Quote:
Originally Posted by
Darkpriest667 
yeah thats 2012 DA14 We're gonna see it tonight.
A few? 800 square miles of forest. Russia was lucky it exploded in siberia and not moscow.
What you said in bold is really important for people to understand. We'd need at least a year but probably 5 to build the correct equipment etc etc. Space missions don't just happen and space missions to moving objects on a trajectory for earth don't happen easily.
One of the things a guy was commenting on my post earlier was saying was that "orbital mechanics are well understood" SURE THEY ARE.. for fixed orbit objects... Asteroids, meteors, comets... Those are much different things and we have to understand the orbits of other objects and it gets quite complicated because the gravity of so many OTHER objects have to be taken into account... EVEN OBJECTS WE HAVE NOT DETECTED
(which was kind of my point)
So rendezvous with an asteroid would not be even remotely simple with a manned ship.
I think if we NEEDED it to survive...stuff would happen very quickly. There supposedly are even crazy plans already made up for these scenarios and some thought put in place on the topic. I think as long as we had six months we'd make it. There would be no red tape...no budget to worry about...every resource from every corporation would be available. I've just seen it over and over on a small scale when people were threatened with death...they worked together to overcome it. Of course the majority of the world would probably degrade into anarchy and chaos, but all we would need is the people with the know how to keep a level head long enough to get some nukes up there to make a blast to change the course of the object. The law of physics pretty much require that it would work provided we manage to target it but that shouldn't be impossible just going off the stuff we've already done in space. If it was something the size of Texas heading at us...yeah, we're toast, but smaller ecosystem threatening stuff we could handle.
