Lets say the Earth detected a large asteroid heading towards Earth, but inside the asteroid is a bunch.....?

Question

Of frozen aliens in cryonic sleep and their guardian died and the asteroid ships navigation computers failed and the whole this was headed for Earth, what would we do in a situation like that?

Answer 1

Fire millions of nuclear missiles at it, and blow the thing to h**l. We can't help it if there are living beings inside of it, we're just defending our planet. Even if the asteroid did crash into Earth, the aliens would still die, the only difference would be that billions more Earth-bound life forms  would die with it. Anyway, we wouldn't know about the aliens inside the asteroid, so there'd be no ethical question about it. Blast that thing out of the sky. Planet Earth is a growing and prospering planet, and we won't be brought down by one stupid asteroid. Tough **** for the aliens inside.

Answer 2

Get hit.

We don't have any real way to divert an asteroid.

Answer 3

NASA wouldn't do much, they might fly another satellite into it to change its orbit, or try some silly solar wind. They wouldn't nuke it, that is highly unreliable.

Answer 4

If it hit us, the force of the impact would kill the aliens anyway, so our options would be to

A: Attempt to wake the aliens. Might be difficult to do with limited time, but if we can communicate with them, they might know how to maneuver the ship.

B: Divert it. Depending on how big it is, of course. Blowing up a suitably large asteroid is not technologically feasible, but it is at least may be possible to knock it out of the way.

Answer 5

get out our particle ray and blast it to oblivion.

Answer 6

Sounds like a mission for Captain Kirk! This is a plot from an episode of startrek, isn't it?

Ok, Seriously? You really want my answer?  

I think I would take my chances on waking the aliens to see if they could fix their ship and reprogram its guidance. I would hope they would be kind enough to evacuate it if they couldnt so we could try to destroy it.

The alternative is wiping them out. If they're all in cryo-sleep, would they ever know? Of coarse this seems very wrong because any group that going to freeze-dry themselves to come visit us, are likely to be explorers or colonists, not warriors. I can't believe a warrior people would take a trip by cryo-sleep.    

Answer 7

The same thing we would do if no aliens were in it. Deflect it from its path so it missed Earth or, if we were unable to do that, evacuate the area where it was expected to hit.

Contrary to popular belief we do not have the ability to actually blow it up, even with all the nuclear warheads in the world, even if we could get them all there and set them off at the same time, which we couldn't.

Answer 8

Bye bye aliens. We aren't putting our planet in danger so they can crash into us and kill all of us. In this situaiton, it's them or both of us, and we'd chose them to go.

Answer 9

Dudes!

1. How would we ever know the thing was inhabited?

2. "Blowing it up" is not an option in any case, since nothing we

have could generate enough 'delta vee' in the process to cause

enough of the fragments to miss us to save our butts.

3. The only even remotely possible answer to the problem would be

to rendezvous early enough to change its course, and at present

we don't have the technology.

Answer 10

how would we know there was someone inside?... we wouldn't... we'd blow it to kingdom come..... oops.. sorry..........

Answer 11

Contact Steven Spielberg, he's the only one who can save us!!

Answer 12

Wake the aliens.  At best they will be able to repair the navigation computers and divert the asteroid.  At worst they can be rescued before being char-b-queued in the atmosphere.  At worst-than-worst you fail to wake them and they die on re-entry, and you get whatever technology you could salvage off the rock during the rescue attempt.