Incoming Asteroid!: What Could We Do About It?

399 Pages·2014·12.35 MB·English

by  Duncan Lunan (auth.)

Duncan Lunan
Incoming
Asteroid!
What Could We Do
About It?
Astronomers’ Universe
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Duncan Lunan

Incoming Asteroid!
What Could We Do About It?
Duncan Lunan
Troon , Ayrshire , UK
ISSN 1614-659X
ISBN 978-1-4614-8748-7 ISBN 978-1-4614-8749-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-8749-4
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013947790
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To recently absent friends: Iain Banks,
John Braithwaite, Philip Coppens,
Archie Roy
All greatly missed

Preface
The major concept that underlies my published work was thrashed
out between myself and my late friend John Braithwaite over the
winter of 1968–1969, with some input from Charles Muir and oth-
ers. This concept has been the core of almost all my published
work since—all the nonfi ction and almost all the fi ction has been
compatible with it, if not generated or infl uenced by it.
The key concept, as outlined by John Braithwaite, was for a
“Politics of Survival”—a program that would ensure that at least
one viable segment of human life and civilization would survive
any imaginable catastrophe—inevitably requiring the preservation
of other forms of life as well. John and I disagreed pretty strongly
from the outset about how that might be brought about. In particular,
although the concept had sprung from a discussion about asteroid and
cometary impacts, John came to believe that threats from off-planet
should be ignored, to focus on what he considered to be more immedi-
ate ones of human origin. By contrast I felt that we should start with
those, partly because they were cross-party issues and partly because
they were more immediate. In one such argument, he challenged me:
“Seriously, which is the more immediate issue—global starvation or
asteroid impacts?” To which I replied, “Put it this way – if something
a mile across hit the Paci fi c twenty minutes ago, we aren’t going to
fi nish these cups of coffee.”
Completing my own formulation was highly liberating, com-
ing at the end of a decade in which the destruction of humanity
had come to seem increasingly inevitable. But I quickly learned
that the very concept was a long way ahead of its time. At the end
of the 1960s, everyone I spoke to about it was convinced either that
doom was inevitable or that there were no problems at all. Either
way, there was no point in talking about solutions. So I gave up
on talking about it and simply got on with it, within ASTRA, the
vii
viii Preface
Association in Scotland to Research into Astronautics. ASTRA is
the Scottish counterpart of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS)
and was a Scottish branch of the BIS for ten years before becoming
independent as ASTRA in 1963.
In the early 1970s, I ran discussion projects within ASTRA
that became parts of my book Man and the Stars [1] , and a sec-
ond series that became N ew Worlds for Old [2] and M an and the
Planets [3]. The projects were run on Politics of Survival guide-
lines; I simply never mentioned it, and everyone supposed I had
forgotten it, even as they were helping me think it through in more
and more detail. But in 1977, the fi rst of a new series of meet-
ings was scheduled for October 1, which made “October the First
Is Not Too Late” the obvious title, paraphrasing Sir Fred Hoyle.
ASTRA council members Bill Ramsay and Gavin Roberts, backed
up by the late Prof. Oscar Schwiglhofer, the founder of the society,
demanded that I come clean about the Politics of Survival—and to
their amazement, they found that they knew it all already.
After years of my keeping it low-key, in 1986 the late George
Hay approached me with a challenge to write it up for the jour-
nal Science and Public Policy , edited by his colleague Dr. Morris
Goldsmith, where it appeared in February 1987 (see A ppendix 1 )
[4]. My Slovenian friend, the editor Samo Resnik, arranged for it
to be published in translation in a student journal called K atedra
and actually beat S cience and Public Policy into print by a month.
I was asked to launch the concept publicly, in advance of publica-
tion, at the Environmental Sciences Society of the University of
Stirling, but even though S cience and Public Policy very kindly
mailed out 20 copies, at their invitation, to people who I thought
should be interested, there was no feedback at all.
In 2001, ASTRA council member Andy Nimmo proposed that
we devote a special issue of ASTRA’s journal A sgard to the Politics
of Survival. After the events of September 11, 2001, it was agreed
that we would set up a new discussion project on it, dedicating
four issues of the journal to the results, edited by Jamie McLean
and myself with Andy as consultant.
The fi rst issue in March 2002 introduced the Politics of Sur-
vival, and the rest of it was devoted to the impact threat and ways
to counter it. Partly that was for historical reasons, but also it was
because in 1998 ASTRA had become affi liated with Spaceguard
Preface ix
UK, run by Jay Tate and subsequently based at the Spaceguard
Observatory in Powys. Jay was a guest speaker at ASTRA meet-
ings in the Airdrie Arts Centre and in the Central Hotel, Glas-
gow, on March 20 and 21, 1998. We had promised to devote one
of ASTRA’s publications to Spaceguard, and we now ran an intro-
duction to it and a discussion of the impact threat by Jay Tate [5],
followed by an updated reprint of a paper by past president Gordon
Ross and myself on using the “Solaris” solar sail as a comet or
asteroid de fle ctor (see Chap. 5 ) [6].
Bill Ramsay, also a past president of ASTRA, then proposed
that we set up a new project, or a subproject, to address the ques-
tion, “What would we do if we knew there was to be an impact in
ten years’ time?” It led to a fascinating series of meetings, includ-
ing a conference at the Spaceguard Observatory in October 2003
and a seminar in the Bridie Library of Glasgow University Union
in 2012, and the results make up the content of this book.
Troon, Ayrshire, UK Duncan Lunan