Apparently the threat of asteroids hurtling towards Earth and wiping out life as we know is a little bigger than we thought, as NASA has announced they are looking for ideas to find, identify and redirect threats coming close to Earth.
The Grand Challenge, as named by NASA, is calling on academics, governments and even everyday people to help them avert an Armageddon-like scenario.
To learn more about the Grand Challenge and to give your expert opinion, visit NASA’s Asteroid Initiative website. We here at DailyXY have a couple of suggestions of our own.
- Most small objects on a collision course with Earth burn up in our atmosphere. Maybe we could embrace global warming, make our atmosphere more dense so even larger meteors will burn up, protecting the human race. Drawbacks include creating an inhospitable planet filled with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
- Launching missiles or nuclear weapons has always been a popular strategy in fiction, but we’ve only got one shot with a nuke and the math has to be absolutely perfect. So instead of using weapons from the Earth’s surface that may miss, why not outfit the International Space Station will an arsenal of asteroid destroying weapons? We’re talking missiles, lasers, the works. The only problem is getting those weapons up there and handling them, but it can be done.
- We have to be prepared for the worse possible outcome: something collides with our planet, causing catastrophic damage and killing mostly everything on Earth. That’s why an underwater base at the bottom of the ocean would be a welcome refuge for our species. It could keep us safe from all the extinction stuff happening on land and with some investment in technology, the supply of fresh water and other necessities could be endless. The problem is we know more about space than we do about the bottom of the ocean and a whole new set of challenges await us in the deep.
What do you guys think of our ideas? Do you have any tips for NASA?
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