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As major disasters go, asteroid impacts are one of the few, which are theoretically preventable, provided we had enough advance notice. Some schemes call for merely painting the asteroid white, and relying on radiation pressure from the sun, to change its' orbit enough to miss us.
Step zero, is to see the asteroid first, so I was thrilled to see, some recent progress on this front.
"Based on the geologic record and what we know about the NEO (near earth orbit) population, the probability of a catastrophic event is quite low. A Tunguska-scale event might occur once every few centuries. Impactors as large as the 10-km-diameter object that finished off the dinosaurs very rarely collide with Earth, just once every 100 million years or so.
But of course, these are just average rates. The next asteroid with the potential to level a city might not hit Earth for hundreds of years; it could also arrive tomorrow. The only thing we can say with certainty is that there will be more collisions in our future."
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 06 2015, @11:02PM
Well, the asteroids most likely to hit Earth are probably those that are already in co-orbit, such as those migrating back and fourth between our L4 and L5 points. So capturing it would probably mostly be a case of adjusting it's path so that it gets caught by a gravitational slingshot with the moon.
Plus, the last I heard the operating theory was that most of the asteroids we'd be interested in mining are already pretty much pure resources. After all water and iron (rocket fuel and construction) are probably the most long-term valuable resources to have in orbit. Gold, platinum, etc., might help pay back you initial investment, but they're basically useless.