They did, after all, pardon Galileo in 1992 after having sentenced him to life in prison for his heretical beliefs in a non-heliocentric cosmology.

Would have been the Alan Dean Foster novelization of John Carpenter's film.

We see lots of stories with headlines like "Nation's Millionaire College Dropouts."

Odd that we never see "Nation's Minimum-Wage College Dropouts."

I suppose they only have so much newsprint...

You still use Balonium? If you want to maximize your nucleonic blasts, you need to refine it into Phoni-Balonium

Umm... Yes. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

Well, if we're shooting at it, it means we can see it. If we see it we can track it.

Accuracy? A laser is a straight line of photons that travel at the speed of light. If we can track it, we can hit it. It's just a matter of calculating trajectories and factoring in gravitiational effects. At the distance it would be at, i'm not sure how lasers could possibly cancel each other out.

A spinning asteroid wouldn't matter much... just calculate its center of mass then fire appropriately to effect the greatest change in desired direction. You might be shooting at empty space part of the time, but the rest will do the work you want.

And if we get wiped out, what difference will all that have made? All the things we've learned and done will be for nothing, save perhaps a step up for the next dominant species.

An asteroid could wipe us out tomorrow.

Evolution never stops. All it could take is one organism able to capitalize quickly and efficiently on the truly huge food supply that is Humanity, and it could all be over for us in a matter of months. That could happen tomorrow, too. Or yesterday, for that matter.

And even if nothing needs to be done for a few hundred years, the fact remains that right now, we *have* the capability. All those hundreds of years from now when things get really grim for whatever remnants of humanity remain after our species-wide catastrophe, it might be impossible to save ourselves.

By acting now, what we're doing is taking out an insurance policy. And in a country where the average person spends about 10% of their income insuring their homes, health and vehicles, it seems odd that we're not willing to go the extra step and insure our Species... But I guess like any other terrifying event, the internal refrain of "It won't happen to me." is hard to contend with.

We humans would like to think that we're special, but the fact is, we're just another species on this planet.

And 99.99% of the species that have evolved on this planet have gone extinct on this planet.

Doesn't matter if it's failure to compete, a slow climate change, a rapid disease or a near-instant asteroid strike, sooner or later, nearly every species gets wiped out.

If we really want to be special, we need to leave Earth and spread out, because while the Earth's environment is the safest for us *individually* over the short term, it is also a near-guaranteed death sentence for our *species* over the long term.

Wait! So the Northern Hemisphere is being destroyed in 2012 and the Southern Hemisphere not until 5015 ?

Rio, here I come !

I'm pretty sure *every* camera I've ever used could see radiation... In the visible spectrum anyways.

Back in the stone age of wet photography, it wasn't all that difficult to take pictures of IR or UV, either, come to think of it. Either by accident or design.

On the serious side, I imagine it was a technical hurdle to manage to filter a CCD in such a way that it could capture useful information from various highly energetic particles hitting it without it being degraded or destroyed in the process.

The Large-Impact Hypothesis is the current consensus. One smaller protoplanet grazed a larger one, leaving a large chunk of itself behind. The larger became the Earth, the smaller, the moon.

As to why the Lunar crust is (believed to be) about 1/3 thicker of the far side than the near side, no one is quite sure.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance. - Hippocrates (c.460-c.377 BCE)

"Polite Society" only exists because of the evolutionary imperative to avoid pain. If you break society's rules, sooner or later, you go one step too far and get punched in the mouth. In our overly PC society we seem to have forgotten that this is a tremendously effective, tried and tested method of behavior modification.

I don't get the "Eww" comments. You do realize that what you flush down the toilet goes to a gigantic pond where the solids settle out then the remaining liquids are pumped through filters and sent right back to your faucet, don't you?

This is just a handy portable (potable?) option to the system already in place in most North American cities.