[dleavitt]

This appears to be a human interest piece (specifically a local Welsh one) rather than science journalism. A quick check of the Wikipedia page for "Asteroid impact avoidance" indicates that this is a well-established and well-funded field, and that the lone hero narrative is for effect only.

It would have been interesting to know what people inside the field think - is it like some areas of astronomy where having lots of amateur eyes on the problem is key? Or is this guy sort of a crank?

[patrickyeon]

Astronomy is one of the few places amateurs still regularly make significant contributions. The Planetary Society has a grant program specifically meant to give financial support to amateurs and professionals doing work in this field.

> The world's professional sky surveys alone cannot handle the burden of finding and tracking the estimated 10 million NEOs larger than 20 meters, the size of the asteroid that hit Chelyabinsk, Russia and caused city-wide damage. That's where our Shoemaker grant winners come in. They find new NEOs, track and measure existing ones, and contribute to the field of asteroid science by determining characteristics like spin rates and whether one asteroid is actually a binary pair.

$440,000 across 62 grants to date.

https://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/neo-grants/

[echelon]

Lots of questions from a layman.

What's our level of confidence that we'll be able to find something that can wipe out cities or civilization?

What's our percentage of detection? Does it vary by size, velocity, and orbit?

How much lead time do we have? Years? Days? Hours?

What can we do about it?

Will we ever attain a complete picture of asteroids in orbit? (Assuming there are no collisions that alter trajectories?)

What's the probability we'll be hit by something big within our lifetime?

[wizzwizz4]

Answers from a layperson, while you wait for a proper answer:

1. Low, and high, respectively.

2. Almost all very big stuff, most big stuff, some medium stuff and very little small stuff, where "medium" is around the size of the Chelyabinsk one (~20m).

3. Decades for very big stuff, years for big stuff, very very variable for everything else.

4. Nothing. Plenty, in theory, but we haven't got around to setting any of it up yet. Knocking them sideways so they miss us is the current best bet, iirc.

5. No.

6. Low, assuming you're not going to live past your 90s (which is a potentially dubious assumption).

[sammalloy]

> this is a well-established and well-funded field

I’ve been following this topic for many decades and I’ve never once heard anyone say that. Last I checked, there were like 30 people on the entire planet looking for NEOs, and they are either volunteering or getting paid very little to do it. I hope that I’m wrong.

[sandworm101]

Also, there are so many objects that the idea of checking them one at a time is not practical. They are best found and tracked by automated systems.