When you look at the moon at night, and it’s one of those nights when the moon feels really close, and you can see on its face little circles: craters left by asteroids.
We don’t see many craters on Earth because the wind, vegetation, and the ocean eventually erase them.
If you’re a planet floating in space, it’s inevitable an asteroid will eventually hit you.
If an average asteroid hit New York City today, it would wipe out and vaporise the whole city. That’s the entire five boroughs. 18 million people.
In order to stop an astroid from destroying you, you need to do two things:
- You need to be able to detect it
- You need to be able to deflect it (basically flying a satellite into it and causing it to veer off course)
Want to know how much it’d cost to do these two things and eliminate the threat of an asteroid disaster?
About $500 million.
To put this in perspective, the movie Armageddon—a 1998 film about Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck stopping an asteroid from hitting earth—grossed $550 million at the box office.
So if we can easily afford to stop an asteroid from hitting earth, why haven’t we done so?
In a drastic oversimplification of game theory, political psychology, statistics, and economic theory, no one on earth has ever experienced an asteroid disaster, and when something has occurred zero times, we place a much lower probability on that thing happening. Additionally, asteroid funding is subject to the free rider dilemma: if one country pays for the programme, they bear the cost, but all other countries reap the benefits. So it disincentivizes all countries from taking that first, bold step.
To date, there is no coordinated funding for affordable asteroid destruction.
And I wonder if there ever will be.
H/T to Planet Money from NPR on the amazing podcast on this topic.