Nah, there’s nothing anybody could do. We don’t have the technology to handle anything that could come from space.
That’s obviously ridiculous — the object that detonated over Russia was only 50 feet across, and could easily be blasted to bits using conventional explosives. The problem is in detection, which has grown a lot since 1994’s SL-9 impact on Jupiter, but clearly it still lags when something this size comes in with no warning.
I don’t know. It would not take very much to nudge one off course. Besides the problem in being able to nudge (not trivial) you have to be sure you aren’t making matters worse :-)
I just think it is pathetic that we piss away so much in money and resources yet devote so little in defense against something that could wipe out the entire planet. This is an example of an global issue that governments and NASA should be focused on rather than monitoring the size of Big Gulps and other crap.