The fact is, the odds are so astronomically low that it would hardly be worth the funding and effort required. We have real problems, and they're earth-based.

Even if we did know an impact was imminent, is there anything that can be done about it?

You'd be surprised what a few hundred million dollars could do for several humanitarian efforts.

Worry about the devil you know rather than the devil you don't.  (Not the correct usage of the idiom, but let it slide )  I'm not entirely convinced that we can do anything if there is something coming for us.  Put rockets on it?  Safely landing something on the space object, let alone getting it set up correctly to push it, sounds awefully difficult.  Blowing it up assumes that it's small enough to blow up, and that the chunks won't be just as bad.  But like I said in my first post in this thread, I am far from well versed in this area.

Would I rather put efforts into bettering the lives of people today than try to defend against something that in all likelihood will never happen in our lifetimes and we might not even be able to do anything about?  Absolutely.

Both were dismissed years ago for not making a dent in orbital gravity pulls extended by Earth & more importantly, the Sun.

Asteroids & Comets are drawn towards the surface, not simply flying by.

1/6250 is an EXTREMELY high odd, btw. Considering the diameter of Earth, it's 300kms worth of a rocky hyper-velocity bullet either hitting dead smack in the equatorial middle or skimming the atmosphere, in which case a Tungunska type explosion or any amounts of shrapnel (how many 5kms roaming around?) plummeting anywhere.

It's 11:55, and you've got five minutes.

I tend to agree, we're that stupid with some statistical truth or facts -- about Jupiter or not.

That is the type of thinking people use to convince themselves they don't need insurance. Maybe 1 in 10,000 houses burn down in any given year, so why waste money on insurance against an event that probably won't happen to me? There are better things to spend that money on, right?

Besides, the point of finding these things NOW is to give us time to do something if it ever becomes necessary. It is much better to find the big ass rock with our name on it now, when it won't hit us for several years rather than waiting and having some amateur astronomer find it 2 weeks before it hits the pasific and makes the Indonesian tsunami look like a minor splash. The energy needed to prevent an hit is inversely proportional to the time before impact, and finding it early gives us time to build a rocket to do something about it

tazgecko, all it took was a miscalculated reset in the trajectory BY gravity to not only spin the bullet outa control but also to deviate it enough so that it remains in OUR orbital grasp.

No computational power can negate Earth's location or weight.

Do you wear a helmet all the time in case something falls on your head, too?  (I wonder how the odds compare to doomsday asteroids)

Its a vid from you tube Primal ?

Must be chrome , firefox is ok

Nope, only when i sat on a motorcycle... but i've played football a few times in High-school too. I intercepted passes and ran down fields to score touch-downs instead of throwing grenades at targets or using semi-automatic rifles to shoot down a black dot 600 yards away.

Practicing is simple balastics. Although, locking up clearly in combat is scary unless cloaked in a triple amphibious water_air_ground gimmick anyone must fear.

Look it's a UFO. Yeah, well. A blip on radars. Helmet free or not.

Back on topic?

Pray, space is vast.

Maybe it's your helmet visor. Otherwise, get Adobe Flashplayer 10.

Not so, says the current generation of environmentalism goals. And their own ongoing quest for a future worth living for but still granted to THEIR precious childrens.

And yet, money can buy whatever we (as in Humanity, btw) decide or not; health or death, budgeted by conflictual choices, militarized by arsenals.

Catch a ride to Mars, dump the UN flag.

Party time, comet X is on its way.

What NASA can't (or wouldn't through decisions, btw) do, somebody else will and the USA would have to beg for a pie slice as usual..  without Russia, your obsolete fleet of shuttles wouldn't have a dockable ISS. Without Canadian Robotics, you wouldn't assemble it. Without Japanese technology edge, you wouldn't change batteries or deploy solar panels. Without European cashflow, you wouldn't launch probes.

Cooperation could save Earth in a space threat scenario, not pride or politics.

They kept saying things like that when discussing things like "500 year floods" or the odds of cat 5 hitting New Orleans. The problem with planning like that is if you're wrong even once, you're screwed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

That happened only a hundred years ago, and could happen again next year, or not for another hundred years. How much of an investment is it worth to prevent another such impact, especially if is going to hit somewhere more valuable than Siberia?