Will Humanity go the Way of the Dinosaur? (AlterNet)

Will Humanity go the Way of the Dinosaur?

By Robert B. Reich, The American Prospect. Posted March 31, 2007.



A new NASA report on killer asteroids ought to spook people into action.

According to a new report from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, some 100,000 asteroids and comets routinely pass between the Sun and the Earth's orbit. About 20,000 of these orbit close enough to us that they could one day hit the Earth and destroy a major city.

But the really worrying news from NASA is that over a thousand of these things are large enough (almost a mile wide in diameter) and their orbits close enough to us as to pose a real potential hazard of crashing into the Earth with enough force to end most life on this planet. Scientists think this is what killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.

Congress has given NASA a budget of a little over $4 million a year to track these killer asteroids, but NASA says it needs at least a billion dollars more to find all of them by the year 2020. This might involve building a special observatory for tracking them and launching a spacecraft to observe the space around Earth from Venus.

The job could be finished sooner than 2020, says NASA, but that would probably require a deep space orbiting infrared observatory, at an additional cost of $700 million. ....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/49919/

One of the most successful complex lifeforms ever, I believe. Dinosaurs were around for about 120 million years, and it took the double whammy of extreme volcanism and an asteroid (as far as we know) to bowl them out! Always assuming you don't think they evolved into birds, in which case they're still here, and probably laughing at us. Homo sapiens has been around for about 100,000 years, if that, and recently we have spent all our efforts on destroying the very environment to which we are adapted. Stupid hardly seems to cover it...

It would be just desserts for what we have done to the planet.