[FPSPACE] The Discovery Enterprise: Is Another Siberian ApocalypseClose at Hand?

[Jens Kieffer-Olsen]

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Michael Bonnici [mailto:albonnici at vol.net.mt] 
Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 2:25 AM

> As my good friend Ralph Buttigieg has recently written
> the Earth had another close encounter with a Tunguska
> sized body a week ago today. It is becoming more and
> more apparent that the issue of Near Earth Objects must
> be seriously addressed before some city or other densely
> populated area falls victim to a Celestial 9/11 event.
> It is my personal belief that another Siberian Apocalypse
> very much that like that which befell the Tunguska region
> of Siberia a little more than a century ago is very close
> at hand.

 Don Yeomans suggests 300 years between Tunguska-like events:
 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=1769

 Less than 1 in 100 such events is it cost-justified to
 prevent ( regardless of whether Bruce Willis is willing to
 forfeit his fee ), the rest may be ignored ( Southern Ocean,
 Arctic, Antarctic, etc. ), or responded to by simply
 evacuating people in the firing line.

 That leaves us with one high-risk Tunguska event per 30,000
 years to address.

 Larger bolides will cause regional damage and be harder to
 deal with by evasive measures. That's consistent with the
 emphasis placed by the US Congress on detecting NEO objects
 larger than 140 m. ( Which translates into objects 10 times
 as massive as the Tunguska impactor ).

--
Jens Kieffer-Olsen
Slagfelse, Denmark