Sunday, September 18, 2011
NASA Satellite to hit Earth Friday...or Thursday...or Saturday
Which is a rather ironic piece of news as Honors Econ just discussed the difficulties of excluding free riders from government protections. (A hypothetical situation was debris hitting Earth). The satellite, launched in 1991, has succumbed to Earth's gravity and is now being pulled into our atmosphere. It is unknown where the satellite will strike Earth, but the piece of junk will eventually break up into scintillating fireballs that will be visible even in daytime. Some of the pieces will be around three-hundred pounds; there is a 1 in 3200 chance that a person would be struck by a piece of the satellite. Although this situation does not seem very urgent, it does pose the question of who would be responsible to help divert bigger threats meteor threats in the future. How would countries figure out how to contribute to this unlikely (or less unlikely than we thought) scenario?
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3 comments:
I think it's really sad that our own scientific genius (well i guess not so genius anymore) is backfiring. What if someone actually does get struck? How are they going to deal with that? Just apologize and pay some money?
I think that the government needs to figure something out to protect its citizens. If they can't even protect us from our own man-made disaster, how would they protect against anything else? At this point, the government should to step it up and call for help if they can't figure out a way to protect us. Gather up everyone who knows these mechanisms the best and work towards a solution. Something really should be done about this situation. It's for our safety as citizens and its the government's duty to protect us anyway.
It poses the question of who should be responsible for it, and who should pay for it. As we know the demand of such an expensive piece of technology (especially if it is untested, hypothetical, and a one time use device) wont go up at all until we find an object hurtling toward us and the impact date in the near future (around 50 years for enough worry to occur according to space.com). Should the device be paid for internationally, by all governments in a star trek like harmony, or by the US, Russia and up and coming space countries (China & India). Also, where would these funds come from? Or a private company charging governments and citizens for their lives?
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