Catastrophic effects, such as those as asteroid-killer that hit dinosaurs 66 million years ago, are not limited to the past. Earth will face another big asteroid. Sooner or later. As said Bill Nye  at the International Conference on Planetary Defense of the Astronautics Academy 2019.

The problem is that we don’t know when. The probability of this event is very low, but it has very serious consequences. If this happens, it will be like a reboot (Control-Alt-Delete) for all living things.

-Bill Nye

However, unlike dinosaurs, we don’t just need to sit and wait for our doom to fall. We can do something with the asteroid threat – and we need to start preparing for it now.

The first step is to find dangerous space stones. There is good news on this front: NASA scientists believe that they have already discovered more than 90% of potential – near-Earth asteroids at least 1 km wide – and not one of these space stones the size of a mountain poses a threat in the foreseeable future.

But there are many undiscovered asteroids moving in near-Earth space that can cause serious damage on a local scale — for example, the destruction of a state-sized area. So it would be good for us to get some online detection tools..

For example, the Large Panoramic Telescope, which is supposed to start observing the sky next year from Chile, is likely to be able to detect and catalog from 80% to 90% of potentially dangerous asteroids at least 140 meters wide.

NASA is considering launching a specialized asteroid hunter called Near-Earth Objects Camera. This intended mission will scan the space objects in the infrared spectrum, detecting their thermal signs in the dark.

Coordination is the next step after discovery. A large asteroid flying toward Earth will be a global problem, so the international community will have to work together to cope with it.

And we will have several options. If we had enough time – years or decades – we could launch a probe to fly near the asteroid, gradually pushing the stone off course with the help of a gravitational effect.

If we didn’t have enough time, we could crash one or more spacecraft into an asteroid, knocking him off course to a harmless trajectory with the help of brute force. Or we could blow up a nuclear weapon near a stone, evaporating most of its surface. As a result, the loss of mass and material flow from the asteroid will change its path, experts say. The shock wave from the explosion itself can help us.

Nye also mentioned the Laser Bees strategy, which involves sending a swarm of small spacecraft to a potentially dangerous asteroid. Each small probe would focus the laser beam in the same place on the rock, evaporating the material and causing the jet to erupt. This jet will serve as a kind of engine that will push the asteroid in the opposite direction.

In his part of the presentation, Green talked about many things that we can extract from asteroids – after all, these are time capsules of the Solar System, and carbon-rich stones may have helped start life on Earth. According to him, the use of asteroid resources can make future spacecraft and future astronauts more self-sufficient, and also improve life here on Earth.

But Green agreed with Nye that the threat of asteroids is real: there will be disastrous consequences in our future if we don’t do anything with them.

This is not a question, but only a matter of time.

-Green

Asteroid-killer approaching – we don't know when, so let's be ready
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