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There's no need to panic; NASA and FEMA have a plan to respond to a potential asteroid collision:
It's a scary scenario: an asteroid headed for Earth, just four years away from slamming into our home planet. It may be too short a span to plan an asteroid-deflection mission, but it's long enough to present very different challenges from those of a more typical crisis, like a hurricane or earthquake.
NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came together Oct. 25 to plan a response to such a hypothetical event. In a "tabletop exercise," a kind of ongoing simulation, the two agencies tested how they would work together to evaluate the threat, prevent panic and protect as many people as possible from the deadly collision.
"It's not a matter of if, but when, we will deal with such a situation," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Science Mission Directorate's new associate administrator, said in a statement. "But unlike any other time in our history, we now have the ability to respond to an impact threat through continued observations, predictions, response planning and mitigation."
Also at JPL.
(Score: 2) by seeprime on Monday November 07 2016, @01:57PM
FEMA will be incapable of taking care of survivors of a serious asteroid collision with earth, assuming that there is a functioning FEMA. Politics will screw up everything. Who will pay when there is no money available, should help be possible?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Monday November 07 2016, @04:58PM
I'm not an american, but with what i heard about the New Orleans fiasco, isn't FEMA most likely to try saving rich white people and basically ignore black people unless they have ooodles of cash?
Their plan is probably: rich white people move to the right: we'll call you heads, everyone else to the left: you're tails... now, let's flip a coin to see who gets to go to a safe place. Yes, this coin is a 2 headed one: what's wrong with that?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 07 2016, @07:56PM
I don't have a lot of confidence in FEMA. I've heard of several cases where they appear to have made things worse, and concentrated on preventing others from helping. I'm not sure they're always that bad, but they sure are sometimes. And now they appear to have been joined by "Homeland Security", which to me still sounds Nazi, and doesn't have much of a record of doing any good...though they've certainly done a lot of bad.
OTOH, this is probably just a PR puff piece, and doesn't really mean anything. I'm much more concerned about their preparations for a zombie attack, which to me looks like preparation against a citizen uprising.
That said, civil war is a really bad idea. The government has to be a lot worse than it is before that starts looking like a good idea. But why does it keep getting ready for one, and taking actions that appear to be deliberately provocative? It's as if some in government think that their goal is to make the government enough worse that it stops looking like a bad idea.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.