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Did you know your odds of being killed in a car accident tomorrow are the same as the Earth suffering an asteroid impact tomorrow of greater than 100 Megatons? 100 Megatons is many times larger than all the bombs used in WWII. But while your death in a car accident would be a tragedy, the difference with an asteroid impact is that we are all riding in the same car!

By the way, the statistic mentioned above is not in dispute. It comes from a combination of counting craters on the moon, directly counting meteors in the sky, and using our limited telescopes on Earth to search small regions of the sky for asteroids. Take a look at the chart below (from the National Research Council Report Defending Planet Earth). 100 Megatons by the way is nothing close to the scale of something that would wipe out all life on Earth. In fact it may even result in quite limited damage if it hits in a suitably desolate spot (like northern Canada or Siberia). Of course if it hits the wrong spot, things could be pretty bad. Is this a risk we want to take?

Do you wear a seatbelt? Do you have an airbag in your car? Why aren’t we taking the same precautions with
our own planet? We should be searching the skies, finding and mapping all asteroids that could hit the Earth so
we can deflect them as needed. There are a number of ways to deflect asteroids that we are confident would work (a subject for a later post). The harder thing may actually be getting people to take the problem seriously enough to spend the relatively small amount of money needed to find and track asteroids ahead of time so we have advance notice of a threat. Take a look at what we are doing about the problem at the B612 Foundation.

The amazing thing is that we as a species have developed the tools to slightly change the evolution of our solar system, and to prevent our planet from being hit by asteroids. Now if we only had the wisdom to deploy these tools. Drive safely!

I gave a talk yesterday at Google about protecting humanity. We had a good discussion about
the best way to fund projects that are trying to ensure the long term survival of humanity.
Corporations are in general bad at funding projects with benefits that are potentially
off in the distant future. And governments are bad at funding such projects too when there
isn’t a concrete threat (i.e. with known time/place etc) and there isn’t
a natural constituency that directly benefits from the program.

For example, I made the argument that work such as what we are doing at the B612 Foundation (www.b612foundation.org) may actually be amongst the most important works on Earth, but does not have any government or corporate support.

Nine years ago today, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry, killing seven close friends. One of the astronauts aboard Columbia was Ilan Ramon. In the months leading up to the final flight of Columbia, I had been holding a running discussion with Ilan about how we should get our families together for dinner. But life was busy. His flight was upcoming, and I was training for an upcoming Space Station mission. With my travel schedule and his, we always found an excuse to put off our family dinner. A few weeks before his flight we ran into each other in the hallway of the astronaut office, and we swore we would have our long awaited dinner right after his flight. Obviously that never happened, and one my true regrets is that we never got to enjoy that time together because life got in the way. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it is that Tomorrow isn’t certain. Don’t put thngs off!

Every year on the last week in January, NASA remembers our fallen comrades from Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia.  This is video taken of the T-38 missing man formation over Johnson Space Center.  RIP Rick, Willie, Kalpana, Dave, Mike, Laurel, and Ilan.

If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?  It’s actually a great question, with a subtle answer.  The universe doesn’t have to expand “into anything” if it doesn’t have an edge, in other words if it is infinitely large.  Take a look at this Escher print of an infinite grid.  As far as the eye can see, the grid goes on forever.  Now imagine each of the sticks between nodes all getting longer.  The nodes would begin to separate, and this Escher

universe would begin to expand.  But it isn’t expanding into anything, it is just getting larger.  That’s exactly the same as what we notice about our own universe.  All the galaxies appear to be moving away from each other.  But there is no edge to the universe, and therefore there also isn’t a center to the universe (which is also the reason the Big Bang didn’t happen at a point).  At least we haven’t seen an edge yet.

Here’s another version I like of this print done by Escher.  Flying fish as far as the eye can see!

Update 1/25/2012 – A reader wrote to inform me that these Escher works were not actually paintings, but rather prints.  I’ve corrected the post.

I’m interviewed here about Liquid Robotics and our fleet of ocean going robots.

Last week it was announced that our Milky Way Galaxy likely has more than 100 Billion Earth-like rocky planets.  Many, if not most, stars in our neighborhood are likely to have at least one planet capable of supporting life.  With so many habitable planets, why is it that we haven’t found any signs of intelligent life despite decades of searching?  One possibility is that life is indeed out there, but there isn’t enough time between asteroid impacts for civilizations to become advanced enough to prevent being wiped out.  Our planet is struck by an asteroid large enough to wipe out advanced civilization (roughly 1km or larger) about once per million years.  This is not to be confused with the rarer and larger asteroids capable of causing most life to go extinct (10km or larger), but here we are talking only about those capable of “just” knocking out civilization.  As civilizations become more advanced, they become in many ways more interconnected and fragile, like a complicated piece of machinery.  Witness the global effects of such relatively minor events as the recent tsunami in Japan and the 2008 financial crisis.  Any civilization must eventually develop the technology to predict and prevent asteroid impacts (and the foresight to use it), or it will eventually be ctl-alt-deleted back to a much more primitive state.  Perhaps life does exist elsewhere, but hasn’t managed to pass this test.  Human civilization is about 10 thousand years old, and we have just recently reached the stage of building rockets and space telescopes (the essential ingredients in finding and deflecting asteroids).  Will we deploy the technology to find threatening asteroids and pass the test?  Or will we continue to play the odds?

In the Silicon Valley rush to do everything fast, we often push things forward by “trying things out and seeing what happens”.  There is a lot to be said for such a style – it drives innovation.  At Google we called it a “bias towards action”.  But sometimes, especially in a crisis, it just leads to churn.  One of the things I learned as an astronaut at NASA is how (and when) not to hurry decisions.  One of the old-head astronauts told me when I was new that “no situation is so bad that you can’t make it worse by acting too fast”.  In fact, more often than not, if something didn’t kill you right away, you had time to gather some data and consider your options.  If things were stable and a critical decision is needed, it often paid to wait for more data that could inform your decision.

In 2003, when we lost Space Shuttle Columbia, we still had 3 people in orbit aboard the International Space Station.  But we knew we had no way to send sufficient supplies to keep the Space Station running indefinitely. Rather than abandon ship right away and bring the crew back down to Earth using the escape pod (Soyuz spacecraft), we calculated that we had a few weeks to make up our minds.  During that time, we worked out that we could manage to keep the Space Station running with just 2 people, as long as we could train them quickly enough to fly another Soyuz up to the Station.  When the word came back that this was just on the edge of being possible, I was informed on a Friday afternoon to get myself to Russia that weekend to begin training as a Soyuz flight-engineer (which was a story in and of itself!)  The decision making was methodical and thorough, and the end result was that we managed to keep the program alive for several years in this manner with 2-person skeleton crews.  Even now I have to remind myself that sometimes you can actually move faster by slowing down your decisions.

Some years back I was involved in a discussion of how much radiation shielding we needed to put on a spaceship for a manned mission to Mars.   At issue was how to keep the expected risk from cancer down to a few percent.  This required an enormous amount of shielding to be put on the spacecraft, to the point where it might actually increase the astronauts overall chance of dying because the spacecraft could become so heavy that the rocket was less reliable and other safety systems were compromised.  This was crazy because we at the time were considering missions where the chance of dying because of a rocket failure somewhere during the 3 year voyage might be 50 percent.  It was a bit like being overly concerned with a mountain climber eating too much unhealthy fatty foods for breakfast on the morning he is going to scale Mount Everest.  We got carried away with the dangers of developing cancer over 30 years, and we lost sight of the fact that on such a mission our chief danger was in having a rocket or other system failure.

Sometimes the things we worry about aren’t the biggest threat.

Because asteroids have struck the Earth before, and they will again.  In the latest Scientific American issue, I write about an awe-inspiring project to protect humanity.  If we don’t find and track Near-Earth-Asteroids (ones that cross the Earth’s orbit), then we can never do anything about them.  But if we have lots of advance warning – we have many options to divert an asteroid and prevent the impact.