Lifeboat Foundation

NASA has a plan to deal with potential asteroid impacts that sounds like it’s been taken straight from a science fiction film.

The space agency is building a spacecraft named HAMMER — which stands for Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response.

The plan is to blow any harmful looking asteroids out of the sky before they have a chance to hit out planet.

Continue reading “NASA building ‘HAMMER’ spacecraft to save Earth from cataclysmic asteroid impact” »

A massive asteroid estimated to be 2.7 miles wide is set to make a ‘relatively close encounter’ with Earth on 1 September.

Dubbed ‘Florence,’ the huge space rock will pass just 4.4 million miles from our planet on Friday – or, about 18 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

Continue reading “A THREE MILE wide asteroid is set to graze past Earth this Friday” »

A big space rock slipped right by us last week and was only spotted as it left our cosmic neighborhood.

Today is World Asteroid Day… https://bcgallie.wixsite.com/asteroidday

Asteroid Day is a global awareness movement to protect Earth against asteroid impacts. The original inspiration for this campaign came from Grigorij Richters’ asteroid impact disaster film 51 Degrees North — all profits from which he has now dedicated to the cause of Asteroid Day world-wide. Dr. Brian May is a key supporter and delivered a slight update of the original mix, specifically for the Asteroid Day launch. Learn more about Asteroid Day, here: http://www.asteroidday.org

Continue reading “We Will Rock You” »

Scientists have discovered a new branch of the Taurids meteor stream that could pose a major risk to Earth, with asteroids up to 1,000 feet wide flying past us every few years. The Taurids meteor shower peaks every October and November, producing a relatively small display of shooting stars as the planet.

NASA has announced that asteroid strikes may have tipped over Saturn’s icy, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus. Researchers came to the conclusion after analysing the latest images and data from Cassini.

Researchers say they have enough evidence to suggest the moon’s spin axis – the line through the north and south poles – reoriented from its original position due to a collision with a smaller body, most likely an asteroid. The shift from its original axis is by 55 degrees, more than halfway rolling completely onto its side.

“A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest or codefest) is a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others, often including subject-matter-experts, collaborate intensively on software projects. Occasionally, there is a hardware component as well. Hackathons typically last between a day and a week. Some hackathons are intended simply for educational or social purposes, although in many cases the goal is to create usable software.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon

In February 2014, Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist and famed guitarist for the rock band QUEEN, began working with Grigorij Richters, the director of a new film titled 51 Degrees North, a fictional story of an asteroid impact on London and the resulting human condition. May composed the music for the film and suggested that Richters preview it at Starmus, an event organized by Dr. Garik Israelian and attended by esteemed astrophysicists, scientists and artists, including Dr. Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Rick Wakeman. The result was the beginning of discussions that would lead to the launch of Asteroid Day in 2015. See : https://asteroidday.org/

Creating rejuvenation will probably be quite expensive, but that’s no reason to give up on it. We can pull it off.

The first thing to realise is that, when you wonder how much something will cost, you’re actually wondering how many resources and how many people doing how much work it will take to do that something. That’s all that really matters. The problem is that we have a sucky economic system such that even if we do have more than enough people and resources to do the job, the monetary cost of it could be so high that you can’t get the job done without creating financial problems left and right. This should be a hint that the problem, if it exists, lies in our crappy economic system, not in rejuvenation itself or whatever other thing we may create.

Apart from the obvious fact that other hysterically expensive endeavours (such as space missions) are pulled off despite their costs, we must take into account that desperate circumstances call for desperate measures. We don’t need to tear apart our economic system and replace it with another before we create rejuvenation, and neither would we if faced with another health crisis (such as a pandemic) or a planetary crisis, but we need to get the job done despite its costs and the consequences they may have. We can’t give up on rejuvenation on the grounds that it may be too expensive to create, just like we wouldn’t in the case of an existential risk. Can you imagine that? There’s a huge asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and our only hope is a spectacularly expensive space mission to destroy it before it’s too late. Just who in their right mind would step up and say: ‘Nah, too expensive. Let’s not do it.

NASA says a 2,000-foot-wide space rock will pass within 1.1 million miles of our planet this week.