At 01:30 AM 06/21/2002, David Weinshenker wrote: > > it's never too early to fully fund The Watch. > >Hmmm... doctors say that you should not subject a patient to tests which >will have no benefit in makeing treatment decisions; and that's a fairly >sensible position. Programmers have been known to say, "Never test for >an error condition that you're not prepared to handle." - that has a certain >ironic fatalism to it... it may do you no good to see it coming, if it's too >late (or if you don't have the means) to duck.
How much notice of a regional disaster would you rather have: none, or several years? The doctor analogy isn't really applicable as stated. I would amend it as follows: We know this patient (Earth) is at risk for cancer (asteroid strikes). What we don't know, because we haven't bothered to build the MRI lab (fund The Watch or something similar), is whether the patient actually has cancer (whether there is an asteroid on a collision course) and if so, when the cancer is expected to metastasize (when will it hit), and how far (how big is it)? It's better to know. If nothing else, we can indeed duck - a hit up to many MT equivalent could be handled reasonably well given a few weeks notice. Mt. St. Helens is a good model for an expected small asteroid strike. >But then on the other hand (was this the premise of the stories you mention?) >if you see a really big one far enough out that you've got time to start >building a response... I'm not going to steal Flynn's thunder. :-) In fact, asteroid diversion is one tough problem - Flynn cheats; he has to, to set the end story in the 2020s - but if we really had our backs against the wall, I bet we could come up with a solution, with a combination Manhattan Project and Project Apollo. One line from Flynn's first diversion mission keeps coming back to me. One of the flight crew prospects observes, "Just another flight, right? Except it's not. Shoving that Bean aside is important. It's the most important thing anyone's ever been asked to do. And that means that this is the first flight ever, since Gagarin rode a tin can, where the recovery of the flight crew is not the most important objective of the mission." Chilling... -R -- No electrons were harmed in the creation of this message PETE - People for the Ethical Treatment of Electrons Randall Clague [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
