missed us by that much

Don't worry. Bruce Willis will save us. Well. He and Ben Afleck.

That news article said they basically concentrate on rocks big enough to do serious damage to the planet. Maybe we need a network of amateur astronomers that look for the smaller stuff?

Well I am also haveing a child, pretty much garanteed to be the AbtiChrist and most people havn't noticed either.. Scary isnt it?

"basically concentrate on rocks big enough to do serious damage to the planet."

You know, ordinarily I'm in favor of editing (I do that kind of work myself), but in this case...of course, then the astronomers would be sort of like NSA; buried under too much information.

Maybe the government was trying to avoid riots and unrest. They do have a policy of what the public should and should not know. I wonder if they would tell us if an asteroid (or a nuke) were really just about to hit.

Maybe the government should spend our tax dollars on telescopes instead of bombs.....

It is mostly amateur stargazers that find these close ones. The big telescopes are looking much further out, especially Hubbell. We the people need to have more telescopes cuz we'll be much more effective finding close asteroids than any government. Hey, maybe we could get the government to put a telescope in every backyard!

if i had one in mine, i'd definitely do my duty and be out there stargazing all the time. that would be just heavenly.

you know, toxic, sometimes i wonder --- what could we do if we weren't devoting so much time effort energy money and technology into new ways of killing each other?

I'm with Stacey, the government probably kept everything under wraps until there was no threat. My question is, what if they under-estimated the asteroid's trajectory? We'd have never know what hit us. Fine by me. In this case, ignorance would be better than spending the last few hours or my life freaking out.

it actually wouldn't have killed us all -- it would have done damage like Tunguska, which was what, 800 square miles wiped out? it would have been bad and messy, but not fatal to the entire planet.

you're right, they wouldn't trust us with this sort of knowledge, we'd just panic and go mad and do more damage than the actual spacerock, to each other, in those days.

"At some level, it behooves us to look out for these things," he said.

Ya don't say? Goodness. You're right, though, kd. We'd all panic and the affect would probably be worse than any terror attack could have done to us.

You're welcome.

ok. that's it. i'm movin' to uranus.

I totally agree with Shannon. It's better not to know than to freak out the last few hours of your life.