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A comment on Scientists to nudge asteroid off course as practice for protecting Earth. Parent comment

Re:Scientists to nudge asteroid off course as practice for p... by sbuttgereit on Monday October 05, 2015 @12:21AM (#10329955)
What would be ironic given that quote from the article is if we nudged it into the path of a larger asteroid and that collision sent the larger, dangerous asteroid into our path. Perhaps the larger asteroid fragments in a way to increase the probability of a collision with the fragments.

Don't get me wrong... I do agree with you that all of these scenarios are extremely unlikely (space is really big) and I do think the experiment is worth doing. But still, there are failure modes and unintended consequence opportunities that should at least be thought about a bit, even if a very little bit.

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Re:Scientists to nudge asteroid off course as practice for p... by gizmo686 on Monday October 05, 2015 @12:47AM (#10330021)
In this case, wouldn't any risk of a butterfly effect causing an asteroid to hit us be offset by the chance of a butterfly effect accidentally deflecting an asteriod off of a colission course.
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Re:Scientists to nudge asteroid off course as practice for p... by mangeletti on Monday October 05, 2015 @12:56AM (#10330036)
European or African butterflies?
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Re:Scientists to nudge asteroid off course as practice for p... by dajohnson89 on Monday October 05, 2015 @01:36AM (#10330117)
European and laden.
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Re:Scientists to nudge asteroid off course as practice for p... by yohoho22 on Monday October 05, 2015 @01:16AM (#10330086)
> But still, there are failure modes and unintended consequence opportunities that should at least be thought about a bit, even if a very little bit.

I think it's highly likely that the people responsible for these projects will realize this. Do you disagree?

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Re:Scientists to nudge asteroid off course as practice for p... by mukundmr on Monday October 05, 2015 @03:39AM (#10330374)
Given the limited knowledge we have about space, how accurate are the assumptions that no harm will be done? We are still figuring out water on Mars and that is quite near to Earth.
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Re:Scientists to nudge asteroid off course as practice for p... by dredmorbius on Monday October 05, 2015 @12:17PM (#10332819)
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

- Douglas Adams

Chances of anything striking anything as a result of human intervention are quite slim. Effectively nil.

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