• peanuts4life@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    Call me an optimist, but I think that if an android was actually going to destroy life as we know it, nations would do everything in their power to advert the disaster.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    Half the population would believe the asteroid is a hoax spread by the [insert ethnic or religious group here].

    • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Korkki@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • tacosanonymous@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure I learned anything new other than I want to play the tabletop game they created.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    In an exercise involving multiple US government agencies during April 2024, NASA conducted a so-called “tabletop” game in which participants plot their response to a 72 percent chance that an asteroid may hit Earth in 14 years.

    Underpinning a bewildering number of moving parts is the likelihood that space agencies are not ready to implement the operations needed to find out more about the threat and mitigate it, even with more than a decade to prepare.

    The game also found that the “role of the UN-endorsed Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG) in an asteroid impact threat scenario is not fully understood by all participants.”

    “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.

    It recommends “periodic briefings and exercises to continue to raise awareness of planetary defense and increase readiness for preparation and response to an asteroid impact threat.”

    Speaking to US public radio service NPR, Terik Daly, planetary defense section supervisor at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said experts didn’t know of any asteroids of a substantial size that are going to hit Earth for the next hundred years.


    The original article contains 610 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    We are not at a point where the “global community” is more than a few competing, egoistic and greedy tribes with clashing world views, so that’s no surprise.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I think that really it wouldn’t be the “global community” that ends up saving the world in an asteroid impact scenario.

      It would likely be an organization that could operate on its own without endless committees. Say, the Chinese space agency, or SpaceX, or the Indian space agency. Someone would decide to just do it, without getting the whole world’s approval for the mission. Then the whole world would complain that the effort was made without any international cooperation or oversight. And the organization that literally saved the world would get chewed out by everyone because inevitably the plan will not have worked perfectly.

      But I’m not worried, because even billionaires don’t want to die. Someone would do something.

        • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          I’d trust them to try to intercept an asteroid… It’ll be harmless when they miss and achieve nothing, but in the off chance that they pull it off, yeah sure Boeing, go for it.

  • rsuri@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    “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.”

    • Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      Actually we DID. Tho’ only for a little while. And the results were enormous. The B/Yamgata Influenza lineage appears to have gone extinct. The cool part is we weren’t even trying to do anything with those specific efforts to affect influenza. All of which should encourage us to cooperate more. No less.

        • rtxn@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Doctor Ignaz Semmelweiss in the mid-1800s suggested that obstetricians should wash and sterilize their hands before attending their patients to reduce the chance of postpartum infection. He was rejected by the medical community, ridiculed by colleagues, and eventually locked in an asylum where he was killed.

          We’re sliding back in time.

          • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            People forget the most important bit. The clapback to Semmelweiss from other doctors was “A doctor’s hands are always clean!”

            Humans are irrational fucking idiots and we prove it daily. The number of us who are willing to protect our own in-group over things they don’t deserve to be protected over is too damn high.

            • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              “A doctor’s hands are always clean!”

              That’s when Semmelweiss should have rubbed dog shit on his hands and tried to rub them on these doctors’ face.

            • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 year ago

              But it’s very interesting to think where we would be technologically and socially if humans weren’t such assholes

          • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            Semmelweiss is also partially responsible for the widespread rejection of his findings. He basically called doctors who did not follow his advice murderers which naturally didn’t help his popularity. Antagonising someone who you are trying to convince usually just entrenches their opinions further.

    • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      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)
    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Leg@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        We’re also the best around at 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 plenty of mass extinctions before and it will again (with or without humans).

          • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            How many predators can take down prey 50 times their size? How many species can thrive in tundra, jungles, plains, forests, mountains and deserts? How many species can be found on every continent? How many species figured out how to fly despite never developing wings? How many species developed hundreds of distinct methods of communication? How many species have been to the moon?

            Humans are fucking badass…

            • Gloomy@mander.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 year ago

              How many predators can take down prey 50 times their size?

              Ants and a couple of Insects I guess. Also Bacteria and Viruses.

              How many species can thrive in tundra, jungles, plains, forests, mountains and deserts?

              Well, obviously also most Bacteria. If we are speaking more sentient live then the answer is: mot of them. Birds, Mammals, Insects. It might take a generation or 10 to get them adopted to their new envirment, but almost every species. Is able to adopt to their evolutoany niche.

              How many species can be found on every continent?

              Most of them?

              How many species figured out how to fly despite never developing wings?

              Technology. Yes, that’s a human thing at last, at least at the level we use it.

              How many species developed hundreds of distinct methods of communication

              Various species have methods of communicating, from bees dancing to each other to whales having distinct regional dialects. Yes, humans have added some complexity to it by introducing technology, but that’s realy what it comes down to. Technology.

              How many species have been to the moon?

              Technology, once more.

              So your point is that humans have learned to use technology, therefor they are badass.

              I disagree. We are living in an absolut singularity tight now. Humans have learned to use finate resources (oil for example) to amplify the energy that we have at our hands. A single humans beeing today can use energy that would be equal to thousands of men’s work every day.

              Since we are drawing on finate resources there are two ways how this will go: we will learn to exploit other, less finate sources of energy (say, fusion) and the groth path will continue (to the stars, eventually). Or we will run out of energy or ruin the livable world by doing so and will fall back to an earlier level of development. Since most of the resources needed are used up we will not be able clime back up. At this moment we are on the second of those paths.

              And in our way in getting here we have started the sixt mass extinction, accidentaly started turning the climate into something less sustainable for humans and polluted every single space on this planet, including areas like the deep ocean that we have never even touched physically.

              Humans are not badass, in my opinion. We are fucking cancer.

  • mriormro@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    We’ve already solved this. We just need to train a team of dysfunctional oil drillers to send up to the asteroid.