Pray That If An Asteroid Is On The Way, Republicans Aren’t Still In Charge

The Future Doesn’t Vote… So Republicans Don’t Care

As if we need more proof that Trump is the worst president in history, one of the clearest markers of responsible national leadership is the willingness to invest in the long-term health and safety of the country, even when the benefits won't materialize until years after a leader has left office. Señor TACO— true to form— is doing the opposite. By slashing the planetary defense fund and shortchanging FEMA— two examples— he’s betting that tomorrow’s disasters simply won’t happen, or worse, that someone else can deal with the fallout. It’s the same shortsighted, self-serving GOP philosophy that gutted pandemic preparedness before COVID, denied climate science while wildfires and floods rage, and underfunded infrastructure until bridges literally collapsed. Republicans are failing to plan for the future— in exchange for tax breaks for their donors— and are actively sabotaging it. Their brand of governance is rooted in denial, greed and political expediency, leaving the next generation to pay for today’s cowardice and neglect.

Over the weekend, the Financial Times asked an existential kind of question: What Happens Once We Spot The Asteroid That Will Hit Earth? Tomas Weber reported that when astronomers estimate a one percent chance of a collision, asteroid-watchers go on high alert. Recently they found one with a 3% chance! They didn’t “know whether the collision would happen— but [they] knew where and [they] knew when. If there was an impact, it would occur on December 22 2032, along a broad corridor roughly following the equator, from the eastern Pacific Ocean, across the top of South America and the Atlantic, through Nigeria, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and into India and Bangladesh. The asteroid would release around 500 times the amount of energy of the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima. It would do so either by exploding in the atmosphere, or splashing into the ocean, where it might cause a tsunami, or making landfall somewhere along the impact corridor.”

After further calculations it turned out that that particular asteroid isn’t going to hit earth, although there’s a 4% chance it will hit the moon,” possibly releasing up to 110,000 tons of moon rocks, some of which could hit the Earth.

This morning, hundreds of NASA employees sent the TACO regime a letter: “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement and efficient use of public resources.”

“What would have happened,” asked Weber, “if the risk had kept on climbing and the news of an Earthbound asteroid had to be absorbed by an increasingly febrile world? Defending the Earth from incoming asteroids and comets is where celestial mechanics collides with geopolitics, where the clean and calculable sphere of outer space runs up against the human tumult.” He asked NASA “what would happen from the point at which astronomers discover an asteroid on a guaranteed collision course. Who would make the decision to launch a deflection mission? And on what authority? And what would happen if the mission failed?

Larry Denneau, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii who helps NASA map near-Earth objects, told him that “members of NASA’s planetary defense team would soon be gathering near Cape Town where they would be hashing out answers to these issues and many others with the world’s planetary defense community.” 

Earth, in its journey around the sun, passes through swarms of rock. Through the millennia, collisions with those rocks, whether asteroids (the vestiges of the solar system’s violent formation) or comets (frozen balls of ice, dust and rock that have slipped into the inner solar system from its frigid outer edges) have shaped the way life on our planet evolved. An asteroid probably delivered the chemical building blocks of life to Earth; one day, another impact will probably do away with much of it. On a clear night you can see evidence of the peril— the moon’s asteroid-impact craters— with the naked eye. 

… Only asteroids and comets defined as “near-Earth objects”— those whose distance to the sun is less than 1.3 times that of the Earth’s— are of concern to planetary defenders. Of these, roughly 1,000 are larger than 1km in diameter and capable of destroying civilization. The very largest would cause mass extinctions— the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was between 10 and 16km (6.2 and 9.9 miles) wide.

Astronomers have found roughly 95 per cent of the near-Earth objects larger than 1km, and none of them poses any threat to Earth. We know much less about the smaller ones. An asteroid as slender as 50m (164 feet) across can wreck a city. Of the nearly quarter of a million that are around that size in Earth’s neighbourhood, 93 per cent remain undiscovered. “We’ve barely scratched the surface,” Mark Boslough, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico, told me. It is likely we will discover some of these so-called “city-killers” only when it’s too late. In 2013, a previously unknown 20m asteroid exploded in a half-megaton airburst— 30 Hiroshima bombs— above the town of Chelyabinsk in Russia. The explosion, which injured more than 1,000 people, was the result of what Boslough calls a “death-plunge asteroid,” an object that appears out of the daytime sky and is spotted for the first time as it’s already shooting through the atmosphere.

Governments have only just started taking the threat seriously. In 1994, Lindley Johnson, an astronomy graduate then working with the US Air Force, wrote a white paper called “Preparing for Planetary Defense.” Johnson, who coined the term planetary defense, argued that the military needed to consider defending humanity from flying space rocks— an idea his colleagues thought peculiar. “It raised a few eyebrows,” Johnson said. But the colleagues quickly came around. In July 1994, fragments of a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter, and NASA, for the first time ever, caught the spectacle on video. Later that summer, Congress tasked NASA with mapping all near-Earth objects larger than 1km, sobered by the sight of the comet’s cataclysmic Earth-sized impacts. The brief was then expanded to include 90 per cent of all objects 140m or larger— a task that is still less than halfway complete.

It was only between 2008 and 2020, though, that near-Earth object research really took off. In 2016, NASA created a Planetary Defense Coordination Office, and installed Johnson as its inaugural planetary defense officer. Its European counterpart, ESA, created its own planetary defense office at its centre near Rome, in 2019. Thanks to a system of telescopes located in Hawaii, Arizona, Puerto Rico, California, Chile and South Africa, along with an army of asteroid-hunting amateurs, we now have a catalogue of nearly 40,000 near-Earth objects, with approximately 40 more discovered every week. It is an effort that will be accelerated later this year when the world’s largest digital camera, a telescope located at the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, begins nightly sky surveys. In February, it was reported that China had begun recruiting for its own planetary defense force.

In 2028, NASA plans to launch an infrared asteroid-detecting telescope called NEO Surveyor. The following year, which the UN has designated “International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary Defense,” an asteroid called Apophis will pass within 32,000km (about 20,000 miles) of Earth, closer than some satellites. A NASA spacecraft is on its way to study Apophis in detail. The boldest mission to date was a game of cosmic billiards called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test  (Dart). In 2022, 11,000,000km (6.8 million miles) away from Earth, NASA crashed a remotely operated spacecraft, travelling at 22,500km (14,000 mikes) per hour into a 160m-long (525 feet) asteroid called Dimophos. An ESA spacecraft is currently on its way towards Dimorphos to assess the damage— but we already know that Dart shifted its orbit. It was the first time anybody had altered the trajectory of a near-Earth object, and it gave the world hope that the world might be spared an apocalypse from the sky. But Dart was just a test, not a road map for how things would play out in real life.

…  The US, as the only nation with the demonstrated capacity to nudge near-Earth objects off a collision course, is the de facto world leader in planetary defense. It has a planetary defense action plan and employs a full-time planetary defence officer. But it is not clear whether the country would be a reliable protector of the Earth. 

In January, as 2024 YR4’s risk of impact was rising, the US withdrew a second time from the Paris Agreement on climate change. It then cut ties, again, with the World Health Organization. The following month, DOGE dismantled USAID— a move that one study estimates has already led to the deaths of nearly 300,000 people. Then, in May, the White House released a spending blueprint proposing to gut NASA’s science work, of which planetary defense is part, by nearly 50 per cent, a decision the administration said was necessary to focus “on beating China back to the moon.” The White House suggested shrinking funding for near-Earth object detection in particular by $3 million, a cut of nearly 8 per cent. A NASA spokesperson told me the agency “remains dedicated to our mission of safeguarding our planet.” But if an asteroid were bearing down on Bangladesh, it seemed fair to ask, would the US intervene— and would it demand anything in return? Would it for Iran? 

… I’d attended the biannual Planetary Defence Conference in Stellenbosch in the Cape Winelands. Hundreds of military people, policymakers, asteroid astronomers, planetary scientists and disaster-management officials also attended the five-day event. Many of the papers were impenetrably recondite, on subjects such as “Hypervelocity Cratering and Disruption of Three L-Type Ordinary Chondrites.” Others (“Nuclear Deflection of Kilometre-Scale Asteroids”) were downright frightening. Nothing, though, was as disquieting as the “Hypothetical Asteroid Impact Exercise,” the war game that took place on the conference’s first afternoon.  

NASA had circulated the game’s realistic scenario to the community several months earlier, and they had all been studying it closely. Now, more than a dozen participants— including Johnson, a couple of UN people, SMPAG [Space Mission Planning Advisory Group] astronomers and a few disaster responders— crowded on to the stage to play it out. Projected on the wall was a slide, marked EXERCISE EXERCISE EXERCISE” in red letters, laying out the premise. The date was April 28 2028. The International Asteroid Warning Network, to which NASA is a signatory, had informed the UN and SMPAG that in 13 years, on April 24 2041, an asteroid called 2024 PCD25 was guaranteed to collide with the Earth at nearly 14km per second. The asteroid was around 150 metres in length, with between 45 and 160 megatons of impact energy, which it would probably unleash by exploding in the atmosphere above a region 870km long by 270km wide, stretching from northern Angola up through the Democratic Republic of Congo— one of the poorest areas of the world. Closest to the airburst, many people would probably die. Buildings would be incinerated. Clothes would burn on people’s bodies. Fires and structural damage would extend 100 to 120km further out, with the total number of injured or killed ranging from the tens of thousands to more than a million. 

What to do? It would be a struggle to convince people to evacuate, explained David Ngindu Buabua, the director-general of the DR Congo’s National Centre of Remote Sensing, who was participating in the exercise. That area was already beset by conflict and contained many displaced people. “It’s a very complicated situation,” he said. The government had limited reach into the region, and people had little trust. “People might think we are asking them to evacuate to take their land.” It would be better to push the asteroid off an Earthbound collision track. But of course, said Ngindu Buabua, DR Congo and Angola lack the necessary equipment to do so. 

Koschny, the SMPAG astronomer, reported on the mission options. To divert the asteroid, five spacecraft would have to be crashed into its surface. Or we could launch several craft to shoot streams of charged particles at the object to push it away. And then there was the nuclear option: a single bomb would suffice. Because of the orbital dynamics of the asteroid and the solar system’s geometry, Koschny said, it was possible to move the asteroid only in one of two directions: north or south relative to the Earth. There was also a risk that deflection would be only partially successful, shifting the asteroid’s impact zone further north or south. 

Most participants felt that sending the asteroid south would be the better option. Deflecting it north would open up a much more populated risk corridor stretching through the centre of Africa, over Istanbul and western Ukraine and up to northern Scandinavia. And although Cape Town lay in the southerly path (“talk about a conflict of interest here,” said Johan Minnie, a manager at Cape Town’s Disaster Risk Management Centre) the southern corridor was much less populated overall. But then a member of the audience asked about possible risks to Antarctica. Lóránt Czárán, an officer from the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, took the microphone to respond. The equivalent of more than 10,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding over the ice sheet and raising global sea levels was “a bigger problem than anything else I can see,” said Czárán. There was a flicker of shock at the intervention. It was a risk that had been little considered. “Neither way is a sure thing,” Johnson said. “It’s a diabolic situation.”

The purpose of the exercise was to discuss the dilemma. The difficult choices, said Koschny, would have to be made by politicians. But which ones? In a situation where many countries would face varying levels of risk depending on the chosen course of action, it wasn’t clear who would pick among the alternatives. “Who would make the decision?” said Czárán, towards the end of the exercise. “It’s actually quite a fundamental question.” Perhaps, he said, it would fall to the UN Security Council. But defending the Earth from space lies outside its mandate. (Another UN official told me later that the most realistic scenario was individual spacefaring states deciding for themselves whether to launch missions.)

… Rudolph Albrecht [of the Austrian Space Forum forsees] “total chaos,” he said. “A disaster.” The notion that an asteroid might unite humanity was, he thought, wishful thinking. In fact, the main ordeal would simply be getting people to accept the asteroid was real. “Don’t Look Up is more realistic than most people believe,” he told me, referring to the 2021 film in which a pair of astronomers played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence struggle to convince the world to take an Earth-bound comet seriously. Loud voices would deny that the collision would ever happen… The world, he predicted, would quickly split into two camps: those who believe versus those who refuse to believe. “People,” he said, “are living in a dream world.” 

If the killer-asteroid comes in the next 3 years, we know exactly how this plays out. Trump will call it fake news, Fox will say it's woke to worry about it and Marjorie Traitor Greene will accuse it of being funded by George Soros. Meanwhile, the scientists will be defunded, the response dismantled and when the sky lights up, they'll say Biden should’ve done something. This is extinction-level stupidity, not just typically bad Republican governance, which is driven by a belief that if something won’t help their poll numbers or enrich their donors in the next quarter, it doesn’t exist. The asteroid could be visible with the naked eye, screaming toward Earth at 9 miles a second, and they'd still call it a hoax.