Despite living in the Artificial Intelligence era, you may still be afraid of large asteroids that can leave a lot of destruction and sorrow behind. And you are totally right! Although humanity has made tremendous technological progress in the last decades, inventing smartphones, smartwatches, intelligent robots, and more, it will have a lot more to work on encounters with big asteroids visiting us from the depths of the Solar System.
Whether we like it or not, it’s NASA itself revealing it! We’re talking about the same agency that put humans on the Moon half a century ago. Business Insider wrote an article about a new simulation of the space agency will surely break the hearts of many.
NASA’s simulation of an asteroid impact scenario gathered many space agencies
Space agencies from the US and Europe took part in NASA’s simulation of a hypothetical asteroid colliding with Earth. The scientists had to learn about the trajectory of the fictitious asteroid heading to our planet and find ways to stop it. Their work was in vain, as the imaginary asteroid devastated Europe within the simulation’s alternate scenario. The fictitious space rock could hit the Earth within six months.
Not only that the scientists failed to come up with a good idea to stop the imaginary asteroid, but they even concluded that none of our planet’s existing technologies could stop such an asteroid from doing its thing. In other words, Earth would be pretty much done for, and we’re certainly not ready for a huge asteroid like the one that killed the dinosaurs.
Lindley Johnson, who is NASA’s planetary defence officer, declared in a press release:
These exercises ultimately help the planetary-defense community communicate with each other and with our governments to ensure we are all coordinated should a potential impact threat be identified in the future
We all know how things usually go in life: you can’t have them all, and unfortunately, they also include sci-fi scenarios like the one from the 1998 movie ‘Armageddon’, where a bunch of astronauts managed to blow up an asteroid that was threatening the entire human race.
