I evacuated Katy several years ago, and thanks to Clutchfans, I'm reminded that I made the right decision on a regular basis.
Any actual thoughts about the dangers of asteroids strikes? Should the US and / or other governments be spending money to address the problem?
Would like to hear more from Deckard on this. Here's my understanding. 1. What's really tough but not that expensive is to keep improving our ability to *detect* these things. 2. What's really tough and incredibly expensive is to figure out truly viable mitigation strategies. If you detect an enormous asteroid years before it's going to intersect Earth, then yes, there are things we think we could do (super, super expensive things most likely). But how much is humanity willing to spend to save the *maybe* one small or big town selected at random by an asteroid? It seems to me it's best to make sure we can detect and divert something like an extinction event. And by preparing shrewdly for *that*, we would start to address 1&2 for the smaller stuff. It's too bad the world doesn't really collaborate on much of anything but a web of trade agreements.
I get the feeling that nothing major will be done until a major city is actually hit by a meteor. In Rendezvous with Rama Clarke says that humanity doesn't get serious about asteroid detection until one hits Europe killing millions.
