Yikes, where’s Paul Ehrlich when you need him? Nature reports that population growth is hitting the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
A new survey by TerraSysems Inc. and the Astrophysical Laboratory in Grenoble, France, estimated there were between 1.1 million and 1.9 million asteroids in the belt. That’s about twice as many as was previously thought.
Of course the biggest concern with asteroids is that one of these might decide to get up close and personal with the Earth someday. In movies typically such asteroids get destroyed or deflected with nuclear weapons, or if you’re the Stargate team you simply pop them in and out of hyperspace (worst. episode. ever.)
But it turns out a realistic way to deflect asteroids would be to alter the amount of sunlight they reflect. It turns out that due to something called the Yarkovsky effect, the momentum of unevenly heated objects is altered by re-radiating heat. Change the amount of light reflected and you could change the course of the asteroid.
One possibility, for example, is to cover the surface of the asteroid in dirt to alter its surface heat conductivity.
Man, I can’t wait to see Bruce Willis do that in a film.
Source:
Asteroids pile up. Meera Lewis, Nature, April 12, 2002.