Tony Milligan: There are many home problems on earth, but there is still time to worry about bad things come from above. The latest is the Asteroid 2024 YR4, which can be a “killer of the city” if it hits the strongly populated area of our planet in the early years of the next decade.
The chances that this will happen is estimated at about 0.001%. But after the asteroid discovery, it took place last year, when the estimated danger of direct hit exceeded 1% of the threshold of comfortable risk.
It is necessary to worry about planetary defense if we are to avoid the path of dinosaurs. But there are many other things that could kill us, including climate and war change. So what is in the space that attracts our attention? And how do these fears affect us – individually and as a society?
In the long run, something great will hit us, unless we can redirect them. Responsibility for preparation begins with us.
However, preparation also carries a risk. Daniel Deudney, a professor of political sciences at Johns Hopkins University in the USA, warned that technologies used to defend planetary can not only lead asteroids away from Earth – they can also lead them as a tool in military conflict.
As explained in his book Dark Skies, the Dudney solution is to reverse, regulate and give up most of our human activities in space for several centuries.
He believes that the more we do in space, the more likely they will end in a catastrophic conflict. “Avoiding a disaster of civilization and extinction of species now depends on the recognition of what not to do, and then make sure that it has not been done,” he writes.
Ultimately, he claims that the extension of the space came too early and we must reverse the process until we are ready. To say, he thinks that we can still need some form of planetary defense, but it may be confined.
Holding for centuries is, however, an unlikely option. The chances of a asteroid strike may be too high. And political interest in expanding space is irreversible at this point.
Fear of space increased with space programs. He is worried about asteroid strikes and excessive militarization bends into deeper fears of space as unknown. However, they also bend into worries about the self -destructive side of humanity.
Both fears are very senior. One of our earliest human stories, a story about a cosmic hunt reaching at least 15,000 years, combines these two.
The indigenous version, which survived in Scandinavia, describes how a great hunt in the sky would not be mistaken if Hunter is impatient and fires an arrow that does not lose his goal and accidentally strikes the star of the pole. It would bring a canopy of the night sky that crashed to the ground. Again, fears of erroneous human actions and a threat in advance.
We see this in contemporary technological fears such as Ufology. Some hefty believers in UFOs are not only concerned about hostile guests, but also about secret cooperation among scientists on Earth or the whole plot to keep the truth in front of the audience.
Without faith in a plot aimed at suppressing evidence, the whole idea falls apart. But without the conviction that there is in fact something to fear from space, there is nothing that the conspiracy can be. Fear of space is a necessary part of this picture.
This is an idea carefully captured recently by the Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu, who compares the space to the “dark forest”, in which foreign civilizations try to hide from each other.
All this assumes something about bunker mentality, excessive land and space or heaven and soil. This is something I called above ground prejudice. The impact allows you to look like space as threatening outside, not something that we are also part.
Foreign viruses
The rationalization of such fear changes and is not confined to asteroids, aliens, meteors and uncontrolled military conflict. There is even a theory that viruses come from space.
When Covid Skeptics was looking for an idea to explain why wearing the mask was pointless, what many of them struck was a vague theory developed by Astrophysics by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe in 1979.
The duo eventually had a good idea that followed the bad idea. A good idea was that the elements of the appearance of life could come from space. The bad idea was that they came ready to create as viruses and bacteria, and that they were still coming.
According to this theory, the well-known pandems from the past (such as the deadly pandemic of the influenza from 1918, and even epidemics in archaic times) were apparently the result of viruses from space and could not be the result of transferring a person to personal-at least all of the asymptomatic carriers.
The Covid version concerned the explosion of the meteor over China. In an interview with Wickramsinghe, he stated that “a piece of this car containing billions of Covid-19 virus broke away from Bolide when he entered the stratosphere”, releasing viral particles, which were then transported through the dominant winds.
The idea illustrates the way the fears of space are used for fears related to human defects or offenses. Since then, skepticism has moved to the White House.
But concerns about space can also be used to criticize people in power. In our time, they are used to drive a narrative about billionaires with private cosmic programs and presidential access, wealthy cosmic tourists and yet wealthy prospective colonizers of Mars and more. It is a tempting narrative, but the one that sees the Earth as a closed system that should not be opened outside.
At a certain level, we can be afraid of the space itself. We certainly have an exaggerated sense of our earthly separateness from this. And there are some special things we are to worry about.
However, there is a risk that fear of space can connect with suspicions about government, which leads us to adopting conspiracy theories as a way to consolidate various types of worries in one, a mastered set of beliefs.
Tony Milligan, researcher of ethics philosophy, King's College London
This article is published from Conversation under the Creative Commons license. Read Original article.
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