I decided then that Issac Asimov was correct and the surface of a planet was not a suitable location for an advanced society.
Just for your edification since I know you want your blind spots pointed out, this statement is dripping with statism.
The correct answer is, the location for an individual in an advanced society is any place they like. “I decided”, “Asimov was correct”, regarding the decisions of individuals? We still have hope for ya Thomas.
Ken,
Issac Asimov was talking about individuals, merely about where an advanced society would locate, or do you consider Earth being currently a home to any advanced societies? Ones that folks like Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke or Issac Asimov would recognize as advanced?
Opps. That should be “wasn’t talking about individuals”.
I know. With all Asimov’s impressive work (I must have read hundreds of his books and loved them) he shared a lot of statist views with you.
The thing is, I really believe you do believe in free enterprise. But you have this control freak streak in you. I understand. Letting others have control is scary, but the objection shouldn’t be about their choices but their choices that control others.
Ken,
I fail to see how a Solar System with thousands of independent mobile space habitats, most with less than a 1,000 inhabitants, would be statist. If anything it would be a hot house of political experiments with the most successful being duplicated by the others. And those that don’t wish to play nice with the others, or just want to be left alone will just migrate further from Earth until they lose themselves in the huge expanse of the Oort Cloud and drop off the radar.
Think of the fur trapper culture in the American West but on a much larger scale.
That is another advantage of the “Asimov” model versus being stuck on a planet. If you don’t like those communities around you, you just fire up your thrusters and move further out…