That's not exactly the headline of this dumb NYT editorial, but it almost could be.

Let's leave aside that no meteor has ever struck the earth, or anything else, other than eyes (a meteor is the flash of light that an object makes when it hits the atmosphere--not the physical object itself). They talk about how life has been devastated in the past by bombardment from extraterrestrial objects, but instead of proposing that we do something about it, they use it as an opportunity to preach about how we're extincting too many species. In fact, they not only don't propose doing anything about it, they deny that anything can be done.

There's no controlling the possibility of a meteor strike. But there's every reason — ethical and practical — for preventing our own habitation of earth from having the same impact.

Well, in fact, there is "controlling the possibility of a meteor [sic] strike." One starts looking for them, and as Clark Lindsey (from whom I got the link) points out, one develops the spacefaring capability to divert them, which is entirely feasible, and relative to the cost of being hit, quite affordable.

It's particularly ironic that the Gray Lady publishes this silliness on perhaps the eve of a major change in space policy that might, in fact, ultimately lead to such a capability, but I guess that there's some comfort in knowing that, even under new management, some things at the Times never change.

"Professor Goddard...does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
---The New York Times, 13 January 1920

(Having dug that up, allow me to insert a shameless plug. And another. Right-click and open in new window.)

Yes, I was thinking about the Goddard quote when I posted this, but didn't have time to go run it down. I wonder how many decades it will take them to retract this one.

This guy clearly didn?t bother to research the subject. Decades ago, you might see the term ?meteor impact? or ?meteor crater? referring to impacts of ?small? (100 foot or so) asteroids (you can still find references to the ?Barringer Meteor Crater? though it more properly would be ?meteorite?). Back then, ?asteroid? was almost always applied to mile plus diameter rocks orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.

Other points ? it is very questionable that we are in a ?great dying? ? and what we have done doesn?t approach the effects of the regular periods of ice age/thawing on the world. There HAVE been major events (either volcanic or extraterrestrial in origin) in the last 160,000 years, though not as extensive as the really big impacts. Multi-megaton impacts come every few centuries, most over the oceans.

His comment about not being able to control impacts is true in a way ? it would be almost impossible today to stop a major impact unless we discovered the threat very early. Clearly we need to develop the capability. While a giant impact in any year is low, I?d really be annoyed if our civilization fell and the world subjected to devastation just because we didn?t bother developing the capability to stop it, though we knew full well the danger existed.

And rather than putting people down for their impact on the world, it seems to me that we have a vital role to play that no other species can: We can foresee and protect the world from devastation that is, sooner or later, certain to occur. All life on this planet will eventually be destroyed. We, or our descendents, are the only ones that could change that.

VR, I suspect the author of that article would love nothing more than to see civilization crumble to pieces in order to prevent the "die-off." Left wing misanthropes are a dime a dozen.

The NYT retracted that statement on July 17, 1969, at which point Apollo 11 was already on its way to the Moon. Credit Instapundit at the attached URL.

Consider two possible scenarios for the future.

Future 1:
Environmentalism becomes a new kind of religion with definite thou shalt nots. These include disturbing species be they mammal or microbial. Luddism reigns supreme. The ecnonomy sputters due to excessive regulation. A kind of economic suspended animation results. In 2080 a large rock smashes into the Earth. There is a mass die off of many species. The surviving humans lose their previous peta-like ethics in the crush for survival. That last whale was delicious.

Future 2:
A rational economic pace continues without being bound by any kind of religious zealot. There will be some trade offs with regard to species survival, but compete extinction doesn't happen since DNA samples are kept as required by law. In the year 2080, a large rock is noticed on an Earth collision course. It is easily deflected by the advanced space fairing civilization. Nobody gives it a second thought. Several hundred years later, large space colonies are built and inhabited by species brought back from suspended animation where they had been stored since the bad old days of the 21st century.

Now, ethically, which scenario is better for all Life?

When I said "retract this one" I was referring to today's piece. I know they retracted the Goddard one in 1969.

Future 1 will be our fate if the swelling roles of the Green Party are any indication. I actually like some of the Green Party's platform, but I will never accept such ideological rigidity. Unfortunately though, people have that religious gene, which means Christianity and the other old religions are bound to be replaced by some other form of 'spirituality.' Earth worship is a good candidate for filling the shoes.

/whine the link in the last paragraph is FUBAR ?

Journalists are notoriously bad with hard science. It's a shame, but that's the way it is. Luckily we won't have to put up with it for very much longer.

As for asteroids, we have the basic technology to mount a very robust potential asteroid impact detection and asteroid diversion system for much, much less than a billion dollars a year. Which works out to a trillion dollars a millenium, which is a damned cheap price for security from mass destruction. We paid something like over $10 trillion over about 4 decades for less certain defense from the Soviet threat. All it really requires is sufficient motivation to do it (which, I fear, will come after the first big impact disaster and not before).