A scientist admitted this week that there isn’t a “hell of a lot we can do” should an asteroid appear on a collision course to earth with less than 5 years’ warning, The Daily Caller reported.
Dr. Joseph Nuth, who works for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, revealed that an asteroid impacting our planet, however unlikely that may be, could still be disastrous on an epic scale.
“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” Nuth told Alphr.
He did have some good news for those who worry about apocalypse-level disasters: Asteroids of that size are so rare that there may never be another one.
“On the other hand there are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially,” he explained. “You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”
Some are not as positive about our chances. On Oct. 25, NASA and FEMA ran a joint tabletop exercise to deal with an “impact threat,” according to Phys.org.
“It’s not a matter of if — but when — we will deal with such a situation,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “But unlike any other time in our history, we now have the ability to respond to an impact threat through continued observations, predictions, response planning and mitigation.”
Although minuscule, the threat of such a disaster exists. There may not be a lot to do about prevent impacts, but we can prepare our reaction for if and when calamity strikes.
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said that “It is critical to exercise these kinds of low-probability but high-consequence disaster scenarios. By working through our emergency response plans now, we will be better prepared if and when we need to respond to such an event.”
(via: Conservative Tribune)
