A scientist with NASA warns that, should the earth suddenly be struck by an asteroid, we'd basically all be completely and totally screwed. Not exactly the great news we desperately need during globally dire times, but there it is.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysicists Union, a NASA researcher with the Goddard Space Flight Center, Dr Joseph Nuth, claimed that we're all but doomed should an asteroid strike us now. "The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment," Nuth said at the meeting, according to the Guardian. Nuth also said that while it's not exceptionally likely a catastrophic asteroid will come barreling at us any moment, it's something he thinks we should prep for.
"But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point," Nuth told his fellow geophysicists, according to the Guardian.
The possible solutions to prevent a catastrophic asteroid from wiping us all out sound straight out of sci-fi. Nuth suggested that having an asteroid-busting rocket on hand "could mitigate the possibility of a sneaky asteroid coming in from a place that’s hard to observe, like from the sun." The rocket would need to be ready to go with a year's notice in order to be effective. A program for this type of initiative would also need to be approved by congress.
