Earth Avoids Collisions With Pair of Asteroids

Whatever flashy headline was used to attract readers to the fact that there are potentially *a lot* of undetected large objects that could wipe us out was worth it.

Well, no. We've been looking pretty closely at the skies for a while now, and the odds that there is an undetected object large enough to threaten extinction are now pretty low. It's the one's in the "oh, crap, we hope this doesn't hit a populated area" that are a problem, but they're pretty rare objects and even rarer events. Such flashy headlines mostly serve to excite the excitable and panic those easily panicked and those who really don't understand the situation at all. The popular press has significantly overstated the threat.
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I mean, this is serious shit, and we are NOT taking it seriously enough. We are seating ducks unless we "diversify our investments", meaning going out there and colonize other planets.

We, as a species, are taking in about as seriously as we can. We're looking for and cataloging the objects and predicting their tracks, and that's about the best we can do for the near future.
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Absent a Manhattan or Apollo level project, we simply can't usefully colonize other planets. With such "waste anything but time"/"near blank check" level projects, we're a century or more away from being able to do so - there's simply too many "unknown unknowns" in creating a colony or system of colonies that can survive if the Earth is wiped out. The odds are far too low to justify to cost.
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Honestly, I'd expect this crowd in Slashdot to really understand the implications.

Understanding the implications is one thing - objectively understanding the overall issues is another.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/FEsL16bBJos/story01.htm

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