“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.
First administration: “We must do something about the asteroid. I’ve started a plan to divert it, but it’ll take several years.”
Second administration: “The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office.”
Third administration: “Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there’s just too much political resistance to solving it. Let’s focus on other priorities that we can solve.”
Yea that and panic at the end !
We’ve already solved this. We just need to train a team of dysfunctional oil drillers to send up to the asteroid.
🎵 Don’t wanna close my eyes 🎵
I don’t even remember what movie that was
Armageddon, the mega block buster hit movie of 1998
Thanks! I can’t for the life of me remember when I watched that, especially since I wasn’t even alive when that came out. Maybe we watched it in school or something
Not to be confused with the other mega block buster hit movie about an asteroid hitting earth released one month earlier in 1998, Deep Impact.
Deep Impact is to Armageddon as Volcano is to Dante’s Peak.
almost forgot about Dante’s peak. that was the shit!
Superior?
Yes
I would have sworn it was Space Cowboys. Shit.
We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.
We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.
- No one washes their hands — Increased infection rates.
- Research doctors don’t work — Reduced cure research speed.
- Sick people given hugs — Infectivity increased once spotted.
– Plague Inc. description of Easy Difficulty (Written before the 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown)
The cloth does nothing to stop the virus but also completely cuts off oxygen to your brain.
No I will not explain. It’s your job to educate yourself by watching more Jordan Peterson videos.
Goddamnit, stop making me click the downvote button twice!
Sir, I’m trying to survive a pandemic not learn how to be a lobster.
Don’t make me tap the sign…
Poe’s law strikes again
Cameron Poe?
Did you get the special chloroform-infused masks? I hear they’re the only ones that do the job properly.
I hope you’re a troll. That’s just next level stupidity to be real.
The second sentence tells me troll/sarcasm. But there are people who unironically believe that
I know it’s stupid but /s really should be mandatory if you arennot serious. Because there are too many prople that are
Don’t look up
It was a great movie - sadly, because it was so accurate. Provided that you can call a sci-fi movie accurate. But after the pandemic and shit, “don’t look up” looks like a playbook for a meteor extinction level event
What’s funny is that movie released during the pandemic, so it seemed like that was the thing it was commenting on, but actually it was filmed before the pandemic and was originally meant as a commentary on climate change. What it shows is that humanity’s modern tribalism is remarkably predictable. No matter what the problem, we will turn it into an us versus them situation where getting anything meaningful done becomes an uphill battle.
Actually they say that Comet Dibiasky is twice the size of the dinosaur killer, but they also say it’s 6-1 9 kilometres wide. 10 kilometres is the size of Chicxulub. Scientifically it was very inaccurate. But politically it’s flawless.
That’s the last three words of the article. The author didn’t miss the connection either.
I always wonder when people repeat something from the article or ask a question that’s answered in the article: did you not read it or did you just want to start a discussion about this connection and are somehow constrained in the number of words you can write per day?
That’s okay, humanity had s good run. I imagine we’ll have extinctified ourselves way before a space rock could do it. A+ for trying though.
I haven’t had much hope that if there was an major asteroid racing towards earth that there could be much done about it, but I also know that likelyhood of it is very small so there is no need to lose sleep over it.
Sorry don’t you mean let’s fund AI?
/s
Real talk, an asteroid wiping us out would only expedite the inevitable. If we could pull together and deflect an asteroid, there’s hope. If not, we failed the test and die with the consequences. But we don’t need the asteroid to fail this test. We’re making great strides towards destroying our home with home field advantage.
Gotta give it to humanity, though. We’re damn good at ruining everything we touch.
I don’t think we ruin everything… We’re also the best around at improving things, certainly improving our environments.
I know it’s easy to be pessimistic about these things, but humans are evolutionary badasses. We’re capable of amazing things. I wouldn’t count us out just yet.
Besides we haven’t really ruined anything. We haven’t done any damage to the earth that won’t heal eventually. The earth has seen many heating and cooling cycles and plenty of mass extinctions before and it will again (with or without humans).
Don’t Look Up!
Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.
As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren’t signals from innumerable civilizations out there.
We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.
Master space? Master planetary defense? We can’t even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world’s owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.
And Reminder, what we’re doing and have been doing in decades won’t be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we’re doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.
Achievement unlocked: discovering the Great Filter.
If an asteroid were to hit the Earth large enough to cause human extinction, it would save us the embarrassment of killing ourselves from poisoning the climate or microplastic pollution.
I’m pretty sure we navigated nuclear holocaust, but we haven’t fully ruled it out either.
