Unless you've been sleeping, you should have caught the news that we (Americans) have sent a satellite into space with the aim of hitting a small asteroid. It did hit. They call it "proof of concept". So what?
We've known since we landed on the moon that we can send things to other bodies in space, bodies in predictable motion. The moon, Mars, both have been graced with our space junk. Of course we call it something much more noble than that, but the fact is these things have a limited ability or move and send back information, eventually just sitting where they died, littering the surface of another body in space. Hence, space junk. We have no care for what we may have sent along with them. Microbes? Radiation? Dismissed as irrelevant. Inconsequential. We are the important ones, so who cares? Those bodies are huge, so our little pieces of detritus have no consequence. They don't support life as we know it, so no life was harmed. But how can we know that?
Even if they are right, this was different. We sent something crashing into a tiny (relatively) body in a known orbit, as step one of the goal of disrupting an asteroid's orbit and destroying it's theoretical potential for it to someday crash into us. Seems noble, right? We know something similar crashed into the Yucatan about 63 million years ago, changing life on this planet spectacularly, and not to the benefit of what was then a stable ecosystem planet wide. In other words, it killed off what we know as dinosaurs. Major extinction event. Everything died, right?
Wrong.
First, it changed the megafauna on the planet. This is not the moon, airless and lifeless. We still have life here. Obviously, right? We have finally figured out the dinosaurs have descendants alive out there. They fly by your windows nearly every day and are called birds. We also know that small mammals survived, and evolution has had 63 million years to produce us. Now we are the top of the food chain, if you will, and want to keep it that way, though we're doing a piss-poor job of that, being well on our way to internally producing the next major extinction event, no asteroids needed this time, thank you very much.
But we humans love to fight the last war instead of the current war, so go looking for another possible asteroid threatening to crash into this planet and unsettle everything again, meaning us this time. Of course this is a very possible threat. We hope we have the technology to avert this particular disaster. It's such a popular threat that we make blockbuster movies showing ourselves doing it successfully. So we start with baby steps, sending a small launch to a known small asteroid just to prove we can impact it. Easy peasy.
I'm just waiting to hear what else happened in that impact. It would have been a small effect. But in our rush to prove ourselves, did we look at exactly what that would have been? Or did we assume it was zero? Because, you know, it's very easy to assume when one means no harm, one causes no harm. But what about that tiny push? Was an orbit changed minutely? After all, our eventual goal is to change an asteroid's orbit much more than minutely in order to deflect contact with us. We know how much damage can be done. Earth is too huge for its orbit to be changed by something so little. But we didn't aim at something huge, we aimed at something miniscule in space terms. Perhaps we learn its orbit was changed by an amount we can only measure 20 years from now? Or 300 years from now, should we still have a civilization able to measure such things? What if we disrupted it by enough that in tens of thousands of years it changes enough to get distorted by another body, and eventually another body, and so on until we made just what we most fear, something crashing into us?
We won't be here to worry about that of course. That doesn't mean it can't have happened. Maybe not this time. But it's our goal, changing an orbit, right? All I hear is, "Wow! Look at what we can do!" I want to hear that somebody did the math and did it right. We don't need any more unintended consequences from our hubris in thinking because we can we should... (insert any action here.)
Of course the odds of creating a catastrophe from this launch are extremely tiny. But we won't be stopping here, will we? How about the next ones, where we progress to bigger and badder, throwing in nukes for example to blast something apart as the next proof of concept? Do we really believe we have somebody doing the math correctly? Are there enough known factors to be able to do so in something like such a deliberately destructive explosion? Or are we just thinking that because Hollywood reassured us with its special effects "success", we can and should be doing this at all?
Just one more comment, possible refuting every point I just made. You should have heard of the "butterfly effect" by now. I've always had a problem with it. It states as part of chaos theory that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one place can set up a chain of events leading to a hurricane in another place. Summarize it as tiny things have big consequences. My problem is that in every step of the way, there has to be an increased energy input. I can't accept that. I think of a pool table, the opening shot sending balls in all directions. Each impact tends to damp energy rather than increase it. All the balls quickly stop. If I have my physics right, it's call entropy. A butterfly effect as commonly explained would make each ball go faster, bounce in more directions, and pretty soon everybody in that room would be injured and/or dead from the impacts! We know that doesn't happen or nobody would be playing the game.
I still just want to know we are proceeding thoughtfully.
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