Affirmatives usually reply that the Negative team are in fact the mad men for proposing such a theory. Today, their suspicions are confirmed by experts
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If you lie awake at night worrying about some supervillain steering giant asteroids toward your hometown, you really should relax, experts say. It's not going to happen anytime soon. Humanity does indeed have the technical skills to move space rocks around, and we may employ this know-how at some point to avoid a catastrophic impact like the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But the odds of any rogue state using asteroids to rain death down on its enemies are minuscule, experts say.
Why is it so unlikely? Here are two theories
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"It's a lousy weapon," said former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, chairman of the B612 Foundation, a group dedicated to predicting and preventing cataclysmic asteroid impacts on Earth. "You get a chance to use one once every several hundred years," Schweickart said during a recent panel discussion called "Moving an Asteroid" at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "And even then, you can only deflect it to hit someplace along a sort of arbitrary line across the Earth."
Here’s another interesting consideration: what if our enemies become our friends before the Asteroids hit?
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That bombardment rate is scarily frequent to anyone worried about the long-term survival of human civilization. But it's not nearly frequent enough to make asteroids good weapons of mass destruction, according to Schweickart. "You're going to have an opportunity once every two or three hundred years to go up and have a weapon to hit Baghdad," Schweickart said. "Of course, the problem is that by that time, the Zambian space program is the world's premier space program, and Baghdad is a buddy of yours."
Another interesting hurdle: we can move asteroids “north-south,” not “east-west”
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Potential asteroid wranglers also wouldn't be able to direct a space rock just anywhere on Earth, he added. For the foreseeable future, we'll be able only to speed up or slow down an asteroid, moving it in an "east-west" direction along its trajectory. Moving it in the "north-south" plane is not an option.
"If you do anything other than speed up or slow down the asteroid, it has almost no effect," Schweickart said. "You've got to go along that line; it's the only way physics lets you do it."
And here’s the big conclusion: this fear should not keep us from performing the Affirmative plan.
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Schweickart and other panelists argued that humanity will need to deflect a killer asteroid away from Earth someday. It would be a shame, they said, if unfounded fears about possible nefarious uses of asteroid-moving technology impeded its development.
"The public perception of asteroids can be pretty scary," Schweickart said. "There's going to be a lot of scare stuff. It's already out there, it's going to get worse and that is going to be a very serious challenge that we on the technical side will have to deal with."
People worried about death from above should focus their anxiety elsewhere, fellow panelist Bill Nye said. There are plenty of much more viable space weapons than asteroids already up there.
"Space is already pretty weaponized," said Nye, executive director of the Planetary Society and former host of the science-themed TV show "Bill Nye the Science Guy." "The global positioning system that we all know and love was designed to guide weapons. So using an asteroid as a weapon is sort of coming late to the party."
