Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains why we need planetary defense

63 comments

In humanity’s first test of asteroid deflection technology, NASA’s DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into the Dimorphos asteroid on Monday at 7:14 p.m. ET. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson joins CNN’s John Berman and explains the importance of a planetary defense system. #CNN #News

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63 comments

  1. Watched the live feed. Definitely a goosebumps moment.
    68 million miles away, DART traveling at 14,000 mph! Amazing!
    Congratulations to all involved!

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    3. All these trolls are just so sad. Never a day of school in their lives and they literally missed an important moment in human history. Willful Ignorance is bliss i suppose….

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    4. @Humperdoo Saves You do realize you mentioning them is the only goal they have? A troll can only excist when they are given attention.

      It’s like chumpansees, we should get rid of them but keep a few in the zoo for our kids later on. Just so they understand how subhumans look like.

      /example…

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    5. @Marvin Westmaas ye, i usually call them out once, just in case someone takes it seriously. Similarly with apologists, those are the worst.

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  4. How about 3 or 4 of those bad boys at the ready….set some out into deep space and wait. or eventually a system of them intelligent enough to determine deadly prospects and then automatically moves them? This is wise.

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    2. Space is far too vast for that. If we would have missed the target today, plans were already set forth to start a burn (turn on thrusters) on the vehicle that would last 8 days, and the next chances at contact would have taken 2 years.

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    3. @Shaun W You have a point there. If we don’t wipe ourselves out we’ll live off world and our planet, and the tech maybe there for smart space drones .👍👍

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    4. @Sting hitting it far enough is all we need. It just depends on how much it moves out of its current trajectory and even a small push would be huge after a while

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    5. @Sting You missed the big picture. We can predict well measured orbits precisely. When we find a rock that, in several more orbits around the sun, it will find itself directly in the path of the Earth; we can give it a relatively small nudge, changing it’s direction slightly so that in several more orbits, it will have moved, gradually, out of the Earths path much more than needed.

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  6. Does he need to explain it? Didn’t we all see Armageddon? For a second, forget the fact that this is in service of trying to save the planet. We just witnessed the largest physical experiment in astrophysics to date. We’re going from merely just trying to blow stuff up to trying to figure out how to manipulate the heavens. This is our first step in trying to change the universe according to our will. That’s a big step and I wish more people would see it that way.

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  13. Like NDT mentioned before, deflecting an asteroid is a lot easier and cheaper than terraforming a whole other planet and lifting the entire human race (and ecosystem) over.

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  15. Earth has had 5 mass extinction events. Only one of those was due to a large impactor. The rest were mega-volcano eruptions.

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  17. What we need is self sustaining eco domes in the deserts
    So we can finally start to solve world poverty

    If we can make a station in space
    We can make domes in the desert

    Reply

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