The Threat of Meteoroids

*Originally published on 9/16/09



The Science and History channels really do like their doomsday specials. Every so often, you'll see a documentary detailing the various ways humanity can kick the bucket. One of the things that always comes up is a threat from beyond the stars, not an alien invasion,but the impact of a meteor that causes devastating effects world wide.

Even Hollywood has depicted such a scenario in the mirror films Deep Impact and Armageddon.

The threat is very real, there are tons of meteoroids floating through the cosmos at vast speeds. Were the space rock large enough, a head on collision really could wipe out a vast majority of life as we know it. It happened before, millions of years ago with the dinosaurs, so a repeat is definitely not out of the question.

The one difference between man and dinosaur (well, one of the differences anyway) is the fact that we have the technology and ability to protect ourselves from such a threat.

We have all kinds of telescopes and gadgets that would detect any object heading for Earth long before it hit. As such, we would have a chance to mount a defense.

Your first thought would be just to blast the hell out of the thing with missiles. That would most likely not end well. All that would really do is break the meteoroid into smaller pieces. While it will deflect some of it, the smaller rocks will most likely cause more widespread damage.

In Armageddon, they make a point to say that setting explosives off on the surface won't do much in the way of damage, they choose instead to hire some oil riggers to dig into the asteroid and plant a bomb at the center of the rock, splitting it.

I guess you could do that, but why not put all the explosives on one side of the rock and set them off. It won't destroy the meteoroid, but the force of the explosion would push the rock off of it's trajectory so that it didn't collide with Earth.

One special addressed this. They spent a good chunk of time making it seem like we had no chance of surviving such an ordeal. They posited various ways that our defenses would fail or fall short. After much hullabaloo, they said that it was possible to deflect the meteoroid in such a way that it floated safely by with no harm done. Yeah, it's not that complicated a solution. It's common sense really. You don't need to have a doctorate to understand the concept of momentum.

Over the years, I've come across various articles that talk about how some asteroid is going to hit the planet in like 50 years or so. With the knowledge that we can defend ourselves against extra-planetary collisions, we can rest easy in knowing that those won't be the cause of any global disaster.