zlacker

>>Brajes+(OP)
Really burying the important takeaway at the bottom:

Starting in 2025, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile — funded by the National Science Foundation — will catalog the solar system from the ground...

"It took us 200 years to discover all the asteroids we know to date, about 1.2 million asteroids," Mario Jurić, the Rubin Observatory's solar system discovery team lead and the director of the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, told Astronomy. "In the first three to six months of Rubin, we will double that."

That's one additional ground based observatory coming online in the Southern hemisphere. If we get our act together and build a lot more of these and other space based observatories we're going to see the true scope of the "shooting gallery". We really need to raise public awareness of this, as a planet based civilization we are taking our chances by ignoring the problem and assuming everything will be fine for a hundred or a thousand more years. All of our efforts at averting a climate catastrophe will be for naught if we get smoked by a rock big enough to fill the atmosphere with particulate matter and drop global temperatures for years afterward let alone anything bigger resulting in global firestorms and tsunamis.

>>throwa+KW
Doesn’t even need to be a planet killer, even a small object like the Tunguska event hitting a large city (Like NYC) would cost trillions in damage and millions of lives, the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off. The cost to build some surveillance and technology to mitigate it would be far less.

And prevention wouldn’t require Bruce Willis to blow it up with nukes, like the DART mission all you’d need is to hit the space rock with a fast moving, small probe and alter its course by a millionth of a degree far enough out, could be the difference between hitting a city, landing in the ocean, or not hitting earth at all.

>>oceanp+u11
The probability of that is really low though, theres not a lot of area with dense population when looking at the whole earth. And for your redirection to work, you would need really precise trajectory predictions while still very far away so a small impulse is enough.

>>echoan+IK1
A couple of nukes missile will be more than enough to fragment it and split the trajectory to less denser population. But just like Leonardo movie look up, nothing will be done as everyone will just quarrel for attention and inaction.