The Politics of Doomsday

The Asteroid Peril

AN alarmingly misleading news story was published by Reuters soon after a brief scare that asteroid XFll might hit Earth in 2028. "We could have stopped that asteroid anyway," Don Yeomans, a senior JPL researcher, was quoted as saying. On the contrary, I very much doubt if we could have stopped it. Not because we don't have the technological ability - we do - but because we lack the political will. Politicians are prepared to pay serious attention to famines, epidemics and other terrestrial disasters. But when it comes to the danger of asteroid impacts, their response is to giggle. Look at the facts. A total of 900 asteroids, all a kilometre or more in diameter, have been shown to be regularly crossing Earth's orbit. Some pass within a few Moon distances of us every year. If any one of them hits us, it will kill hundreds of millions of people. Meanwhile back on Earth, Congress has doubled the annual NASA asteroid "search" budget to $3 million. Oh, what a gigantic sum! A five-hundredth of what we spent on the Dome. As one scientist remarked: ``The total effort that we, the citizens of planet Earth, are putting into scanning the sky for potentially dangerous comets and asteroids is less than the staffing of one McDonalds restaurant."

You'll hear an thunderous rumble and feel the ground shake!

But when it comes to the asteroid entertainment industry, we are far more willing to open our purses. The budgets for the disaster films Deep Impact and Armageddon were respectively $75 million and $150 million. Tragically, most people believe that these films were based on fact; that when an asteroid is shown to be on collision course, someone like Bruce Willis and his fellow oil-drillers will jump into a nuclear-propelled spaceship, rendezvous with the asteroid, and do something nasty to it. But in the real world there are no nuclear-propelled manned spaceships, and no plans to build any. Nor could such a mission be carried out by space shuttles that cannot go further than low Earth orbit While scientists can watch for a dangerous asteroid, no one has any power to do anything if they find one. When Comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter in 1994 amidst huge publicity, I thought they would get the message: this could happen here, and something should be done to prepare for it. But incredibly, they seem to have viewed the incident as mere entertainment, a natural event in the sky which has nothing to do with us. In 1997, when the US Air Force wanted to fire the spacecraft Clementine-2 at an asteroid as an experiment, President Clinton used his line-item veto to stop it, apparently to avoid trying out possible new military technology that might offend the Russians. Politicians cannot think further ahead than the four years to the next election, and they tend to be profoundly ignorant about space. Some of them know vaguely that the Earth goes round the Sun, but not much else. So perhaps one day you'll hear an thunderous rumble and feel the ground shake. Before the fire storm hits you you'll know whom to blame.