Month: November 2020

Matthew Cross outlines three ways to defeat killer asteroids to save Earth; Pound it, Push it, or Pull it.

In the novel ASTEROIDS – Bridge to Nowhere the characters attempt to use one of these methods to stop an Earth ending asteroid.

Read ASTEEROIDS to see how that works out for them!

BY MATTHEW CROSSNOVEMBER 16, 2020SPACE

If astronomers found a large asteroid headed towards Earth, could we defeat it before it smacked into our atmosphere, raining down fire and destruction?

Astronomers, physicists and engineers have been watching for “planet-killing” asteroids and other space bodies and making plans for decades. I just finished reading the Space column in my November/December issue of Popular Mechanics by Jennifer Leman, titled “Could a Cosmic Lasso Divert Extinction-Level Asteroids?”

It’s a good read and I recommend you check it out. In the meantime, I was thinking of the 3 basic ways to defeat an asteroid, which can be found in discussions with scientists and also in Sci Fi film and literature: pound it, push it, or pull it.

1) Pound it

That’s right, pound the asteroid with missiles, nukes, bombs, whatever! Throw everything we have at it. Blow it up! So simple and easy, a 5-year-old could figure it out.

That is possible, but a “blown up” giant asteroid can be as dangerous, sometimes more dangerous, than an intact one. Consider a Mack truck rushing towards you at 100 miles per hour. If it hits you, you’re a pancake. But if I disassemble that Mack truck into its thousands of metal and plastic pieces, put them on a cart, and shove them at you at 100 miles per hour, the pieces are just as dangerous as the fully assembled Mack truck.

The point is that “blowing up” an asteroid does not change the overall mass of ice and rock. Unless the explosion threw most of that mass off its course with Earth, it would still be a devastating blow for life on Earth whether the asteroid was one solid piece, hundreds of one-ton pieces, or even a massive cloud of dust. In fact, sometimes pieces are worse.

Here’s what Jennifer Leman says on this topic in her Popular Mechanics piece:

“It’s risky to Hulk-smash an Earth-bound, extinction-level asteroid, though. ‘In general, when we move an asteroid, we want to keep it in one piece,’ says planetary astronomer . . . Andrew Rivkin, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The rock could break apart and create a wave of several smaller ‘city-killing’ asteroids instead.’ (This risk also applies to an Armageddon-style nuclear solution, we’re told–there are no plans to test a space nuke at this time.)”

Dust is also a problem.

According to killerasteroids.org, “to lead to a global catastrophe, an asteroid or comet only has to be big enough to launch large amounts of dust into the atmosphere. That leads to the abrupt change in climate that wipes out species.”

If an intact asteroid enters the atmosphere as one giant mass, hits the ground, and releases a giant cloud of dust, it’s bad.…

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In the novel ASTEROIDS – Bridge to Nowhere, Colonel Cruikshank visits “The Spa” for special treatments. The colonels treatment involves a procedure known as parabiosis in which the blood of young boys is exchanged for his old blood. In the book, the process provides amazing results for old Colonel Cruikshank. He looks and feels years younger. His hair becomes fuller and his skin becomes supple. The process leaves his young subjects feeling drained and weak.

You’ll have to read the book to learn how the boy’s from the gymnasium get their revenge.

While the novel is fiction, the idea that young blood can rejuvenate ageing people is real.

In the early 2000s a group of scientists at Stanford University, California, revived a grisly procedure used in the 1950s known as parabiosis. They paired living mice, young with old, peeled back their skin and stitched together their sides so the two animals shared the same blood circulatory system. A month later, they found signs of rejuvenation in the muscles and livers of the old mice. The findings, published in 2005, turned the minds of scientists, entrepreneurs and the public to the potential of young blood to rejuvenate ageing people. By 2016, enough interest had grown to prompt a US-based startup called Ambrosia to start offering pricey infusions of young plasma – the cell-free component of blood. 

Meanwhile, a clutch of scientific startups are trying to discover the secrets of parabiosis and use them to tackle age-related disease. By identifying factors in plasma that change with age, they aim to create therapies that either supplement what’s beneficial in young blood or to inhibit what’s detrimental in old. One is even beginning to report early clinical trial results.

“There’s still a long way to go – blood is complicated,” says Aubrey de Grey, who leads the nonprofit Sens (strategies for engineered negligible senescence) Research Foundation. “But there are many excellent labs focused on this, so I am optimistic about progress.”

Source: The Guardian

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