Increasing the albedo makes the photons bounce back, which requires a bigger change in momentum than just stopping them.

I agree it won't hurt for people to spend some time brainstorming about this in their spare time. But before we actually set up a budget to look into this on a more structured scale, it would probably be better to use the same budget to improve road safety, for example, or encourage people to stop smoking.

No, because there's a good chance humanity will be gone before that big impactor hits the earth.

In the long term, we're all dead anyway. And I don't play in the lottery either. It's just as silly as worrying about asteroids hitting me.

Hey, they can fantasize all they want, but I get to vote whether I want to have my tax money diverted to crazy projects.

How much thrust would you be able to generate for long periods of time, and where does the energy come from ? Huge solar panels ?

It would take a huge asteroid to wipe out the entire human race. We're talking once every 100 million years, or so. Before we spend any resources on detecting and deflecting asteroids, let's wait another 1000 years. On the scale of large asteroid impacts, a 1000 year delay is insignificant, but on the scale of human civilization, 1000 years is huge. If our civilization is much more advanced in 1000 years, we don't need our dated asteroid impact plans. If civilization crashes, our plans will be useless anyway.

But there's not just one car, there are about a billion cars, so even if you multiply the probability by the magnitude, the asteroid is still insignificant.

The chance of getting killed by a car when crossing the road is orders of magnitude larger than the chance of getting killed by an asteroid.

The CRU data has been available for a while now. What have the "deniers" done with it, exactly ?

Are launch costs that high ? I think there are several options in the $10 million/ton range. I'm not an expert on weather satellites, but I assume you can make a decent one that weighs less than 5 tons, putting it in the $50 million range for launch costs. One launch every 5 years, equals $10 million per year, which is a tiny amount by any standard. You could even launch a couple. Don't worry about launching a Ferrari. Just use something simple and reliable.

Sure, but then everything that has tabs set at 8 (i.e. everything else) will break instead.

No need to save the exact same 20-year old design and copy it. People launch satellites on a regular basis, and most of them are not too expensive. Apparently, there's quite a bit of knowledge on how to make a reasonably priced, earth orbiting satellite that can do basic housekeeping, and maintain a up/down data link to ground stations. To make it a weather satellite, just slap some useful instruments on it, and call it good.

I don't even think the issue is money, or at least not lack of it. They had a $12 billion budget. Compare that to the $2.5 billion they spent on the Mars Curiosity mission, which is much more complicated than a weather satellite. They should have given them a $500 million budget instead, and then it would have much bigger chance of success. The bigger the budget, the higher the risk of making it too complex.

I'm not mixing tabs with spaces. I'm just typing 'more somebody_else\'s_source.c' and it looks like shit because they have tabs set at 4.