The public is unanimously in favor of funding asteroid protection mechanisms and research. It's even higher support than the military.
Naturally what do we do with that money and goodwill instead? Yes! Let's build a massive space telescope which takes pictures that are only marginally better than the other multi-billion dollar space telescope!
Protect the Earth? Fuck that, don't ya know kid? She's toast anyway because the Sun will explode soon! Also get in loser, we're going to Mars!
It seems any serious asteroid prevention program is going to require the learnings of "pointless" (as you might put it) scientific expeditions like putting an object into L2.
There have been many studies about what could be done to deal with asteroids that are on track to impact earth and the simple answer is 'nothing'. Frustrating, but unless you can think of something that none of the very clever people on those committees could think of it's going to stay that way.
There have been many studies about what could be done to deal with asteroids that are on track to impact earth and the simple answer is 'nothing'.
The National Academies report that you link to down-thread did not state that nothing can be done. They discuss multiple options, and they discuss which options would be most effective given different amounts of warning lead time. Figure 5.5 (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/12842/chapter/7#85) is a great high-level view of the option space.
A real message to take away from the "Mitigation" section of that report is that it's important to identify dangerous objects as early as possible.
No, the lead author is on the record as saying exactly that. The report is a fantastic read and chapter 5 (the mitigation section) leaves little doubt about the futility of any attempts to mitigate such a threat. Your chances of making things worse are just as large as making things better and given the masses involved your 'window of opportunity' is very likely going to be preclude doing something about an impact that you are 100% sure is going to happen. Of course if you want to feel good about this that's fine with me but this is just blunt physics, an impactor that weighs 8.4 billion metric tons (500 meter asteroid) isn't going to respond to much of anything that we do to it in the time between detection and the time that it will intersect Earth's orbit. And smaller ones are likely to go undetected right up to the moment that they hit.
The Siberian one was a very nice illustration of how completely blindsided we were and now that Arecibo is gone we have lost one very powerful tool in our arsenal that could have helped with this.
But don't let it ruin your day, the chances of this happening are very low, one in a million or larger.
(Doesn't make a huge difference but gives experimental validation of their previous theories.)
Some choice quotes from the report:
" As addressed in
Chapter 5, the time required to mitigate optimally (other than only via civil defense) is in the range of
years to decades, but this long period may require acting before we know with certainty that an NEO will
impact"
"The amount of destruction from an event scales with the energy being brought by the impacting
object. Because the range of possible destruction is so huge, no single approach is adequate for dealing
with all events. For events of sufficiently low energy, the methods of civil defense in the broadest sense
are the most cost effective approach for saving human lives and minimizing property damage.[+] For larger
events, changing the path of the hazardous object is the appropriate solution, although the method for
changing the path varies depending on the amount of advance notice available and the mass of the
hazardous object. For the largest events, from beyond global catastrophe to events that cause mass
extinctions, there is no current technology capable of sufficiently changing the orbital path to avoid
disaster."
[+] So, in the case of say the Siberian meteor if we had seen it coming (which we did not) you could have called on all the people in a 100 km (1/20th of a second of travel!) radius or so to go to the nearest shelter. This likely would have caused more injuries and casualties than the event itself did, but if the impact had been a bit more steep and closer to a city (or even in a city) then it may well have saved (some) lives. Note that that was only 18m across, was going close to 70 K km/hour, weighed 9000 tons and that it exploded nearly 30 Km up in the air.
"Finding: No single approach to mitigation is appropriate and adequate to fully prevent the effects
of the full range of potential impactors, although civil defense is an appropriate component of
mitigation in all cases. With adequate warning, a suite of four types of mitigation is adequate to
mitigate the threat from nearly all NEOs except the most energetic ones."
Note the careful qualifications, 'adequate warning' does a lot of heavy lifting there.
Pages 70 and onwards are pretty realistic and I think that the table really tells it all, none of the methods outlined are going to be practical given realistic times of warning and the kind of effect that you would have to create to make a meaningful difference in the outcome. Unless you happened to be able to pinpoint the trajectory with extreme precision and you had plenty of time and the impactor would be small enough. But that's playing the lottery. 'Civil defense' is code for 'shelter and evacuation', but assuming we're talking about an impact the size of the one that we are talking about here (400 meters, a couple of hours notice) utterly futile, especially if you don't know exactly where it is going to come down, you might end up moving people in the wrong direction, besides the mass panic. I don't want to be overly pessimistic but I'm with Jewitt in the sense that I do not believe we are geared up to deal with a challenge at that level.
Here it is in his own words in case you don't believe me:
I don't buy that. It shouldn't be that hard to launch a cloud of space drones that produce a lot of dusty debris when they hit. Have them adjust their courses when the incoming asteroid gets close.
That way, we could paint a huge smiley face on the asteroid.
I would much rather be exterminated by an asteroid with a smiley face than a big dumb pile of rocks. (Even if the smiley face keeps spinning out of view while it's coming in.)
The masses you're talking about are such that you'd need to detect the asteroid well before impact (ideally: years) and that your efforts would not accidentally make matters worse rather than better. Even then it likely won't do anything at all. Calling Bruce Willis on line 3... But agreed on the smiley.
I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing. The smiley drones would work fine hitting pretty close to Earth, even an hour or two out. And the mass shouldn't matter much, just the surface albedo.
Oh. You're probably talking about deflection. Yeah, deflection requires massive lead time, way more ballistic forecasting ability than I suspect we're capable of (isn't a clump of rocks going to heat up and throw things off as it comes in closer to the sun?), massively efficient engines to match velocity, and a whole lot of wishful thinking.
The smiley face might still be useful in that implausible scenario, I guess, if it changes the reflectivity enough to let the sun slowly nudge it out of the way? It at least avoids the velocity matching problem; you're intentionally crash "landing" anyway. And spinning is probably ok, as long as Galileo was right and the sun isn't orbiting around the asteroid. It's not likely to head straight at the sun.
But as you say, intervention seems just as likely to make things worse as better.
The obvious answer to that is being able to reliably detect asteroids on a collision course, and compute where is it gonna fall in order to proceed the emergency evacuation.
But first you have to be able to detect it, second you have to do it with reasonable time to save as many people as possible
Again, these people aren't stupid. You will have a very large amount of uncertainty based on a series of observations which essentially project a circle of probability on the planet that shrinks as more information from newer observations comes in and then just before impact that probability will either drop to zero because it is deemed to be a near miss (sorry, George) or it will then become a certainty. By that time it will be too late to evacuate. I can dig up the report from one of these committees if you want (I should be able to find it), they make for very interesting reading, it is a really nice example of science at work, even if the result is a negative. Anything more advanced makes for great special effects in movies and science fiction but isn't going to work. You'd have a very short time to move the entire population of a circle with a radius of a few hundred kilometers to outside of that circle starting from the center. The longer you waited the fewer people you'd have to move but the bigger the chance you'd be too late.
Naturally what do we do with that money and goodwill instead? Yes! Let's build a massive space telescope which takes pictures that are only marginally better than the other multi-billion dollar space telescope!
Protect the Earth? Fuck that, don't ya know kid? She's toast anyway because the Sun will explode soon! Also get in loser, we're going to Mars!