Killer asteroids are a staple of fiction and action cinema. Whenever an asteroid is headed for earth, a daring mission is sent to blow up the asteroid, so it no longer poses any danger. It’s how we would deal with a large rock that threatened to roll down a hill and destroy a village, so it must work for an asteroid too, right?

As you might have guessed, it doesn’t work that way. Unlike on earth, an asteroid is going through space, so blowing it up with a nuke wouldn’t actually change much. It’s still going the same way, its mass is still the same, just in smaller chunks, and now it’s also radioactive.

Actual ways to deflect an asteroid are actually kind of boring. One way would be to just park a spacecraft close to it, so the spacecrafts’ gravity¹, however small, would very slowly influence the course of the asteroid, so it would eventually miss earth².

Another way would be to paint one side of the asteroid white, which then would cause the sun’s photons to transfer more momentum to that side than the rest of the asteroid, which in turn would also slightly change the course. No, really.

But now a new method has been published, and it does involve a nuke, probably to Hollywood’s relief: [Whack ‘em or nuke ‘em: How to deflect a killer asteroid](https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/whack-em-or-nuke-em-how-to-deflect-a-killer-asteroid “Bad Astronomy

Whack ‘em or nuke ‘em: How to deflect a killer asteroid”).

Danger to Humanity

Facebook’s and Google’s constant surveillance of anyone who uses the web has been criticised a lot, especially this year. Their market might gives them power that no one can really imagine. And even Amnesty International is concerned: Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights.

Speedrunning Eight-Thousanders

There are fourteen mountains (on earth) that are higher than 8000 meters. Reinhold Messner was the first person to summit all 14 of them (he did not use supplemental oxygen), taking 16 years to complete this feat. Ever since, people have tried to do it quicker, both with and without supplemental oxygen. And until this month, the fastet person to summit all 14 did it in just under 8 years. Now? Nirmal Purja managed to summit all 14 in just six months.

SUV Mad

SUVs - You either love them, or hate them. Car makers love them, since they sell a lot of them. Their drivers love them for the feeling of security, seat height, and power. Everyone else hates them, and for good reason: They’re statistically less safe for passengers as well as pedestrians, and they consume a lot of gas thanks to their weight. ‘A deadly problem’: should we ban SUVs from our cities?

Eternal Signs

Nuclear power does have its upsides. It does not generate any greenhouse gases, power plants can run a long time with comparatively little fuel, and unlike many renewable energy sources, is impervious to seasonal changes. But the downsides are also well-known. Nuclear waste from a reactor stays dangerous for at least thousands of years. The only solution we’ve found so far to deal with that waste is to bury it. But then you have yet another problem: How do you leave a warning that lasts as long as nuclear waste?

📖 Weekly Longread 📚

“For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?” The Jungle Prince of Delhi

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A Solar Eclipse from the Edge of Space