[stupidcar]

Elon Musk trying to save humanity from going extinct as a "one planet species" and in the process causing us to miss a near-Earth asteroid whose impact wipes us out would be rather ironic.

[gitfan86]

The ironic thing would be if we detected a large asteroid and had no way of deflecting it in time because we had shutdown SpaceX in an attempt to better find smaller asteroids.

[sschueller]

Or we can't launch anything to save us because of Kessler event caused by startlink sometime back.

[ZetaZero]

LOL. Unfortunately, we still are not in any position to do anything about any detected asteroid.

[panick21_]

Of course we are, if we would spend the money.

[danieldrehmer]

Humans had no NEO monitoring for about 500k years, we'll do ok for a few years of diminished capacity

[kaba0]

Dinosaurs didn’t have one either and are still doing… ooh

[sschueller]

Sadly that is what happens when you blindly follow someone without ever questioning their doctrine.

[netsec_burn]

We've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our solar system [1]. There are smaller ones that won't end life on Earth that are still concerning, but the quandary is we have almost nothing to do even if we detected a threat from an asteroid.

[1] https://youtu.be/4Wrc4fHSCpw

[Qem]

Only in the near planetary region of the solar system. There's lots of comets with very long periods we didn't detect yet, because their last visit to the inner solar system was centuries or even millennia ago.

[gitfan86]

If only someone was trying to build a spaceship company that could launch massive payloads everyday.

[ceejayoz]

> We've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our solar system.

We really haven't. We found Sedna in 2003. Makemake and Eris in 2005.