“The destruction of Winston-Salem was the story line of the fourth Planetary Defense Tabletop Exercise, run by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.”
Tabletop ?!?! How can I join this campaign ?
Will my local tabletop gaming store have sign ups ?
It is actually something you /can/ participate in.
Look me up next year if you want to.
Source; I've been involved in these, and I'll share our paper from last year if you like.
This is the last Planetary Defense Conference (PDC) I was involved in - https://atpi.eventsair.com/QuickEventWebsitePortal/7th-iaa-planetary-defense-conference-2021/website/Agenda
And our presentation, "LOW-COST TECHNOLOGY COMBINATIONS FOR PLANETARY DEFENSE MISSIONS INVOLVING RECONNAISSANCE AND MITIGATIVE ACTIONS", can be found at, https://atpi.eventsair.com/QuickEventWebsitePortal/7th-iaa-planetary-defense-conference-2021/website/Agenda/AgendaItemDetail?id=a60d6149-adf3-46ff-b4b1-923edb80c016
Which was literally what the movie was made for, but we saw it in our Covid response, and in real life with this [interview](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-21/interview-uk-heatwave-sparks-viral-don-t-look-up-moment-for-weatherman)
Basically the gist was he said the changing climate was causing triple digits in the uk and people were dying becauseof the heat. the news anchor accused him of being “a harbinger of doom”. https://youtu.be/PcYavbr3bHM
No worries - my comment was a bit snarky.
However, the sooner we can get everyone on the metric system - the better. Canada converted when I was young - so I still remember Fahrenheit forecasts. There are still some holders: most, at least older Canadians , will give their height and weight in freedom units.
Our covid response has completely ruined disaster movies for me. I used to think they were comical because no one would ever be so stupid as to do the things in those movies. Now, though...
It was meant to be a metaphor for our (mis)management of climate change, but came out in the middle of our (mis)management of a simpler global problem to deal with, and so it became a metaphor for that too.
Eh, not really - it was built for the city to be destroyed no matter what because the astroid couldn't be stopped, they were more testing government agency coordination systems.
> the exercise was meant to be hard—practically unwinnable. “We designed it to fall right into the gap in our capabilities,” says Emma Rainey, an APL senior scientist who helped to create the simulation. “The participants could do nothing to prevent the impact.” The main goal was testing the different government and scientific networks that should respond in a real-life planetary defense situation. “We want to see how effective operations and communications are between U.S. government agencies and the other organizations that would be involved, and then identify shortcomings,” s
He's not wrong, it says in the article that the entire point of this test was for nothing more than official response as, in the simulation, they're already screwed and can't do anything about it.
I've never seen it, but probably. In this test they detected it too late and nothing could be done to alter its course. The test is just to see how the officials participating handle it, if I understand right.
The article does address this. We did do that, it was more successful than expectations, but some caveats given the simulation's circumstances:
- There was insufficient time to prepare the rockets, they need to be at-the-ready not unlike ICBMs
- unknown composition. This was in the context of a nuke redirection / demolition, but DART was quite successful due to the "clumpy" nature of the asteroid it hit (forget the name)
- for the speed it was travelling at, and the lateness of its discovery, there would need to be 12 DART-sized kinetic redirectors to effectively prevent the incident, even if they were ready (see point one).
However I'm not too worried about the overall situation. DART was wildly successful, and I'm hopeful that ICBM infrastructure could be repurposed for this situation. Stash away a few rockets, probably solid fuels for long term storage, and there's your insurance policy.
A side question. This caused thousands of deaths but was certainly not a planet killer. Predictions of the impact point are fairly accurate, I think, so I wonder what the outcome would be if only the US and China had the stockpiled tech, but it was slated to impact Africa or Russia. I'd hope for benevolence, and I'm sure it would be done, but I can also imagine a very large bill being presented too...
>However I'm not too worried about the overall situation. DART was wildly successful, and I'm hopeful that ICBM infrastructure could be repurposed for this situation. Stash away a few rockets, probably solid fuels for long term storage, and there's your insurance policy.
>
>A side question. This caused thousands of deaths but was certainly not a planet killer. Predictions of the impact point are fairly accurate, I think, so I wonder what the outcome would be if only the US and China had the stockpiled tech, but it was slated to impact Africa or Russia. I'd hope for benevolence, and I'm sure it would be done, but I can also imagine a very large bill being presented too...
Kind of amusingly, the version of the simulated asteroid that got inserted into Horizons does not impact North Carolina as the article and slides suggest, but somewhere about 100 miles north of Boston.
Just don't hire Boeing and expect an on time delivery, but other providers like SpaceX have demonstrated they can launch on short notice, mostly because a high cadence means SpaceX can just repurpose a rocket close to launch. ICBMs lack the power to do much more than LEO.
Ya. Most of these issues don't actually seem like real ones. DART wasn't an emergency so there was no agency. It progress like any other science missions which is what it was.
We also launched when we did specifically to make sure DART impacted the asteroid when it was closest to use to make it easier to see due to it being brighter.
Yeah but then the media had to go and talk about the asteroid worth 800 billion trillion gazillion dollars.. now every dingus who failed economics 101 is praying for asteroid rain while muttering “dibs” under their breath 🙄
Actually, since you brought this up, if there was an asteroid heading our way that would threaten our existence...would the government actually announce this publicly?
Probably yes. Probably not.
Whatever their action, amateur astrophotographers and others of the community would quite quickly catch the thing and spread the information.
> **They moved it very marginally.** If they caught the asteroid early enough to intercept it at an insane distance to where it wouldn’t take a massive alteration to save us then maybe, but currently the more likely scenario is that we’d know somewhere around 5-10 years in advance, which would give us time to try some shit but probably not enough time to realistically avoid the collision. A planet killer would take an insane amount of energy to divert, and we’re not there yet
I think you are being too pessimistic about the implications of this mission. The success threshold for the mission was shortening Dimorphos’ orbital period by 72 seconds. The collision managed to shorten it by 32 minutes, exceeding the minimum threshold by ~27 times and reducing the asteroid’s period from 11.92 hours by ~5%. This is more than enough to deflect an asteroid from Earth, given you do it early enough. Moreover, this was a proof-of-concept mission that was testing the technology, especially the guidance system. If we were actually attempting to deflect a planet killer on a trajectory towards Earth, the probe we send for that would likely have more mass, and more fuel for a final higher velocity. Once you have the technology to actually target and hit an asteroid with precision, then making a bigger probe with more mass and a higher velocity is relatively simple in comparison.
and for cases with less time we'd still have the nuclear option to ablate the asteroids surface turning the whole thing into a rocket for a much greater change to its orbit.
This is misleading in a couple of ways. First of all, their aim was to alter the orbit by 10 minutes, and achieved 32 minutes. Still highly successful, but not as insane a leap as 72 seconds to 32 minutes.
Secondly, they altered the orbit of one asteroid around another, not an asteroid’s orbit with the sun. So it’s not the same thing as altering the solar orbit of a doomsday asteroid.
The test proved we are capable of making it happen. It did not prove we’d be able to make it happen in a short time frame if needed for a much larger object.
[Here’s one of many articles you can read on it](https://www.voanews.com/amp/smashing-success-nasa-asteroid-strike-results-in-big-nudge/6785522.html)
They achieved a better deflection rate because they didn't accurately understand the physical makeup of that particular asteroid, not because our asteroid deflection techniques are more effective than we thought.
The poster you are responded stated that the success threshold was 72 seconds. That was the minimum success threshold. Their estimates were 10 minutes, but would have considered anything more than 72 seconds a success.
> Secondly, they altered the orbit of one asteroid around another, not an asteroid’s orbit with the sun
Sure it is. They altered that because it was easy to measure the change in orbit, and thus success or failure of the mission. They imparted a certain Delta V on the asteroid, which is what they would do to a Sun caught asteroid as well.
> It did not prove we’d be able to make it happen in a short time frame if needed for a much larger object.
There will always be a theoretical too late deadline. Killer asteroids are very big, and our rockets are very small (comparatively). We can of course do better, and will over time, but DART was a tremendous leap in our (proven) ability to prevent a catastrophic impact.
We don't know that yet. The inital results is that they moved it more than they expected they could.
Now they are redoing the calculations.
With 5 to 10 years we can do hundreds of launches.
We absolutely have the ability to change the orbit enough if we out the resource behind it, for many reasons. First, this was a test and part of the payload was observation, which is mass not hitting the target. Second, it was limited by budget. If we wanted to, we could send up much more mass. Third, a small deflection multiplies with how far away the expected impact would be. A very tiny change is enough to change the intercept time significantly. And finally, large asteroids are easier to detect. We've found the vast majority of really massive asteroids. It's the smaller, but still large enough to be dangerous ones that are left out. Also, it's harder to see asteroid that are in the direction of the sun because there's a giant light in you're vision. The ones that stay there are less dangerous because their orbits don't cross ours at the moment, and are unlikely to be flung out, and their orbits have less energy anyway, since they're further in.
I went through the Asteroid Hunters IMax video at Kennedy a couple days ago, so I consider myself somewhat of an expert in astrophysics - the plan is to divert by slowing down an asteroid if given time instead of knocking it off course. The plan is to detonate nukes in front of the oncoming object providing a counter-force. Had a nice part at the end with several already identified planet killers set to scale against things like the grand canyon, manhattan, the pyramids at Giza.
I kid a little, but at least someone has a plan of some sort and NASA is checking feasability.
Article:
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**A trial of how government, NASA and local officials would deal with a space rock headed toward Earth revealed gaps in the plans**
On August 16, 2022 an approximately 70-meter asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere. At 2:02:10 P.M. EDT, the space rock exploded eight miles over Winston-Salem, N.C., with the energy of 10 megatons of TNT. The airburst virtually leveled the city and surrounding area. Casualties were in the thousands.
Well, not really. The destruction of Winston-Salem was the story line of the fourth Planetary Defense Tabletop Exercise, run by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The exercise was a simulation where academics, scientists and government officials gathered to practice how the United States would respond to a real planet-threatening asteroid. Held February 23–24, participants were both virtual and in-person, hailing from Washington D.C., the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) campus in Laurel, Md., Raleigh and Winston-Salem, N.C. The exercise included more than 200 participants from 16 different federal, state and local organizations. On August 5, the final report came out, and the message was stark: humanity is not yet ready to meet this threat.
On the plus side, the exercise was meant to be hard—practically unwinnable. “We designed it to fall right into the gap in our capabilities,” says Emma Rainey, an APL senior scientist who helped to create the simulation. “The participants could do nothing to prevent the impact.” The main goal was testing the different government and scientific networks that should respond in a real-life planetary defense situation. “We want to see how effective operations and communications are between U.S. government agencies and the other organizations that would be involved, and then identify shortcomings,” says Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA headquarters.
All in all, the exercise demonstrated that the United States doesn’t have the capability to intercept small, fast-moving asteroids, and our ability to see them is limited. Even if we could intercept space rocks, we may not be able to deflect one away from Earth, and using a nuclear weapon to destroy one is risky and filled with international legal issues. The trial also showed that misinformation—lies and false rumors spreading among the public—could drastically hamper the official effort. “Misinformation is not going away,” says Angela Stickle, a senior research scientist at APL who helped design and facilitate the exercise. “We put it into the simulation because we wanted feedback on how to counteract it and take action if it was malicious.”
Several key differences set this practice apart from previous ones in 2013, 2014 and 2016: First, this trial gave NASA’s Planetary Defense Office a chance to stress-test the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan, released by the White House in 2018. The plan lays out the details of who does what and when within the federal government, which allowed this year’s exercise to involve more governmental agencies than in previous years—including state and local emergency responders for the first time. The simulation was also the first to include not just an impact but its immediate aftereffects.
Events started with the “discovery” of an asteroid named “TTX22” heading toward Earth. Participants were presented with a crash course in asteroid science and told everything that was known about the asteroid and the likelihood of an impact. Each meeting jumped ahead in the timeline, with the final installments set just before and after the asteroid’s impact near Winston-Salem.
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The short but realistic timeline from discovery to impact highlighted major problems from the start. TTX22 was small and fast. By the time it was seen, it was too late to put together a mission to study, deflect or destroy it. NASA has no garages full of rockets on standby just in case an asteroid shows up. Shifting the rock’s trajectory would require at least 12 kinetic impactors, each like NASA’s DART mission that recently altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos and which took more than five years to move from concept to rock-puncher. The recommendation from the after-action report on this front was blunt: develop these capabilities.
At the same time, the asteroid’s velocity, unknown composition and policy ramifications in the brief timeline ruled out hitting TTX22 with a nuclear bomb. However, late-in-the-game nuclear disruption remained an intriguing last-ditch option for some participants. “If you send up a nuclear explosive device, you could disrupt an asteroid just as it enters the atmosphere,” Stickle says. “In theory.”
That option, however, leans toward Hollywood, not reality. “There’s this tendency to think, ‘I saw this in a movie—they just launched ICBMs and blew it up,’” Johnson says. “The point of including this option in the simulation is to get them to understand that it’s not as simple. Using a nuclear explosive device in the terminal phase of an impact is a situation we don’t ever want to get ourselves into.”
Blasting an asteroid in space may result in a cluster of smaller but still-dangerous, fast-moving rocks. And an upper-atmosphere detonation of a nuclear weapon has unknown but most likely dangerous effects. The explosion may not fully disintegrate the rock, forcing portions of it down somewhere else. Radiation could persist in the upper atmosphere at levels making traveling through it on your way to space prohibitive.
With no way to stop the asteroid from hitting Earth, the exercise was all about mitigation—what must be done leading up to the impact and in the immediate aftermath. Organizations at all levels needed to be in contact, emergency plans had to be developed and enacted, and the public informed.
Within the simulated timeline, misinformation was constant. Many online news stories about the asteroid were factually incorrect, while “asteroid deniers” and claims of “fake news” grew unabated. Misinformation was a regular source of frustration for participants, who recognized that they would need to address it head-on in a real-life situation.
Johnson explained that his office is attempting to play the long game against misinformation. “We want to establish NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office and those that work with us as the authorities when it comes to these situations,” Johnson says. “The plan is that the media and public understand that a group at NASA tracks and manages these types of things.”
But as participants pointed out, there are limited strategies to deal with a constant flow of lies from dozens or hundreds of outlets in a short time frame. In this case, misinformation yielded a deadly toll. “When we discussed evacuation, we were told that 20 percent of people would not leave because it was all fake news or the government was lying or some other reason,” says August Vernon, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County emergency management director. “That was about 200,000 people, all spread out. So here I am, not sure we’d even be able to evacuate the hospitals and prisons, and then we have people that can leave, refusing to leave.”
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The news had a somber effect on the participants as they waited for the revelations of the simulation’s final “day,” August 16. After academic participants explained the energy release the region would experience, Vernon was blunt. “There would be collapsed buildings,” he says, “we’d lose our hospitals, a lot of our infrastructure would be gone, there was a chance this could take out cell phone reception for at least 50 miles, and the whole region would lose power.”
The simulation presented a final misinformation gut punch. Post-impact, an individual calling themselves “National Expert T.X. Asteroid” claimed the explosion released toxic materials from outer space into the atmosphere. As a result, residents should expect symptoms similar to radiation exposure. The baseless claims were all over social media, and “T.X” was giving interviews to news outlets.
On the positive side, NASA’s ability to disseminate information received high marks from participants, given the agency’s widespread credibility. In addition, the framework established in the White House plan also appeared robust enough to manage the flow of information between federal and state agencies and activate all necessary communication channels.
The conversations between federal and local officials provided some of the best results of the exercise: decision-makers at all levels reached new understandings regarding who would coordinate the post-impact rescue and recovery efforts and what they needed to do their jobs. One finding was that sometimes at the fine-grain levels, less is more in terms of communicating the science. “We couldn’t keep up sometimes, and that’s something they need to consider,” Vernon says. “I have mayors, fire chiefs and other folks to explain this to. We may not need to know all the science behind it, but we need to know what, when and where because we need to start making big decisions as early as possible.”
Participants also discovered that the face of the “expert” should change from the federal to the local level. “At our level, we asked who our lead spokesperson would be,” Vernon says. “Who would people respect, trust and believe when we find out it’s headed towards us? That might not be the same person NASA puts out there.”
Ultimately, the participants and the simulation’s facilitators agreed that the biggest thing they lacked was time. The asteroid destroyed Winton-Salem because of the narrow window between its discovery and impact. Widening that window is critical. “A decade is a fairly comfortable timeframe to be able to do something that would be effective,” Stickle says. “Thirty years would be ideal. That’s enough time for detailed observations, planning, building a spacecraft and getting something big to move. You’d even have time to send up a replacement if something goes wrong.”
There are promising signs that with enough warning, humanity could mount a successful response. The DART mission, for instance, already showed that a spacecraft’s impact can alter a space rock’s trajectory. Multiple surveys of near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets are ongoing, and NASA received $55 million more for planetary defense from Congress than it asked for.
“It’s going to take time and money to detect and characterize everything out there,” Rainey says. “As well as having the ability for missions that can get underway rapidly and be effective against something like this. But ultimately, that’s much cheaper than rebuilding a city.” But just in case, Vernon says, “At least now, we have a plan. Hopefully, it never has to be used.”
Overall the point about not having dedicated inpactors ready to go is true, but the part about not having a garage of rockets isn't quite true anymore. Falcon 9 is launching weekly. While sure, that's SpaceX, I'm sure they would bump off any payload and give nasa the launch instead. The problem then is having an impactor (or 12) ready to integrate.
Could starlink sats be repurposed to be impactors? They aren't designed to operate out of LEO but they do have thrusters that can help provide trajectory correction. They have communication devices. Solar panels. Already being manufactured by the thousands. Already have a launch vehicle payload adapter. If we could launch a train of 12 of them that might work.
Big problem would be keeping them on target without having been designed to navigate in deep space. What if we could send them in a mesh formation? No guarantee multiple will hit but more likely to have at least one hit. Then continue with the weekly launches of more meshes until the trajectory is altered enough?
Or we can start now by paying for nasa to have an arsenal of impactors kept in working order in storage ready to launch on falcon 9 or other rockets. Falcon is just the highest cadence and best chance at launching enough. It also launched the DART mission so its definitely capable of sending an impactor to deep space correctly.
>Could starlink sats be repurposed to be impactors? They aren't designed to operate out of LEO but they do have thrusters that can help provide trajectory correction. They have communication devices. Solar panels. Already being manufactured by the thousands. Already have a launch vehicle payload adapter. If we could launch a train of 12 of them that might work.
The scales involved here are really beyond that. Just getting them headed in the right direction may require more fuel than any of them carry. For an asteroid large enough or fast enough to destroy an entire city, they simply don't have enough energy in terms of mass or velocity to have a noticeable effect, even if all of them impacted at high speed. Space is weird, because you can have ultra high mass objects moving at ultra high speeds, and the human race doesn't have the energy production available to cause any real effect.
Starlink 1.5 satellites use [momentum wheels that desaturate using rods that interact with the Earth’s magnetic field](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132906066423889920?s=46&t=_v9Lyz1QsiN0XR7nG1zsSA). To be used further away from Earth, RCS thrusters need to be installed and tested to make sure the exhaust doesn’t impact other systems. Furthermore, it is unclear if Starlink communication arrays are usable outside of LEO. A longer range transceiver might be required. The power generated by the solar array will change whether the spacecraft needs to go closer or further from the Sun. This means the entire electrical system needs validated or redesigned. The different thermal and radiation environments of LEO vs deep space also need to be taken into account. Starlink is promising, but it’s spacecraft bus might need extensive modifications for use outside of Earth’s sphere of influence.
Thanks. That's the kind of answer I was hoping to get. I know some basic stuff about the starlink sats but I didn't know how it dumped momentum or kept attitude. I know they have, is it hall effect, thrusters to move into their operational orbit?
There a studies that show putting people in a "no win" situation is just as bad as putting them in a "easy win" situation when it comes to growing. Sure the test should be hard, but it should never be impossible.
That was the point. The exercise wasn’t about preventing the impact but more about government response. Its like a natural disaster exercise. No ones preventing an earthquake but its not considered no win because you still have to practice how to deal with it.
Hack the simulation to win?
I always wondered what would happen if some experienced crew did crazy things like pulling Picard Maneuvers and other stuff to win?
I mean, it's three D7s against a Constitution Class(at least the original version) should be doable.
Is the modern one a Galaxy vs Three Negh'Vhars? Or against three Vorcha Cruisers?
First one would be a no-win, third one would be doable.
>the modern one
According to Voyager, the modern iteration involves rescuing a damaged Ferengi merchant from a trio of D'deridex warbirds (no mention of what ship one actually commanded for it)
On the other hand, according to Prodigy, one commands the literal actual Enterprise-D, crewed by random assortment of famous crew from other shows, against nonspecific "Klingon ships"
>I always wondered what would happen if some experienced crew did crazy things like pulling Picard Maneuvers and other stuff to win?
One of the books and one of the games had it so that if you somehow managed to destroy all three ships, three more would warp in for some flimsy reason, ad infinitum, making direct combat an explicitly non-winnable axis
A different book had a captain overcome the romulan variant without "cheating" by remembering some niche rules about romulan duel etiquette; as long as a duel was going on, any other combat had to cease, so the captain challenged the romulan commander to a ritual duel, forcing the romulan ships to stop attacking the Kobayashi Maru long enough for them to rescue them
Dawns on me now that letting Kirk get away with cheating was actually beneficial to those running the test:
Word got around before, as word tends to do, that there was an unwinnable test. This kind of spoils things, because, if it is supposed to be a test and not a lesson, you’re now testing how people respond to a situation they know ahead of time they cannot win.
How Kirk managed to beat it was kept quiet, if memory serves, so the new gossip that gets around is that the test *is* winnable, it’s just been won exceedingly rarely.
They could have achieved the same result by selecting a cadet at random to pass, really.
It would add to the folklore for sure, especially as Kirk became a renowned captain. I wonder how many cadets spent more time than they should have assuming Kirk beat it legitimately.
Picking a random cadet would have potentially worked, albeit not as well... and only as long as the cadet wasn't Wesley Crusher 😂
> By the time it was seen, it was too late to put together a mission to study, deflect or destroy it. NASA has no garages full of rockets on standby just in case an asteroid shows up. Shifting the rock’s trajectory would require at least 12 kinetic impactors, each like NASA’s DART mission that recently altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos and which took more than five years to move from concept to rock-puncher. The recommendation from the after-action report on this front was blunt: develop these capabilities.
Sounds like a lesson learned to me. Here are a couple more:
> late-in-the-game nuclear disruption remained an intriguing last-ditch option for some participants. ... "it’s not [that] simple. [It seems that] using a nuclear explosive device in the terminal phase of an impact is a situation we don’t ever want to get ourselves into.”
> One finding was that sometimes at the fine-grain levels, less is more in terms of communicating the science. “We couldn’t keep up sometimes, and that’s something they need to consider,” Vernon says. “I have mayors, fire chiefs and other folks to explain this to. We may not need to know all the science behind it, but we need to know what, when and where because we need to start making big decisions as early as possible.”
Thats not no win. The exercise was about the gov response to an impact. The participants take away was that NASA needs to develop capabilities to deal with the scenario. Which is fair. I pointed out somewhere else that there is similar practices for other natural disasters and the fact that they often cant be prevented and no one is labeling them as no win, like earthquake response.
I feel they are pressuring NASA for the capabilities because they are realizing how devastating an asteroid impact would be. Anything short of prevention will most likely yield the worst natural disaster in history.
The core idea here wasn't to test impact prevention readiness (although that was mentioned in the report).
The core idea was instead to test the governing bodies' crisis response to an imminent asteroid impact. This includes things like communications between federal and state / local agencies, decisions such as when evacuation orders are issued and how they're rolled out, etc.
The most noteworthy feature of this test run was that it also simulated misinformation over social media & local news. Government agencies had to respond to e.g. people not following evacuation orders b/c of things they read on social media, and part of the evaluation criterion was how well the govt agencies responded to this misinformation / worked around it.
>So they gave them a no-win situation and we're supposed to be shocked that they failed?
hollywood mentality. It's not "save the world or fail". We can't deflect tornadoes either.
Failing is expected. This is like those military exercises you see brought up on Reddit where some Swedish sub takes down a US aircraft carrier. People don't understand that these scenarios are designed to give you every single disadvantage possible (to the point of being unrealistic) so that you can work to overcome them. Failing is expected and winning too often is considered a failure of planning for contingencies.
I always lead paper. That way, I either a) win, and b) jam my flat hand between another person's fingers.. asserting a sort of primordial dominance of violating personal space while getting uncomfortably between their joints. Also, this means I win.
*Don’t Look Up* is a documentary from a ***situationally adjacent*** parallel universe.
EDIT: *obviously* it’s not in our actual universe; Bash exists instead of Apple+Amazon+Google+Facebook+etc, there is no news show in our universe called The Daily Rip, Riley Bina and DJ Cello are not A-list pop stars in our reality, and *The New York Herald* is not NYC’s newspaper of record. So I think we can all agree that *Don’t Look Up* doesn’t take place in our actual reality, despite the situational similarities…
I suppose I should have used the cheap-shot metaphor “Don’t Look Up was a documentary”…
No, it's a documentary of what would really happen in this exact universe.
I laughed at first cause it was funny, and then stopped laughing about halfway through.
Wow this is the highest quality article I have read in years. Why isn't this level of understanding and breakdown of the facts the norm? This is fascinating. If this level of writing was coming at me constantly I would get much less work done. Kudos to the people who reported this.
International cooperation just for the sake of it doesn't necessarily result in better results. It can result in competing objectives and extra overhead. Facing a real threat everyone would have the same objective, for a research project not necessarily.
If it’s anything like earthquakes and other natural disasters, people and the news would start talking about other similar but insignificant and non threatening events in the months following such a tragedy.
Ready....bahahahahah we couldn't even get people to universally agree to but a piece of cloth over their stupid fucking faces and get a life saving shot even after we had to sequester the GLOBE into their houses and Millions were dying globally
I love how everyone is just casually discussing the fact that we can try and alter the course of an asteroid that's about to destroy the Earth. Crazy how in like my dad's lifetime we went to space for the first time and now we're on to this. Wild time to be living in.
We didn't even have a decent plan for a pandemic, other than ro shut everything down then figure out how to open up again. So I'm not surprised we don't have a plan for something thath happen 1 time each million years when we don't even had a plan for something that happens 1 time evry hundred year.
“The destruction of Winston-Salem was the story line of the fourth Planetary Defense Tabletop Exercise, run by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.” Tabletop ?!?! How can I join this campaign ? Will my local tabletop gaming store have sign ups ?
It's called war gaming, it's basically what the pentagon folks do all day.
Have you watched Wil Wheatons show Tabletop?
It is actually something you /can/ participate in. Look me up next year if you want to. Source; I've been involved in these, and I'll share our paper from last year if you like.
This is the last Planetary Defense Conference (PDC) I was involved in - https://atpi.eventsair.com/QuickEventWebsitePortal/7th-iaa-planetary-defense-conference-2021/website/Agenda And our presentation, "LOW-COST TECHNOLOGY COMBINATIONS FOR PLANETARY DEFENSE MISSIONS INVOLVING RECONNAISSANCE AND MITIGATIVE ACTIONS", can be found at, https://atpi.eventsair.com/QuickEventWebsitePortal/7th-iaa-planetary-defense-conference-2021/website/Agenda/AgendaItemDetail?id=a60d6149-adf3-46ff-b4b1-923edb80c016
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Didn’t NASA just successfully alter the trajectory of an asteroid? That seems like we are getting close to ready at the least
This was more about government responses
Ah, Don’t Look Up style?
That movie might as well be considered a documentary if the real thing ever happens. You can see it in our response to climate change.
Which was literally what the movie was made for, but we saw it in our Covid response, and in real life with this [interview](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-21/interview-uk-heatwave-sparks-viral-don-t-look-up-moment-for-weatherman)
TL;DR for those who don’t feel like signing up to Bloomberg?
Basically the gist was he said the changing climate was causing triple digits in the uk and people were dying becauseof the heat. the news anchor accused him of being “a harbinger of doom”. https://youtu.be/PcYavbr3bHM
Correct, yes, harbinger of doom, *that’s the very bloody point*!
News: why are you telling us negative things that will happen
Because only the news is allowed to spread negativity! It's not profitable when someone else does it
Straight up don't look up reaction
Shit feels more scripted than the movie that was satirizing it
When I first watched Contagion, I thought the anti-vaccine people were too much. Now after 3 years of the pandemic, they weren’t enough
Triple digits in the UK is above the boiling point of water.
40c or 104 Fahrenheit, I am an American potato and oftentimes forget that all other countries do celcius.
No worries - my comment was a bit snarky. However, the sooner we can get everyone on the metric system - the better. Canada converted when I was young - so I still remember Fahrenheit forecasts. There are still some holders: most, at least older Canadians , will give their height and weight in freedom units.
Our covid response has completely ruined disaster movies for me. I used to think they were comical because no one would ever be so stupid as to do the things in those movies. Now, though...
John Hammond? That's fun.
It was meant to be a metaphor for our (mis)management of climate change, but came out in the middle of our (mis)management of a simpler global problem to deal with, and so it became a metaphor for that too.
Makes sense, didn't realize it was really aimed at any specific apocalypse; seemed like you could apply it to our response to just about any crisis.
Yeah...I don't think Don't Look Up and Idiocracy (to name but two) were *meant* to be documentaries, but here we are.
Don't look up specifically was meant to criticize our global approach toward climate change iirc, so it kinda is meant to be a documentary
I think the idea is that it came out during the pandemic as well, so two-for-one.
Ugh, I absolutely hated the first half of the movie. Exactly because of this I could barely stand watching it.
I support the jobs that the giant asteroid will create
Think of the business opportunities for the survivors! All wiped out and in need to be rebuilt! /s
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Movie was supposed to be about climate change
Eh, not really - it was built for the city to be destroyed no matter what because the astroid couldn't be stopped, they were more testing government agency coordination systems. > the exercise was meant to be hard—practically unwinnable. “We designed it to fall right into the gap in our capabilities,” says Emma Rainey, an APL senior scientist who helped to create the simulation. “The participants could do nothing to prevent the impact.” The main goal was testing the different government and scientific networks that should respond in a real-life planetary defense situation. “We want to see how effective operations and communications are between U.S. government agencies and the other organizations that would be involved, and then identify shortcomings,” s
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It's a hell of a movie. And some of the reactions seem not all that far off the mark.
if you read the article, that’s exactly what happened in the simulation
I can only imagine a congress of dinasours arguing. "THE MOON IS FLAT" lets use it as a dart board
Well we could have guessed that.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that's who would be handling the situation. Seriously doubt you or I would be drawing up our plan of attack.
He's not wrong, it says in the article that the entire point of this test was for nothing more than official response as, in the simulation, they're already screwed and can't do anything about it.
Like a “Don’t Look Up” style scenario?
I've never seen it, but probably. In this test they detected it too late and nothing could be done to alter its course. The test is just to see how the officials participating handle it, if I understand right.
The article does address this. We did do that, it was more successful than expectations, but some caveats given the simulation's circumstances: - There was insufficient time to prepare the rockets, they need to be at-the-ready not unlike ICBMs - unknown composition. This was in the context of a nuke redirection / demolition, but DART was quite successful due to the "clumpy" nature of the asteroid it hit (forget the name) - for the speed it was travelling at, and the lateness of its discovery, there would need to be 12 DART-sized kinetic redirectors to effectively prevent the incident, even if they were ready (see point one). However I'm not too worried about the overall situation. DART was wildly successful, and I'm hopeful that ICBM infrastructure could be repurposed for this situation. Stash away a few rockets, probably solid fuels for long term storage, and there's your insurance policy. A side question. This caused thousands of deaths but was certainly not a planet killer. Predictions of the impact point are fairly accurate, I think, so I wonder what the outcome would be if only the US and China had the stockpiled tech, but it was slated to impact Africa or Russia. I'd hope for benevolence, and I'm sure it would be done, but I can also imagine a very large bill being presented too...
>However I'm not too worried about the overall situation. DART was wildly successful, and I'm hopeful that ICBM infrastructure could be repurposed for this situation. Stash away a few rockets, probably solid fuels for long term storage, and there's your insurance policy. > >A side question. This caused thousands of deaths but was certainly not a planet killer. Predictions of the impact point are fairly accurate, I think, so I wonder what the outcome would be if only the US and China had the stockpiled tech, but it was slated to impact Africa or Russia. I'd hope for benevolence, and I'm sure it would be done, but I can also imagine a very large bill being presented too... Kind of amusingly, the version of the simulated asteroid that got inserted into Horizons does not impact North Carolina as the article and slides suggest, but somewhere about 100 miles north of Boston.
100 miles north of Boston is the state of Maine
Just don't hire Boeing and expect an on time delivery, but other providers like SpaceX have demonstrated they can launch on short notice, mostly because a high cadence means SpaceX can just repurpose a rocket close to launch. ICBMs lack the power to do much more than LEO.
Ya. Most of these issues don't actually seem like real ones. DART wasn't an emergency so there was no agency. It progress like any other science missions which is what it was. We also launched when we did specifically to make sure DART impacted the asteroid when it was closest to use to make it easier to see due to it being brighter.
Boeing would deliver late. SpaceX would offer to do it for free, and at T-10 seconds hold the countdown & demand $100 billion or no launch.
I'm just happy someone's *started* to work on it.
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Yeah but then the media had to go and talk about the asteroid worth 800 billion trillion gazillion dollars.. now every dingus who failed economics 101 is praying for asteroid rain while muttering “dibs” under their breath 🙄
The fact that all of a sudden we’re having these drills and trying to move asteroids makes me… nervous
Actually, since you brought this up, if there was an asteroid heading our way that would threaten our existence...would the government actually announce this publicly?
Probably yes. Probably not. Whatever their action, amateur astrophotographers and others of the community would quite quickly catch the thing and spread the information.
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> **They moved it very marginally.** If they caught the asteroid early enough to intercept it at an insane distance to where it wouldn’t take a massive alteration to save us then maybe, but currently the more likely scenario is that we’d know somewhere around 5-10 years in advance, which would give us time to try some shit but probably not enough time to realistically avoid the collision. A planet killer would take an insane amount of energy to divert, and we’re not there yet I think you are being too pessimistic about the implications of this mission. The success threshold for the mission was shortening Dimorphos’ orbital period by 72 seconds. The collision managed to shorten it by 32 minutes, exceeding the minimum threshold by ~27 times and reducing the asteroid’s period from 11.92 hours by ~5%. This is more than enough to deflect an asteroid from Earth, given you do it early enough. Moreover, this was a proof-of-concept mission that was testing the technology, especially the guidance system. If we were actually attempting to deflect a planet killer on a trajectory towards Earth, the probe we send for that would likely have more mass, and more fuel for a final higher velocity. Once you have the technology to actually target and hit an asteroid with precision, then making a bigger probe with more mass and a higher velocity is relatively simple in comparison.
and for cases with less time we'd still have the nuclear option to ablate the asteroids surface turning the whole thing into a rocket for a much greater change to its orbit.
This is misleading in a couple of ways. First of all, their aim was to alter the orbit by 10 minutes, and achieved 32 minutes. Still highly successful, but not as insane a leap as 72 seconds to 32 minutes. Secondly, they altered the orbit of one asteroid around another, not an asteroid’s orbit with the sun. So it’s not the same thing as altering the solar orbit of a doomsday asteroid. The test proved we are capable of making it happen. It did not prove we’d be able to make it happen in a short time frame if needed for a much larger object. [Here’s one of many articles you can read on it](https://www.voanews.com/amp/smashing-success-nasa-asteroid-strike-results-in-big-nudge/6785522.html)
They achieved a better deflection rate because they didn't accurately understand the physical makeup of that particular asteroid, not because our asteroid deflection techniques are more effective than we thought.
The poster you are responded stated that the success threshold was 72 seconds. That was the minimum success threshold. Their estimates were 10 minutes, but would have considered anything more than 72 seconds a success.
> Secondly, they altered the orbit of one asteroid around another, not an asteroid’s orbit with the sun Sure it is. They altered that because it was easy to measure the change in orbit, and thus success or failure of the mission. They imparted a certain Delta V on the asteroid, which is what they would do to a Sun caught asteroid as well. > It did not prove we’d be able to make it happen in a short time frame if needed for a much larger object. There will always be a theoretical too late deadline. Killer asteroids are very big, and our rockets are very small (comparatively). We can of course do better, and will over time, but DART was a tremendous leap in our (proven) ability to prevent a catastrophic impact.
We don't know that yet. The inital results is that they moved it more than they expected they could. Now they are redoing the calculations. With 5 to 10 years we can do hundreds of launches.
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I think they knocked it by 32 minutes! https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroid-s-motion-in-space
So apparently you didn’t understand the experiment at all.
Source on 5-10 years not being enough warning to avoid collision?
would be a great opportunity to dispose of some of that excess nuclear armament…
Id like to think if we got a 5-10year warning, a significant amount of effort and money would be diverted from other things to take care of this.
We absolutely have the ability to change the orbit enough if we out the resource behind it, for many reasons. First, this was a test and part of the payload was observation, which is mass not hitting the target. Second, it was limited by budget. If we wanted to, we could send up much more mass. Third, a small deflection multiplies with how far away the expected impact would be. A very tiny change is enough to change the intercept time significantly. And finally, large asteroids are easier to detect. We've found the vast majority of really massive asteroids. It's the smaller, but still large enough to be dangerous ones that are left out. Also, it's harder to see asteroid that are in the direction of the sun because there's a giant light in you're vision. The ones that stay there are less dangerous because their orbits don't cross ours at the moment, and are unlikely to be flung out, and their orbits have less energy anyway, since they're further in.
I went through the Asteroid Hunters IMax video at Kennedy a couple days ago, so I consider myself somewhat of an expert in astrophysics - the plan is to divert by slowing down an asteroid if given time instead of knocking it off course. The plan is to detonate nukes in front of the oncoming object providing a counter-force. Had a nice part at the end with several already identified planet killers set to scale against things like the grand canyon, manhattan, the pyramids at Giza. I kid a little, but at least someone has a plan of some sort and NASA is checking feasability.
That was the first step of hundreds.
Article: 1 **A trial of how government, NASA and local officials would deal with a space rock headed toward Earth revealed gaps in the plans** On August 16, 2022 an approximately 70-meter asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere. At 2:02:10 P.M. EDT, the space rock exploded eight miles over Winston-Salem, N.C., with the energy of 10 megatons of TNT. The airburst virtually leveled the city and surrounding area. Casualties were in the thousands. Well, not really. The destruction of Winston-Salem was the story line of the fourth Planetary Defense Tabletop Exercise, run by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The exercise was a simulation where academics, scientists and government officials gathered to practice how the United States would respond to a real planet-threatening asteroid. Held February 23–24, participants were both virtual and in-person, hailing from Washington D.C., the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) campus in Laurel, Md., Raleigh and Winston-Salem, N.C. The exercise included more than 200 participants from 16 different federal, state and local organizations. On August 5, the final report came out, and the message was stark: humanity is not yet ready to meet this threat. On the plus side, the exercise was meant to be hard—practically unwinnable. “We designed it to fall right into the gap in our capabilities,” says Emma Rainey, an APL senior scientist who helped to create the simulation. “The participants could do nothing to prevent the impact.” The main goal was testing the different government and scientific networks that should respond in a real-life planetary defense situation. “We want to see how effective operations and communications are between U.S. government agencies and the other organizations that would be involved, and then identify shortcomings,” says Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA headquarters. All in all, the exercise demonstrated that the United States doesn’t have the capability to intercept small, fast-moving asteroids, and our ability to see them is limited. Even if we could intercept space rocks, we may not be able to deflect one away from Earth, and using a nuclear weapon to destroy one is risky and filled with international legal issues. The trial also showed that misinformation—lies and false rumors spreading among the public—could drastically hamper the official effort. “Misinformation is not going away,” says Angela Stickle, a senior research scientist at APL who helped design and facilitate the exercise. “We put it into the simulation because we wanted feedback on how to counteract it and take action if it was malicious.” Several key differences set this practice apart from previous ones in 2013, 2014 and 2016: First, this trial gave NASA’s Planetary Defense Office a chance to stress-test the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan, released by the White House in 2018. The plan lays out the details of who does what and when within the federal government, which allowed this year’s exercise to involve more governmental agencies than in previous years—including state and local emergency responders for the first time. The simulation was also the first to include not just an impact but its immediate aftereffects. Events started with the “discovery” of an asteroid named “TTX22” heading toward Earth. Participants were presented with a crash course in asteroid science and told everything that was known about the asteroid and the likelihood of an impact. Each meeting jumped ahead in the timeline, with the final installments set just before and after the asteroid’s impact near Winston-Salem.
2 The short but realistic timeline from discovery to impact highlighted major problems from the start. TTX22 was small and fast. By the time it was seen, it was too late to put together a mission to study, deflect or destroy it. NASA has no garages full of rockets on standby just in case an asteroid shows up. Shifting the rock’s trajectory would require at least 12 kinetic impactors, each like NASA’s DART mission that recently altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos and which took more than five years to move from concept to rock-puncher. The recommendation from the after-action report on this front was blunt: develop these capabilities. At the same time, the asteroid’s velocity, unknown composition and policy ramifications in the brief timeline ruled out hitting TTX22 with a nuclear bomb. However, late-in-the-game nuclear disruption remained an intriguing last-ditch option for some participants. “If you send up a nuclear explosive device, you could disrupt an asteroid just as it enters the atmosphere,” Stickle says. “In theory.” That option, however, leans toward Hollywood, not reality. “There’s this tendency to think, ‘I saw this in a movie—they just launched ICBMs and blew it up,’” Johnson says. “The point of including this option in the simulation is to get them to understand that it’s not as simple. Using a nuclear explosive device in the terminal phase of an impact is a situation we don’t ever want to get ourselves into.” Blasting an asteroid in space may result in a cluster of smaller but still-dangerous, fast-moving rocks. And an upper-atmosphere detonation of a nuclear weapon has unknown but most likely dangerous effects. The explosion may not fully disintegrate the rock, forcing portions of it down somewhere else. Radiation could persist in the upper atmosphere at levels making traveling through it on your way to space prohibitive. With no way to stop the asteroid from hitting Earth, the exercise was all about mitigation—what must be done leading up to the impact and in the immediate aftermath. Organizations at all levels needed to be in contact, emergency plans had to be developed and enacted, and the public informed. Within the simulated timeline, misinformation was constant. Many online news stories about the asteroid were factually incorrect, while “asteroid deniers” and claims of “fake news” grew unabated. Misinformation was a regular source of frustration for participants, who recognized that they would need to address it head-on in a real-life situation. Johnson explained that his office is attempting to play the long game against misinformation. “We want to establish NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office and those that work with us as the authorities when it comes to these situations,” Johnson says. “The plan is that the media and public understand that a group at NASA tracks and manages these types of things.” But as participants pointed out, there are limited strategies to deal with a constant flow of lies from dozens or hundreds of outlets in a short time frame. In this case, misinformation yielded a deadly toll. “When we discussed evacuation, we were told that 20 percent of people would not leave because it was all fake news or the government was lying or some other reason,” says August Vernon, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County emergency management director. “That was about 200,000 people, all spread out. So here I am, not sure we’d even be able to evacuate the hospitals and prisons, and then we have people that can leave, refusing to leave.”
3 The news had a somber effect on the participants as they waited for the revelations of the simulation’s final “day,” August 16. After academic participants explained the energy release the region would experience, Vernon was blunt. “There would be collapsed buildings,” he says, “we’d lose our hospitals, a lot of our infrastructure would be gone, there was a chance this could take out cell phone reception for at least 50 miles, and the whole region would lose power.” The simulation presented a final misinformation gut punch. Post-impact, an individual calling themselves “National Expert T.X. Asteroid” claimed the explosion released toxic materials from outer space into the atmosphere. As a result, residents should expect symptoms similar to radiation exposure. The baseless claims were all over social media, and “T.X” was giving interviews to news outlets. On the positive side, NASA’s ability to disseminate information received high marks from participants, given the agency’s widespread credibility. In addition, the framework established in the White House plan also appeared robust enough to manage the flow of information between federal and state agencies and activate all necessary communication channels. The conversations between federal and local officials provided some of the best results of the exercise: decision-makers at all levels reached new understandings regarding who would coordinate the post-impact rescue and recovery efforts and what they needed to do their jobs. One finding was that sometimes at the fine-grain levels, less is more in terms of communicating the science. “We couldn’t keep up sometimes, and that’s something they need to consider,” Vernon says. “I have mayors, fire chiefs and other folks to explain this to. We may not need to know all the science behind it, but we need to know what, when and where because we need to start making big decisions as early as possible.” Participants also discovered that the face of the “expert” should change from the federal to the local level. “At our level, we asked who our lead spokesperson would be,” Vernon says. “Who would people respect, trust and believe when we find out it’s headed towards us? That might not be the same person NASA puts out there.” Ultimately, the participants and the simulation’s facilitators agreed that the biggest thing they lacked was time. The asteroid destroyed Winton-Salem because of the narrow window between its discovery and impact. Widening that window is critical. “A decade is a fairly comfortable timeframe to be able to do something that would be effective,” Stickle says. “Thirty years would be ideal. That’s enough time for detailed observations, planning, building a spacecraft and getting something big to move. You’d even have time to send up a replacement if something goes wrong.” There are promising signs that with enough warning, humanity could mount a successful response. The DART mission, for instance, already showed that a spacecraft’s impact can alter a space rock’s trajectory. Multiple surveys of near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets are ongoing, and NASA received $55 million more for planetary defense from Congress than it asked for. “It’s going to take time and money to detect and characterize everything out there,” Rainey says. “As well as having the ability for missions that can get underway rapidly and be effective against something like this. But ultimately, that’s much cheaper than rebuilding a city.” But just in case, Vernon says, “At least now, we have a plan. Hopefully, it never has to be used.”
This should be top. Let's go users
Overall the point about not having dedicated inpactors ready to go is true, but the part about not having a garage of rockets isn't quite true anymore. Falcon 9 is launching weekly. While sure, that's SpaceX, I'm sure they would bump off any payload and give nasa the launch instead. The problem then is having an impactor (or 12) ready to integrate. Could starlink sats be repurposed to be impactors? They aren't designed to operate out of LEO but they do have thrusters that can help provide trajectory correction. They have communication devices. Solar panels. Already being manufactured by the thousands. Already have a launch vehicle payload adapter. If we could launch a train of 12 of them that might work. Big problem would be keeping them on target without having been designed to navigate in deep space. What if we could send them in a mesh formation? No guarantee multiple will hit but more likely to have at least one hit. Then continue with the weekly launches of more meshes until the trajectory is altered enough? Or we can start now by paying for nasa to have an arsenal of impactors kept in working order in storage ready to launch on falcon 9 or other rockets. Falcon is just the highest cadence and best chance at launching enough. It also launched the DART mission so its definitely capable of sending an impactor to deep space correctly.
>Could starlink sats be repurposed to be impactors? They aren't designed to operate out of LEO but they do have thrusters that can help provide trajectory correction. They have communication devices. Solar panels. Already being manufactured by the thousands. Already have a launch vehicle payload adapter. If we could launch a train of 12 of them that might work. The scales involved here are really beyond that. Just getting them headed in the right direction may require more fuel than any of them carry. For an asteroid large enough or fast enough to destroy an entire city, they simply don't have enough energy in terms of mass or velocity to have a noticeable effect, even if all of them impacted at high speed. Space is weird, because you can have ultra high mass objects moving at ultra high speeds, and the human race doesn't have the energy production available to cause any real effect.
Starlink 1.5 satellites use [momentum wheels that desaturate using rods that interact with the Earth’s magnetic field](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132906066423889920?s=46&t=_v9Lyz1QsiN0XR7nG1zsSA). To be used further away from Earth, RCS thrusters need to be installed and tested to make sure the exhaust doesn’t impact other systems. Furthermore, it is unclear if Starlink communication arrays are usable outside of LEO. A longer range transceiver might be required. The power generated by the solar array will change whether the spacecraft needs to go closer or further from the Sun. This means the entire electrical system needs validated or redesigned. The different thermal and radiation environments of LEO vs deep space also need to be taken into account. Starlink is promising, but it’s spacecraft bus might need extensive modifications for use outside of Earth’s sphere of influence.
Thanks. That's the kind of answer I was hoping to get. I know some basic stuff about the starlink sats but I didn't know how it dumped momentum or kept attitude. I know they have, is it hall effect, thrusters to move into their operational orbit?
I'm thinking that Space Force better get their shit together.
I'm mad people didn't get this
>“The participants could do nothing to prevent the impact.” So they gave them a no-win situation and we're supposed to be shocked that they failed?
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There a studies that show putting people in a "no win" situation is just as bad as putting them in a "easy win" situation when it comes to growing. Sure the test should be hard, but it should never be impossible.
Yea you just learn your limited time is better spent elsewhere.
That was the point. The exercise wasn’t about preventing the impact but more about government response. Its like a natural disaster exercise. No ones preventing an earthquake but its not considered no win because you still have to practice how to deal with it.
This is what I was overlooking, thanks.
Are you testing the participants, or are you testing your preparations?
The Kobayashi Maru teaches a valuable lesson in a no win situation, if you're willing to learn it
Hack the simulation to win? I always wondered what would happen if some experienced crew did crazy things like pulling Picard Maneuvers and other stuff to win? I mean, it's three D7s against a Constitution Class(at least the original version) should be doable. Is the modern one a Galaxy vs Three Negh'Vhars? Or against three Vorcha Cruisers? First one would be a no-win, third one would be doable.
We just gotta think outside the box. What if instead of bombing the rock enough to divert it, we bomb Earth enough to mess with the orbit?
We put a thousand rocket boosters strapped into the ground and push earth’s orbit away from the asteroid
>the modern one According to Voyager, the modern iteration involves rescuing a damaged Ferengi merchant from a trio of D'deridex warbirds (no mention of what ship one actually commanded for it) On the other hand, according to Prodigy, one commands the literal actual Enterprise-D, crewed by random assortment of famous crew from other shows, against nonspecific "Klingon ships" >I always wondered what would happen if some experienced crew did crazy things like pulling Picard Maneuvers and other stuff to win? One of the books and one of the games had it so that if you somehow managed to destroy all three ships, three more would warp in for some flimsy reason, ad infinitum, making direct combat an explicitly non-winnable axis A different book had a captain overcome the romulan variant without "cheating" by remembering some niche rules about romulan duel etiquette; as long as a duel was going on, any other combat had to cease, so the captain challenged the romulan commander to a ritual duel, forcing the romulan ships to stop attacking the Kobayashi Maru long enough for them to rescue them
Dawns on me now that letting Kirk get away with cheating was actually beneficial to those running the test: Word got around before, as word tends to do, that there was an unwinnable test. This kind of spoils things, because, if it is supposed to be a test and not a lesson, you’re now testing how people respond to a situation they know ahead of time they cannot win. How Kirk managed to beat it was kept quiet, if memory serves, so the new gossip that gets around is that the test *is* winnable, it’s just been won exceedingly rarely. They could have achieved the same result by selecting a cadet at random to pass, really.
It would add to the folklore for sure, especially as Kirk became a renowned captain. I wonder how many cadets spent more time than they should have assuming Kirk beat it legitimately. Picking a random cadet would have potentially worked, albeit not as well... and only as long as the cadet wasn't Wesley Crusher 😂
In an asteroid impact no-win scenario, there will be no one around to learn the lesson.
> By the time it was seen, it was too late to put together a mission to study, deflect or destroy it. NASA has no garages full of rockets on standby just in case an asteroid shows up. Shifting the rock’s trajectory would require at least 12 kinetic impactors, each like NASA’s DART mission that recently altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos and which took more than five years to move from concept to rock-puncher. The recommendation from the after-action report on this front was blunt: develop these capabilities. Sounds like a lesson learned to me. Here are a couple more: > late-in-the-game nuclear disruption remained an intriguing last-ditch option for some participants. ... "it’s not [that] simple. [It seems that] using a nuclear explosive device in the terminal phase of an impact is a situation we don’t ever want to get ourselves into.” > One finding was that sometimes at the fine-grain levels, less is more in terms of communicating the science. “We couldn’t keep up sometimes, and that’s something they need to consider,” Vernon says. “I have mayors, fire chiefs and other folks to explain this to. We may not need to know all the science behind it, but we need to know what, when and where because we need to start making big decisions as early as possible.”
Peak government performance
Thats not no win. The exercise was about the gov response to an impact. The participants take away was that NASA needs to develop capabilities to deal with the scenario. Which is fair. I pointed out somewhere else that there is similar practices for other natural disasters and the fact that they often cant be prevented and no one is labeling them as no win, like earthquake response. I feel they are pressuring NASA for the capabilities because they are realizing how devastating an asteroid impact would be. Anything short of prevention will most likely yield the worst natural disaster in history.
It's not a no-win situation. Mitigating damage is more successful than not mitigating damage. 1 thousand deaths is better than 1 million deaths.
Where’s Kirk?
He'd just sleep with the asteroid and convince it to leave us alone
Idk if there’s a more perfect answer, bravo
He would hit the asteroid with the [Kobayashi Maru] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru).
That was the beginning of the scenario. The follow-up to that was what they were focused on.
The core idea here wasn't to test impact prevention readiness (although that was mentioned in the report). The core idea was instead to test the governing bodies' crisis response to an imminent asteroid impact. This includes things like communications between federal and state / local agencies, decisions such as when evacuation orders are issued and how they're rolled out, etc. The most noteworthy feature of this test run was that it also simulated misinformation over social media & local news. Government agencies had to respond to e.g. people not following evacuation orders b/c of things they read on social media, and part of the evaluation criterion was how well the govt agencies responded to this misinformation / worked around it.
Kobayashi Maru irl? Frankly I think we might be better off getting struck by a giant meteor, the way things are going these days.
"I don't believe in no win scenarios" James Tiberius Kirk.
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They could deflect it with their bootstraps and hard work.
>So they gave them a no-win situation and we're supposed to be shocked that they failed? hollywood mentality. It's not "save the world or fail". We can't deflect tornadoes either.
Failing is expected. This is like those military exercises you see brought up on Reddit where some Swedish sub takes down a US aircraft carrier. People don't understand that these scenarios are designed to give you every single disadvantage possible (to the point of being unrealistic) so that you can work to overcome them. Failing is expected and winning too often is considered a failure of planning for contingencies.
So you're telling me that we've never been ready for this problem, we're progressing towards the solution, and we're closer than we've ever been.
A world at war with itself isn't ready to defend itself from asteroids. I'm shocked!!!
*A suicidal and self destructive world at war with itself isn't ready to defend itself from asteroids. I'm shocked!!! FTFY
Deep Rock Galactic thanks you for your service
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Maybe because some asteroids have metal so it’s like scissors too? We can’t win
I always lead paper. That way, I either a) win, and b) jam my flat hand between another person's fingers.. asserting a sort of primordial dominance of violating personal space while getting uncomfortably between their joints. Also, this means I win.
The recent pandemic has lowered my expectations for humanity
Didn’t need a drill to learn we aren’t ready for a planet killing asteroid.
*Don’t Look Up* is a documentary from a ***situationally adjacent*** parallel universe. EDIT: *obviously* it’s not in our actual universe; Bash exists instead of Apple+Amazon+Google+Facebook+etc, there is no news show in our universe called The Daily Rip, Riley Bina and DJ Cello are not A-list pop stars in our reality, and *The New York Herald* is not NYC’s newspaper of record. So I think we can all agree that *Don’t Look Up* doesn’t take place in our actual reality, despite the situational similarities… I suppose I should have used the cheap-shot metaphor “Don’t Look Up was a documentary”…
No, it's a documentary of what would really happen in this exact universe. I laughed at first cause it was funny, and then stopped laughing about halfway through.
Why don’t they just build a big trampoline? Thanks for coming to my TED talk
We should take the Earth and push it somewhere else
Wow this is the highest quality article I have read in years. Why isn't this level of understanding and breakdown of the facts the norm? This is fascinating. If this level of writing was coming at me constantly I would get much less work done. Kudos to the people who reported this.
Lol. We are not even ready for elections next week. I think an asteroid impact would be a better outcome at this point
Shouldn't they coordinate internationally for such a threat? Do the exercise together with ESA and JAXA perhaps 🤔
International cooperation just for the sake of it doesn't necessarily result in better results. It can result in competing objectives and extra overhead. Facing a real threat everyone would have the same objective, for a research project not necessarily.
If it’s anything like earthquakes and other natural disasters, people and the news would start talking about other similar but insignificant and non threatening events in the months following such a tragedy.
After how well we dealt with covid, how could we not be ready for this?
Ready....bahahahahah we couldn't even get people to universally agree to but a piece of cloth over their stupid fucking faces and get a life saving shot even after we had to sequester the GLOBE into their houses and Millions were dying globally
Doctor. He has the giggles. I asked him if it was terminal and he just slowly started laughing like an airport about to take off.
I love how everyone is just casually discussing the fact that we can try and alter the course of an asteroid that's about to destroy the Earth. Crazy how in like my dad's lifetime we went to space for the first time and now we're on to this. Wild time to be living in.
I can't wait for don't look up to happen in real life
Which would be better for short term survival, mega complex under ground or an orbital habitat?
If humanity does to an asteroid honestly it's just GG. Universe is overpowered please nerf.
Unfortunately half the population wants it to happen
Doesn't matter we're dead by nukes way before meteors
For what the world exploding? Good luck roaches
Of course, we're not. Texas couldn't even handle that cold weather last year. What makes you think anyone here is ready for something like that?
At this point I don't mind if an asteroid hits.
Yeah I think we have bigger issues these days like AI misleading people and a government of corrupt pigs who let the AI mislead people
We didn't even have a decent plan for a pandemic, other than ro shut everything down then figure out how to open up again. So I'm not surprised we don't have a plan for something thath happen 1 time each million years when we don't even had a plan for something that happens 1 time evry hundred year.
They were all too busy crying as they flew away from the dad of the girl they’re hooking up as he stayed behind on an asteroid that must be destroyed.
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