Planetary Defense: Global Collaboration for Defending Earth from Asteroids and Comets

496 Pages·2019·12.692 MB·English

by  Nikola Schmidt

Space and Society
Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch
Nikola Schmidt E ditor
Planetary
Defense
Global Collaboration for Defending Earth
from Asteroids and Comets
Space and Society
Series Editor-in-Chief:
Douglas A. Vakoch, METI International, San Francisco, CA, USA
Series Editors:
Setsuko Aoki, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan
Anthony Milligan, King’s College London, London, UK
Beth O’Leary, Department of Anthropology, New Mexico State University, 
Las Cruces, NM, USA
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Nikola Schmidt
Editor
Planetary Defense
Global Collaboration for Defending Earth
from Asteroids and Comets
Editor
Nikola Schmidt
Department of Political Science
Institute of Political Studies
Faculty of Social Sciences
Charles University
Prague, Czech Republic
3D Visualizations of the Multipurpose Lunar Base © Martin Vaněk, AD13
www.ad13.cz
ISSN 2199-3882 ISSN 2199-3890 (electronic)
Space and Society
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The artist’s depiction of the multipurpose Moon base, particularly the section dedicated to
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v
This book is dedicated to the human species
living on Earth in the Milky Way.
Foreword
To the general population, defending planet Earth from fast-moving asteroids and
comets invokes the genre of science fiction rather than the traditional concerns of
national or international security studies. We may be dimly aware of the Tunguska
and Chelyabinsk events of 1908 and 2013, respectively, but the former may sooner
trigger memories of a 1996 X-Files episode than a geostrategic question and the lat-
ter grainy YouTube videos shot from the dash cams of perennially vigilant Russian
drivers. Alternatively, there are the Hollywood blockbuster films Armageddon and
Deep Impact, both of which deal with imminent comet impacts that in the case of
the first are successfully thwarted and, in the second, only partially mitigated, leav-
ing us with a moving popular meditation on human mortality.
The book you hold in your hand (or view on your screen) demonstrates that plan-
etary defense concerns have been the subject of active scientific research and global
governance activity for many years, through cooperative international efforts to sur-
veil and map the orbits of “near-Earth objects” (NEOs) and assess their size; the
research on methods of orbit change and deflection using spacecraft, lasers, and
nuclear weapons; and—just within the last decade—UN-sponsored activity to build
international capacity, dialogue, and coordination, resulting in the formation of an
International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) and a Space Mission Planning
Advisory Group (SMPAG). The 12 observatories linked to the IAWN have identi-
fied some 18,000 NEOs, including 887 objects with diameters of 1 km or larger,
while the SMPAG has recommended that new space missions be tasked with testing
both the “kinetic impactor” and “gravity tractor” techniques for deflection. Indeed,
NASA is currently preparing a kinetic impactor test with the DART mission to the
binary asteroid Didymos in 2021. The testing of nuclear devices in such missions,
which some scientists believe to be the most effective for especially large objects, is
more controversial, raising a number of legal, ethical, and security concerns that
you can read about in the pages below.
With its 27 chapters and about 200,000 words of multidisciplinary scholarship,
this book may well be one of the most comprehensive studies of the near-Earth
object threat across its scientific, technical, astronomical, governance, and ethical
dimensions. You will be able to learn about our technical capacities for finding and
ix
x Foreword
monitoring planetary bodies, the scale and likelihood of the potential threat, e volving
structures of international cooperation, planetary defense methods, the international
law shaping and governing various activities, and futuristic proposals for new kinds
of world governance and cooperative space activity. The careful and expert quality
of its authors’ scholarship, and the integrative analytical power of the book, is an
impressive achievement.
For now, the NEO threat appears minimal, but, if the impact does occur and the
object is large enough or strikes a populated area, it could have devastating conse-
quences. The 1908 Tunguska event,1 in which a comet over 100 m wide exploded
over a wilderness area with an estimated force of 3–5 megatons of TNT (equivalent
to a midsized hydrogen bomb), destroyed two thousand km2 of forest. Had it
exploded over a city, millions would have been killed. As David Morrison explains,
objects over 1 km in size could have global effects similar to a nuclear winter, while
mass extinction is possible at still larger sizes. The 10 km-wide asteroid that
impacted in prehistoric Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years
ago triggered the Earth’s fifth mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and
75% of the Earth’s species. While no significantly big NEOs have yet been found
traveling on an Earth-impact trajectory, tens of thousands remain undiscovered. It is
undoubtedly a serious question for the world’s security and survival.
Two particular foci of this book are especially valuable and important. The first
is its treatment of the issue as a problem for international security and for security
studies. I certainly agree with Nikola Schmidt that the nature of this threat cannot
be effectively understood or addressed within the framework of national security
or alliance politics; it must thus bring us into a space of not merely global but plan-
etary security concern. Given that national and even international security archi-
tectures are so distorted and compromised—what with ideologically fueled
disarray within NATO, Russia, and the Middle East and the UN Security Council
ever more paralyzed by great power geopolitics—and given that space is consid-
ered a special zone that ideally should not be militarized, existing security concepts
and architectures are gravely inadequate. As a number of contributors note, this
raises serious fears about the collateral damage that would ensue should one or a
number of countries decide to “go it alone” either in long-term or short-term prepa-
rations for a potential NEO strike. This raises the question of what moral and ethi-
cal frameworks should govern the way governments think about planetary security
and create mechanisms to deal with it—whether that be in terms of prevention
missions or subsequent response to the damage and disaster that may come from a
NEO impact event.
This is the second great strength of this book: its argument that the planetary
nature of both the NEO threat and governance challenge necessitates a global and
cosmopolitan framework for security governance and policy. It has indeed been
1 Whether the Tunguska 1908 event was caused by an asteroid or a comet, and how wide the object
was, is a living scientific question. The most recent meeting about the topic was the Tunguska
Workshop at NASA Ames Research Center in January 2018. The results will be published in
Icarus, March 2019 (note by the editor).
Foreword xi
intriguing to see my own theory of “Security Cosmopolitanism” (alongside like
thinkers such as Mary Kaldor, Ulrich Beck, and Ken Booth) advanced in these
pages as a valuable framework for action and planning. This theory was first pub-
lished in 2013, around the same time that the UN General Assembly voted to estab-
lish the asteroid warning network and the mission planning group. Even if more
traditionally globalized insecurities such as poverty, refugees, climate change,
nuclear weapons, and conflict had been uppermost in my mind, I can see the strong
relevance of the cosmopolitan approach to the problem of planetary defense. One
important aspect of this viewpoint that the book recognizes is that it is not merely
the entirety of humanity that must be our fundamental security objective but also the
myriad life forms and systems that make up the Earth’s biosphere. It thus pushes us
toward both a planetary and an ecocentric vision of common security.
Security cosmopolitanism was framed as a morally and strategically rigorous
answer to a range of globalized systems of insecurity. Its idealism rests on a vision
of common humanity and global purpose in which every human being and the eco-
systems we depend on are equally worthy of being secured into a long-term future.
Its realism rests on an understanding that contemporary insecurities are structural in
nature and transcend national borders, often emerging from within our states and
systems, and must be addressed through cooperative transnational efforts to trans-
form those systems. I feel that Nikola Schmidt and Frank White are right to point to
the importance of a cosmopolitan idealism for thinking about planetary defense,
one prompted by the “overview effect” of orbiting the Earth or indeed retreating
from it to such a distance that we gain an appreciation, as Carl Sagan reminded us,
of the smallness and vulnerability of planet Earth and of our humble place as “a
lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”
Yet, security cosmopolitanism is more than idealist impetus; it is a standard
and a warning that also takes its cues from this paean to human humility. One
cannot take just any policy or technical decision—however international its gen-
esis—and justify it on the basis of its cosmopolitan idealism or intent, as the
liberal internationalists did when arguing for war against Iraq to “rescue” its citi-
zens from Saddam Hussein. Effects, complexity, and consequences also matter.
This is why I would not automatically endorse every new proposal for cosmo-
politan global governance, a norm of the responsibility to defend Earth, or new
space missions such as asteroid mining, without careful consideration and after
rich and informed global deliberation that goes well beyond philosophers and
experts. The concept of the Planetary Council certainly has those deliberative
virtues and is worth exploring with some seriousness. Such creative proposals
must be assessed (and if implemented, then reviewed) against the ethical tests
proposed by security cosmopolitanism, as should the decisions that are made by
any new deliberative body.
Will such proposals advance the security of humanity and the biosphere without
discrimination? Will they ensure the security of future generations and the long-
term integrity and survival of ecosystems? Are we sure that our actions will have
positive consequences that can be borne by the world as a whole? As I argued in