from Hacker News

‘Don’t Look Up’: humanity could avert asteroid Armageddon, say scientists

by unklefolk on 1/27/22, 9:15 PM with 11 comments

• by Comevius on 1/27/22, 10:51 PM

  In the movie humanity was technologically capable destroying the comet, the solution just got jammed between politics, the media and corporate idiocracy.

  Our tepid response to another existential threat called the climate crisis suggests that this may be our reality.

• by jfengel on 1/27/22, 10:42 PM

  In what sense is this article new, aside from tagging it with the name of a recent movie (which isn't really about asteroids at all, but an allegory about climate change). We know all that; the DART mission is already on its way to go test the theory.

  I get the impression that they're doing something novel here; there's something about "bolide fragmentation". But that takes up about half a sentence in the abstract; everything else seems to be telling us what we already knew about the dangers of asteroids.

  Can somebody give me a better abstract of their paper?

• by genmud on 1/27/22, 11:14 PM

  We could also avert childhood hunger, but humans are notoriously bad at fixing hard problems.