You have probably heard of the asteroid belt. As you might guess, it’s a belt of asteroids circling the sun in much the same way as the planets do. Occasionally, a couple of asteroids might bump into each other causing one or both to drop out of orbit. This might send it off into space, or possibly into an orbit getting nearer and neared to the sun until it finally gets drawn in to scorching oblivion.
In the past 10-20 years scientists have been debating the likelihood of such an asteroid hitting the Earth. Many already believed that an asteroid crashing into earth followed by the loss of light caused by smoke and debris affecting the whole planet was what saw off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That’s a nice theory, but begs the question of how likely it is to happen again? When the asteroid known as Shoemaker-Levy-9 crashed into Jupiter causing an explosion the size of planet Earth, it was agreed that not only was it possible but we were actually in very real danger of it happening to us. An asteroid the size of a mountain would pretty much wipe out all intelligent life on Earth.
Further research has suggested that the Earth has been hit by significant asteroids every 600,000 years or so on average. If the bods are correct, then we’re overdue our next one. Indeed, they’ve already suggested that one labelled as 1950DA could hit in the year 2880 with the kind of devastation associated with armageddon. Or it might not (it’s too early to tell).
So assuming we have some kind of notice, what can we do?
You might have thought we could send up all our nuclear weaponry and blow any unwanted rocks to smithereens. This is no good: Our weapons are relatively short-range (being designed for killing each other, not space rocks) and so lack the engine power to get into space. Even if we could get them up there we then stand the significant risk of turning one big rock into a radioactive shotgun cartridge - not much of an improvement.
The only resolution is to get into deep space to rendezvous with the thing and either blow it up a long, long way from Earth or simply knock it off course. It would require very long-distance space travel on a scale we haven’t tried before, probably requiring a team of craft working together. That would require an awful lot of money to develop and implement, and no doubt many gifted astronauts would die along the way.
Even then, there would be no guarantees: What if it were too big and a fragment still ended up heading for Earth? What if the plans and technology simply failed?
In the interests of preserving the human race, it would be handy to have an off-world contingency plan. Establishing a moon base would be really helpful: a small colony could be preserved even if the earth got badly damaged, and if they had enough resources they could return to Earth once the dust had (literally) settled.
So, if you were a world leader, how would you execute such a plan? It would cost untold billions to complete over many decades, but what do you tell your public? If you were to paint a picture of imminent extra-terrestrial destruction you would most certainly precipitate civil unrest on a scale not seen before: Looters, hoarders, religious freaks and scare-mongerers would lead to riots and a total break down of law and order. Your ability to save the human race would take a dip.
What if you told them a lie? Tell them you’re doing something else, something daring, pushing back the boundaries of human knowledge and experience in the name of science, exploration, and mankind. In short, tell them you’re planning a manned mission to Mars. That would enable you to develop deep-space technology and life-support systems and build a moon base manned with enough people to construct and maintain some of the craft that would be required.
I believe that the planned US misison to put a man on Mars has limited interest in Mars itself; the whole mission is a ruse, a means to an end.
Recent missions crashing probes into comets “better to understand what the universe was like in the beginning” again have more to do with the preservation of human life than the progress of science for its own sake.
It’s going to take a lot of money.
Click here to see what that might really mean.
