MN4

It's a sufficiently neutered name for NASA to call the asteroid with the best likelihood of hitting this flying rock. Playing pool with planets doesn't mean you have to call your poll balls by nerdy half-witted names that will easily be forgotten. I can just imagine if NASA had called the thing a more biblical apocalyptical "Wormwood"... On second thought naming asteroids after biblical references isn't a good idea.

Not that I want to bring about the end of the world. Far from it. That's why I have to speak out against this:

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-California) said in a phone interview on Friday that he supports former Apollo astronaut Russell Schweickart's proposal to create a federal asteroid-response agency. Rohrabacher said he will push Congress and the president to "take action on this by the end of the year."

Space Pragmatist thinks this is a good idea.

The whole fate of humanities future rests in another government bureaucracy? Ain't that quaint? Better yet, let's put NASA in charge of the operation, they'll spend your 300 mill on 3 one inch thick reports and conclude that were all screwed and there is nothing we can do about flying doomsday rocks in space. Because honestly folks there is nothing we can do about MN4 even if we wanted to.

Most plans of action around stopping an asteroid or comet from crashing into Terra Nova don't involve the sexy Armageddon or Deep Impact scenarios of landing on the things and detonating bombs. No. Most know that a true Life-killer sized asteroid would never be stopped no matter how many nuclear bombs we lobed at it. The only way we could stop one is to detect it decades ahead of time. Once we've figured out which rock has us in her crosshairs we could technically launch of multi year mission to slowly modify it's orbit out of a collision course with the planet.

At this point we have problems even going to low earth orbit. And somehow we expect to detect a flying rock millions of miles away and launch a mission to stop it with what little capabilities we have? Even if we did have settlements on the Moon or Mars no mission is perfect, and there would be high likelihood of failure if NASA's deep space mission failure rates are any measure.

Nope there is only one way to ensure the survival of the human race: expand, colonize, and don't look back. So long as we remain a one world species, we will have the problems of having all our marbles in one pot.

Space Pragmatist is right in his first post a while back. His optimism, no matter how refreshing, is misplaced in my opinion. I'd like to believe that humanity is powerful enough to save itself from extinction in a heroic long term deep space mission - but I have doubts. He's right though to suggest that we need to pay more attention to NEOs like MN4.

No, if we ever see a confirmation of an impact anytime in the future, you better start measuring your coffin.

Addendum: Reading over this post I can't help but feel like I've been a little hard on Space Pragmatist. I don't really agree with him on this one, but I do appreciate the fact that he knows miles and miles more than I do so I hope he doesn't take offence to anything in this post. And I'm glad he's back to regular posting after his week long hiatus.