Post
by geekster » Tue Aug 18, 2009 12:30 am
The "problem" is that they are looking only in the ecliptic. If you look at the craters on the moon, for example, you see craters at the poles where something slammed into it from pretty much perpendicular to the ecliptic.
There are "things" that have likely been flung out of the inner solar system on all sorts of trajectories and are in very long period orbits. Not to mention stuff that might come sailing in from any angle that has been ejected from other star systems or stuff getting joggled (look! I made a word!) around in the Oort cloud and falling in for the first time.
Until there is something we can DO about it, there really isn't any sense in even looking for them. So ... imagine we discover something that is going to hit us in, say, 5 years. What are we going to do about it? Pretty much nothing.
So say we decide we are going to get hit, what is going to be the greatest impact on us as a civilization? Food. The world pretty much lives hand to mouth. We don't have enough food in storage to survive a global crop failure for one, let alone two years. A killing frost in the American Midwest and Eastern European steppes in June would pretty much end civilization as we know it. We don't even need an impact to do that. We are one major volcanic eruption away from global catastrophe.
The failure of the Midwestern US grain crop would spell calamity for many in this world. The first to go would be the vegans. That lifestyle is the must unsustainable and requires the most resources and nearly perfect climate along with a working global transport system to deliver out of season veggies all year round. Any cooling reduces crop yields. When crop yields reduce, countries hoard what they have and don't export. That means a really harsh winter with no veggies from South America.
People having goats will survive by eating them. The first year. It's the second year when things get really dicey.
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