I am the first, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!
I blame SUV’s and Republican policies!
/s
Where’s the KA-BOOM?
Too bad the site at the link did not choose to share at least one image with the rest of us.
We don’t have enough stress.
Are they showing pictures in the kindergarten yet?
Perhaps the best defense against asteroids are other asteroids. Not with collisions, as most people would assume, but tethers.
Imagine you had a basketball. But tied to it is a softball. You throw the basketball in a straight line, but when the line connecting the two becomes taut, the softball is dragged along for the ride. But almost invariably, the softball does not go in the same direction as the basketball. The end result is that the flight of the basketball deviates from its straight line, pulled off course by the softball.
Now, were this a contest of masses, the softball would lose. But it isn’t. The softball continues to deviate the flight of the basketball, and in the scale of the distance traveled by an asteroid, this deviation can add up in a hurry.
The best bet to pull this off would be to ram the asteroid with a tunneling missile, connected to a tether which has already been connected to the smaller asteroid.