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Rhaedas t1_j6jzbo5 wrote

Reply to comment by Sylph_uscm in ‘Extraordinary’ footage shows one of the closest known approaches of a near-Earth object — On 26 Jan. 2023, asteroid 2023 BU was about 2,200 miles above the surface of the Earth by marketrent

Knowing what's out there is the first step. Perhaps if we knew there were a lot more and the odds were good one would hit soon, there'd be more push to fund doing whatever we could to intercept. Plus getting better ways to detect and project paths leads to a longer time knowing a better final target, so even if we couldn't do anything, having days instead of hours to move people from a city would be worth it.

It's how hurricane and other storms used to be vs. what we know now. We can't do much of anything about the smaller threats of tornadoes, but we still try to improve accuracy of time and location.

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Sylph_uscm t1_j6llc2b wrote

Funding the search effort is no different than funding technology to stop them, if that's the motivation behind the search (I don't believe that it is, I'm counterpointing people that believe that 'it's the life-or-death nature of impacts that make people search' here.)

Ergo, if we really want to survive impacts, we need to work on ways to stop them - our detection is already 10000x further than our ability to stop anything. It's more than good enough for our current abilities to stop anything.

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