OFF: The dangers of Cosmic Rock

[M Holmes]

Michael W Blackman writes:

> Maybe they should spend some of that MARS money on an asteroid defense
> syste= m=20 in space?

They'd have to start by investigating asteroids and comets to figure out
HOW to defend against them. Real life ain't Hollywood and even if we did
build the capability to nuke 'em far out enough to have an effect, it'd
almost certainly make things worse in some cases as it'd alter one big
bang somewhere into thousands of medium bangs everywhere.

There's also the leelte problem that any space based system that could
hit an asteroid would be able to make a pretty big mess of a city after
a minor orbital manouvre to point it in the other direction. It's the
sort of thing that gets people worried about intentions.

FoFP