[FPSPACE] Some NEO NEWS for David Morrison

[Jens Kieffer-Olsen]

-----Original Message-----
From: E.P. Grondine [mailto:epgrondine at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2008 8:06 PM

> Not everyone shares Morrison's injection mechanism, nor
> his low estimates for cometary impact, and he knows this,
> so his claims for consensus are deliberately misleading.
> That no one here aside from myself mentions this is pitiful.
> If residents of other solar systems have the same problems
> understanding accretion, I'm not surprised intelligent life
> has not been detected elsewhere.

 For one thing cometary impacts don't occur as random events
 in accordance with a Poisson process - as do impacts from
 asteroids approximately.

 Rather, originating from swarms cometary fragments strike like
 MIRVs. 
 
 At present the only defence against cometary impacts is large-
 scale evacuation. Whether you give your government 9 months or
 9 weeks to organize suchthing, they are likely to botch it up
 utterly and totally, won't you agree?
 
 On the other hand it's a crime against humanity to not spend
 the few million bucks it takes to map the orbits of all PHAs
 greater than 50m - a warning 20-200 years ahead of impact is
 something we can adjust to on an individual scale. 

 And it's a great error of judgment too not to launch transponder
 missions ASAP to already detected PHAs with concrete, non-
 negligible impact probabilities, that is to Apophis and 1950 DA
 at this point in time.

--
Jens Kieffer-Olsen
Slagelse, Denmark