What would you do to save the Earth if an asteroid is heading towards it???

Question

What would you do to save the Earth if an asteroid is heading towards it???

Answer 1

Pray same as above and hope that God will destroy it or something.

Answer 2

If the asteroid is large enough to cause a major species extinction event; there is nothing humanity could do to prevent it. If it is larger than a few km in diameter, all the world's combined nuclear arsenal would not blow it up (and anyway; all that would happen would be that it would be fragmented into many smaller pieces, that would cause even more widespread damage).

Techniques like gently nudging it sideways won't work, because there wouldn't be sufficient time available; once it was identified as being definetely earth-bound.  It would have tremendous inertia, because of its mass and velocity, and would take a lot of energy to affect its motion.

We would have to just sit back, and enjoy our last days.

The chance of this happeneing are remote, however; because all of the earth-shattering sized asteriods have been identified, and none are on a collision course (unless one appeared from outside the solar system).

In past geological times, however, there were many more large asteroids, left over from the formation of the planets.

Answer 3

Drink some fetid water

Answer 4

Pray.

Answer 5

I personally couldn't do anything about it, but NEO/JPL/NASA are working on methods of changing an asteroid's orbit to cause it to miss Earth, if and when this is needed.

One of the methods they are looking at is placing a reflective net over the surface of the asteroid to cause the sun to change the asteroid's orbit.  That, unfortunately, needs about 18 years to be effective enough.  A very large asteroid would probably be seen in time, but sometimes they surprise us.  There was one several years ago that we didn't see until it was past us.

14 March 2002

NASA announced this week a new Web-based asteroid monitoring system, called Sentry, to monitor and assess the threat of space rocks that could possibly strike the Earth.

While no large asteroid is currently known to be on a collision course with our planet, experts say an eventual impact is inevitable and the consequences could be grave, up to and including global devastation that might destroy civilization as we know it. The odds of such an impact in any given decade are extremely low, and most experts agree that there would likely be at least 10 years of warning if such an object were ever spotted.

Smaller asteroids, however, are more likely to hit Earth in any given year and could cause significant local or regional damage. The odds are low in any given year. But over the course of a generation, the chances of such an event become significant.

The odds of a locally or regionally destructive asteroid hitting an inhabited area in a given 50-year period are about 1-in-160, according to experts.

Asteroid detections have rapidly increased in recent months, in part because NASA has a congressionally mandated goal to find 90 percent of all Near Earth Objects larger than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) by 2008. About 500 of the these asteroids have been found, and an estimated 500 or so remain undiscovered.

The methods under consideration are variations of exlosive techniques, both nuclear and non-nuclear; and several "slow push techniques":  focused solar, pulsed laser, mass driver, gravity tractor, asteroid tug, and Enhanced Yarkovsky.

Answer 6

PRAY WITHOUT CEASING. A DIRECT QUOTE FROM THE BIBLE

Answer 7

i would go to the moon....Prayers are useless