Technology

We can't even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.

No shit.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In an exercise involving multiple US government agencies during April 2024, NASA conducted a so-called "tabletop" game in which participants plot their response to a 72 percent chance that an asteroid may hit Earth in 14 years.

Underpinning a bewildering number of moving parts is the likelihood that space agencies are not ready to implement the operations needed to find out more about the threat and mitigate it, even with more than a decade to prepare.

The game also found that the "role of the UN-endorsed Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG) in an asteroid impact threat scenario is not fully understood by all participants."

"Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events," the report says.

It recommends "periodic briefings and exercises to continue to raise awareness of planetary defense and increase readiness for preparation and response to an asteroid impact threat."

Speaking to US public radio service NPR, Terik Daly, planetary defense section supervisor at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said experts didn't know of any asteroids of a substantial size that are going to hit Earth for the next hundred years.

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Congress is making laws about bathrooms and genitals like a bunch of 3rd graders running a minecraft server. Of course we can't handle fucking asteroid defense.

Call me an optimist, but I think that if an android was actually going to destroy life as we know it, nations would do everything in their power to advert the disaster.

I’m not sure I learned anything new other than I want to play the tabletop game they created.

We'd rather bomb each other than save the planet.

Also there's this survey that shows we actually would prefer stopping climate change instead of war.
https://kbin.run/m/climate@slrpnk.net/t/505138/Most-people-in-petrostates-want-quick-switch-to-clean-energy

I'm roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.

It's a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.

Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren't up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

As a species, we aren't going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution.

We aren't even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that's been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.

Master space? Master planetary defense? We'll be lucky if we aren't scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We're already starting to argue over the resources it's taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal.

Don't Look Up!

Real talk, an asteroid wiping us out would only expedite the inevitable. If we could pull together and deflect an asteroid, there's hope. If not, we failed the test and die with the consequences. But we don't need the asteroid to fail this test. We're making great strides towards destroying our home with home field advantage.

Half the population would believe the asteroid is a hoax spread by the [insert ethnic or religious group here].

We are not at a point where the "global community" is more than a few competing, egoistic and greedy tribes with clashing world views, so that's no surprise.