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***Asteroids Case Neg******Asteroids Case Neg***......................................................................................................................................1Strat Sheet................................................................................................................................................................2**Heg Advantage F/L JM module**......................................................................................................................3A2 Leadership Scn...................................................................................................................................................3A2 Competitiveness.................................................................................................................................................7***A2 Impact Advantage (jm)***........................................................................................................................10A2 Nuclear Fallout................................................................................................................................................10A2 Environmental Destruction..............................................................................................................................11***A2 Probability adv***.....................................................................................................................................13***A2 Asteroids Advantage (QQ)***..................................................................................................................14A/2 Heg..................................................................................................................................................................152NC xt Heg............................................................................................................................................................172NC Competitiveness xt........................................................................................................................................182NC Nuclear Fallout adv.......................................................................................................................................192NC Environmental Destruction...........................................................................................................................202NC Probability Xt................................................................................................................................................212NC Asteroids Advantage xt.................................................................................................................................222NC Space Weapons Advantage xt.......................................................................................................................23Ptx Links................................................................................................................................................................24SQUO solves.........................................................................................................................................................26Detect, not Deflect CP...........................................................................................................................................26International CP.....................................................................................................................................................28Aff is Bad Science.................................................................................................................................................29Dual use Link.........................................................................................................................................................33

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Strat SheetLab leaders: I cut bennet. Org/ul coming sundayJM Asteroids:Heg— Leadership (they claim NEO detection is uq key—but their ev doesn’t back this up) => Thayer

Competitiveness (plan increases, k2 heg,=>Ferguson)“Impact”—

Nuclear Fallout (squo detection wont see it until it is too late, the nuke we fire will radiate earth)Environmental Destruction (laundry list of improbable impx)

“Probability”---These are really just pre-empts

-big impx o/w probability- solvency deficit to CP means aff vote b/c of big impx

noplanUs key?

Qq:Contention 1:

Probability literatureSome stuff about china. No idea why its there.

Contention 2: HegChina will strike (marginal ev) Econ collapse -> meadNot very strong internal linkwiseFed key warrant isn’tPlan: the USFG should develop technologies that detect and deflect Near Earth Objects

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**Heg Advantage F/L JM module**A2 Leadership Scn

1) Their Young et Al card is the report about a commission advocating the adaptation of the NSS. The NSS has been implemented, solving leadership.2) Their Dinerman evidence’s only warrant is that other countries are slower than the US in implementation. If we prove that other countries are fielding systems, their fed key warrant does not apply.3) Impact empirically denied and TURN: Russia tried plan, increasing risk of Asteroid ImpactHsu 10 (Jeremy Hsu writes for the magazine Popular Science, 1/4/10, gd, http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-01/russia-wants-launch-armageddon-style-mission-deflect-asteroid)

Leave it to Russia to jumpstart the long-debated idea of deflecting killer asteroids that might threaten Earth. A top Russian space official announced just prior to the New Year that he wants to put together a mission for heading off the space rock Apophis, which represents a poster child of sorts for the risk of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). But NASA astronomers caution that a failed deflection attempt could simply make matters worse.Anatoly Perminov, head of Russia's Federal Space Agency, told Golos Rossi radio that he had heard from a scientist of a possible Apophis collision with Earth in 2036. NASA currently puts the Apophis collision risk during that swingby at just a three-in-a-million chance, or about 1-in-333,000."People's lives are at stake," Perminov said. "We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people."Perminov did not provide details about how a spacecraft might nudge the 900-foot-long asteroid aside, but did say that Russia would not use nukes (and presumably also wouldn't enlist a oil rig crew for the job). Scientists and NASA astronauts alike have proposed various schemes, such as gravity tractors, for protecting Earth against an Armageddon or Deep Impact threat. NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office saw Russia's interest as a good sign, even as it emphasized that Apophis presents very little risk. But Paul Chodas, a member of that NASA office and an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told SPACE.com that an attempted deflection carries its own risks -- failure might push the space rock into a more dangerous path.

3) Their Vieru evidence gives no warrant as to why US leadership is KEY, just as to why it is good.4) Their Leadership Scenario is empirically denied: the US fights Solar flares, andSolar Flares destroy the economy, knocks out electrical grid, kills thousands all staring in 2013Vastag 11 (Brian Vastag, June 21, 2011, reporter for the Washington Post “Sunburst could be a big blow” The Washington Post, lexis)

The sun is waking up. And on June 7, it woke up Michael Hesse. At 5:49 a.m., the solar scientist received an alert on his smartphone. NASA spacecraft had seen a burst of X-rays spinning out from a sunspot. The burst was a solar flare - and a "notably large one" at that, Hesse said later. The sun has been quiet for years, at the nadir of its activity cycle. But since February, our star has been spitting out flares and plasma like an angry dragon. It's Hesse's job to watch these eruptions.If a big one were headed our way, Hesse needed to know, and fast, so he could alert the electric power industry to brace for a geomagnetic storm that could knock some of the North American power grid offline. Hesse gathered his team at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, where he is chief of the Space Weather Laboratory, and fed the latest data from four sun-staring satellites into powerful computers.At 7:49 Hesse got his answer. An animated chart traced the predicted path of a huge arc of plasma - hot gas - hurtling through the inner solar system. But only the tail of the plume would lick Earth, arriving June 9 and driving a dazzling display of the northern lights from Alaska through Maine.While a video of the eruption captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory showed an enormous plume spraying from the sun, this solar tantrum would not be the big one - it would not be the 1859 event all over again.Sept. 1 of that year saw the largest solar flare on record, witnessed by British astronomer Richard Carrington. While tracing features of the sun's surface, which Carrington had projected via telescope onto paper, he saw a sudden flash emerge from a dark spot. Although such sunspots had sparked curiosity for centuries - Galileo famously drew them, too, in the early 1600s - Carrington had no idea what the flash could mean.Within hours, telegraph operators found out. Their long strands of wire acted as antennas for this huge wave of solar energy. As this tsunami sped by, transmitters heated up, and several burst into flames. Observers in Miami and Havana gaped skyward at eerie green and yellow displays, the northern lights pushed far south. Such a "Carrington event" will happen again someday, but our wired civilization will suffer losses far greater than a few telegraph shacks.Communications satellites will be knocked offline. Financial transactions, timed and transmitted via those satellite, will fail, causing millions or billions in losses. The GPS system will go wonky.<CARD CONTINUES NO TEXT DELETED CARD CONTINUES NO TEXT DELETED CARD CONTINUES >

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A2 leadership scn [2/] Astronauts on the space station will huddle in a shielded module, as they have done three times in the past decade due to "space weather," the scientific term for all of the sun's freaky activity. Flights between North America and Asia, over the North Pole, will have to be rerouted, as they were in April during a weak solar storm at a cost to the airlines of $100,000 a flight. And oil pipelines, particularly in Alaska and Canada, will suffer corrosion as they, like power lines, conduct electricity from the solar storm.But the biggest impact will be on the modern marvel known as the power grid. And experts warn that the grid is not ready. In 2008, the National Academy of Sciences stated that an 1859-level storm could knock out power in parts of the northeastern and northwestern United States for months, even years. Report co-author John Kappenmann estimated that about 135 million Americans would be forced to revert to a pre-electric lifestyle or relocate. Water systems would fail. Food would spoil. Thousands could die. The financial cost: Up to $2 trillion, one-seventh the annual U.S. gross domestic product.Utilities say they're studying the issue, with an eye toward understanding how to protect the grid by powering down sections of it during an hours-long solar storm.Their efforts are motivated, in part, by the sun's increasingly frequent outbursts. Every 11 to 12 years, solar activity ramps up. After a quiet season, the sun is now spitting out flares again, with activity expected to peak in 2013 and 2014, said Dean Pesnell, a solar scientist at Goddard."The sun is not partisan, it doesn't listen to diplomacy, and sanctions don't work," said Peter Huessy, president of GeoStrategic Analysis. Huessy wants Congress to enact rules that would force power companies to better protect the power grid. "The sun has its own clock. And we don't know what that clock is, except for once every hundred years or so, it has a coronary."

4) No link to Thayer—their Vieru evidence is about space leadership, Thayer writes about the military.5) Collapse is inevitable – the transition to multipolarity will be peaceful if the US accedes Schweller 10 (Robert Schweller is a professor of Poli Sci at OSU, Jan/Feb 10, Lexis: “ Ennui Becomes Us”)

The messiness of this state of affairs contradicts a rare consensus in the field of international relations that concentrated power in the hands of one dominant state is essential to the establishment and maintenance of international order. According to the theory, the demand for international regimes is high but their supply is low because only the leadership of a hegemonic state can overcome the collective-action problems-mainly the huge start-up costs-associated with the creation of order-producing global institutions. The current world has turned this logic on its head. The problem is the virtual absence of barriers to entry. Most new treaty-making and global-governance institutions are being spearheaded not by an elite club of great powers but rather by civil-society actors and nongovernmental organizations working with midlevel states. Far from creating more order and predictability, this explosion of so-called global-governance institutions has increased the chaos, randomness, fragmentation, ambiguity and impenetrable complexity of international politics. Indeed, the labyrinthine structure of global governance is more complex than most of the problems it is supposed to be solving. And countries' views are more rigidly held than ever before. ALAS, AS entropy increases within a closed system, available or "useful" energy dissipates and diffuses to a state of equal energy among particles. The days of unipolarity are numbered. We will witness instead a deconcentration of power that eventually moves the system to multipolarity and a restored balance. It will not, however, be a normal global transition. Great powers will not build up arms and form alliances. They will not use war to improve their positions in the international pecking order. They will not seek relative-power advantages. That is because they no longer have to obsess over how others are doing-much less over their own survival, which is essentially assured in today's world of unprecedented peace. States will instead be primarily concerned with doing well for themselves. What they will do is engage in economic competition. The law of uneven economic growth among states and the diffusion of technology will cause a deconcentration of global power. Global equilibrium in this new environment is a spontaneously generated outcome among states seeking to maximize their absolute wealth, not military power or political influence over others. The pace of these diffusion processes has increased during the digital age because what distinguishes economies today is no longer capital and labor-now mere commodities-but rather ideas and energy. Information entropy is creating fierce corporate competition. Our creeping sameness hasn't led us to the mythical natural harmony of interests in the world that international liberalism seems to take for granted. To the contrary, it's a jungle out there. Global communication networks and rapid technological innovation have forced competitive firms to abandon the end-to-end vertical business model and adopt strategies of dynamic specialization, connectivity through outsourcing and process networks, and leveraged capability building across institutional boundaries. They have also caused public policies to converge in the areas of deregulation, trade liberalization and market liberalization. All of these trends have combined to create relentlessly intensifying competition on a global scale.4 So while we may indeed be looking more alike, what

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A2 leadership [3/]precisely are the traits that we share? Sameness in the "flat" world, where the main business challenge is not profitability but mere survival, breeds cutthroat competitors no more likely to live in harmony with each other than the unfortunate inhabitants of Hobbes's state of nature. So, instead of shooting wars and arms buildups, we will see intense corporate competition with firms engaging in espionage, information warfare (such as the hiring of "big gun" hackers) and guerilla marketing strategies. IN TERMS of the global balance of power, the rapid diffusion of knowledge and technology is driving down America's edge in productive capacity and, as a consequence, its overall power position. Indeed, the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way-roughly from West to East-is without precedent in modern history in terms of size, speed and directional flow. If these were the only processes at work, then the future of international politics might well conform to the benign, orthodox liberal vision of a cooperative, positive-sum game among states operating within a system that places strict limits on the returns to power. But this is not to be because, in a break from old-world great-power politics, there will be no hegemonic war to wipe the international slate clean. We will therefore be stuck with the bizarre mishmash of global-governance institutions that now creates an ineffectual foreign-policy space. Trying to overhaul existing institutions to accommodate rising powers and address today's complex issues is an impossible task. So while liberals are correct to point out that the boom in global economic growth over the past two decades has allowed countries to move up the ladder of growth and prosperity, this movement, combined with a moribund institutional superstructure, creates a destabilizing disjuncture between power and prestige that will eventually make the world more confrontational. The question arises, with hegemonic war no longer in the cards, how can a new international order that reflects these tectonic shifts be forged? Aside from a natural disaster of massive proportions (a cure most likely worse than the disease itself), there is no known force that can fix the problem. THE PRIMARY cause of these tectonic shifts is American decline. Hegemonic decline is inevitable because unchecked power tends to overextend itself and succumb to the vice of imperial overstretch; because the hegemon overpays for international public goods, such as security, while its free-riding competitors underpay for them; and because its once-hungry society becomes soft and decadent, engaging in self-destructive hedonism and overconsumption. In recent years, the America-in-decline debate of the 1980s and early 1990s has reemerged with a vengeance. Despite the fact that the United States is the lone superpower with unrivaled command of air, sea and space, there is a growing chorus of observers proclaiming the end of American primacy. Joining the ranks of these "declinists," Robert Pape forcefully argued in these pages that "America is in unprecedented decline," having lost 30 percent of its relative economic power since 2000.5 To be sure, the macrostatistical picture of the United States is a bleak one. Its savings rate is zero; its currency is sliding to new depths; it runs huge current-account, trade and budget deficits; its medium income is flat; its entitlement commitments are unsustainable; and its once-unrivaled capital markets are now struggling to compete with Hong Kong and London. The staggering costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with the financial bailout and stimulus packages doled out in response to the subprime-mortgage and financial-credit crises, have battered the U.S. economy, opening the door for peer competitors to make substantial relative gains. The current bear market ranks among the worst in history, with the Dow and S&P down almost 50 percent from their 2007 peaks. The major cause of our troubles, both in the short and long term, is debt: the United States is borrowing massively to finance current consumption. America continues to run unprecedented trade deficits with its only burgeoning peer competitor, China, which, based on current trajectories, is predicted to surpass the United States as the world's leading economic power by 2040. As of July 2009, Washington owed Beijing over $800 billion, meaning that every person in the "rich" United States has, in effect, borrowed about $3,000 from someone in the "poor" People's Republic of China over the past decade.6 But this devolution of America's status is truly inevitable because of the forces of entropy. No action by U.S. leaders can prove a viable counterweight. AND AS power devolves throughout the international system, new actors will emerge and develop to compete with states as power centers. Along these lines, Richard Haass claims that we have entered an "age of nonpolarity," in which states "are being challenged from above, by regional and global organizations; from below, by militias; and from the side, by a variety of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and corporations." Of course, there is nothing especially new about this observation; cosmopolitan liberals have been pronouncing (prematurely, in my view) the demise of the nation-state-the so-called "hollow state" and a crisis of state power-and the rise of nonstate actors for many decades. What is new is that even state-centric realists like Fareed Zakaria are now predicting a post-American world, in which international order is no longer a matter decided solely by the political and military power held by a single hegemon or even a group of leading states. Instead, the coming world will be governed by messy ad hoc arrangements composed of a la carte multilateralism and networked interactions among state and nonstate actors. One wonders what order and concerted action mean in a world that lacks fixed and predictable structures and relationships. Given the haphazard and incomplete manner by which the vacuum of lost state power is being filled, why expect order at all? THE MACROPICTURE that emerges from these global trends is one of historically unprecedented change in a direction consistent with increasing

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A2 leadership scn [4/]entropy: unprecedented hegemonic decline; an unprecedented transfer of wealth, knowledge and economic power from West to East; unprecedented information flows; and an unprecedented rise in the number and kinds of important actors. Thus, the onset of this extreme multipolarity or multi-multipolarity will not herald, as some observers believe, a return to the past. To the contrary, it will signal that maximum entropy is setting in, that the ultimate state of inert uniformity and unavailable energy is coming, that time does have a direction in international politics and that there is no going back because the initial conditions of the system have been lost forever. If and when we reach such a point in time, much of international politics as we know it will have ended. Its deep structure of anarchy-the lack of a sovereign arbiter to make and enforce agreements among states-will remain. But increasing entropy will result in a world full of fierce international competition and corporate warfare; continued extremism; low levels of trust; the formation of nonstate identities that frustrate purposeful and concerted national actions; and new nongeographic political spaces that bypass the state, favor low-intensity-warfare strategies and undermine traditional alliance groupings. Most important, entropy will reduce and diffuse usable power in the system, dramatically reshaping the landscape of international politics. The United States will see its relative power diminish, while others will see their power rise. To avoid crises and confrontation, these ongoing tectonic changes must be reflected in the superstructure of international authority. Increasing entropy, however, means that the antiquated global architecture will only grow more and more creaky and resistant to overhaul. No one will know where authority resides because it will not reside anywhere; and without authority, there can be no governance of any kind. The already-overcrowded and chaotic landscape will continue to be filled with more meaningless stuff; and the specter of international cooperation, if it was ever anything more than an apparition, will die a slow but sure death.

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A2 Competitiveness1) Their Huston Chronicle evidence is about NASA—the private sector is beating even ChinaMusk, 11, Elon Musk is an industrial Entrepreneur, also known for PayPal, and CEO of SpaceX, 5/4/11, gd, http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

Whenever someone proposes to do something that has never been done before, there will always be skeptics. So when I started SpaceX, it was not surprising when people said we wouldn’t succeed. But now that we’ve successfully proven Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon, there’s been a steady stream of misinformation and doubt expressed about SpaceX’s actual launch costs and prices. As noted last month by a Chinese government official, SpaceX currently has the best launch prices in the world and they don’t believe they can beat them. This is a clear case of American innovation trumping lower overseas labor rates. I recognize that our prices shatter the historical cost models of government-led developments, but these prices are not arbitrary, premised on capturing a dominant share of the market, or “teaser” rates meant to lure in an eager market only to be increased later. These prices are based on known costs and a demonstrated track record, and they exemplify the potential of America's commercial space industry. Here are the facts: The price of a standard flight on a Falcon 9 rocket is $54 million. We are the only launch company that publicly posts this information on our website (www.spacex.com). We have signed many legally binding contracts with both government and commercial customers for this price (or less). Because SpaceX is so vertically integrated, we know and can control the overwhelming majority of our costs. This is why I am so confident that our performance will increase and our prices will decline over time, as is the case with every other technology. The average price of a full-up NASA Dragon cargo mission to the International Space Station is $133 million including inflation, or roughly $115m in today’s dollars, and we have a firm, fixed price contract with NASA for 12 missions. This price includes the costs of the Falcon 9 launch, the Dragon spacecraft, all operations, maintenance and overhead, and all of the work required to integrate with the Space Station. If there are cost overruns, SpaceX will cover the difference. (This concept may be foreign to some traditional government space contractors that seem to believe that cost overruns should be the responsibility of the taxpayer.) The total company expenditures since being founded in 2002 through the 2010 fiscal year were less than $800 million, which includes all the development costs for the Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon. Included in this $800 million are the costs of building launch sites at Vandenberg, Cape Canaveral and Kwajalein, as well as the corporate manufacturing facility that can support up to 12 Falcon 9 and Dragon missions per year. This total also includes the cost of five flights of Falcon 1, two flights of Falcon 9, and one up and back flight of Dragon. The Falcon 9 launch vehicle was developed from a blank sheet to first launch in four and half years for just over $300 million. The Falcon 9 is an EELV class vehicle that generates roughly one million pounds of thrust (four times the maximum thrust of a Boeing 747) and carries more payload to orbit than a Delta IV Medium. The Dragon spacecraft was developed from a blank sheet to the first demonstration flight in just over four years for about $300 million. Last year, SpaceX became the first private company, in partnership with NASA, to successfully orbit and recover a spacecraft. The spacecraft and the Falcon 9 rocket that carried it were designed, manufactured and launched by American workers for an American company. The Falcon 9/Dragon system, with the addition of a launch escape system, seats and upgraded life support, can carry seven astronauts to orbit, more than double the capacity of the Russian Soyuz, but at less than a third of the price per seat. SpaceX has been profitable every year since 2007, despite dramatic employee growth and major infrastructure and operations investments. We have over 40 flights on manifest representing over $3 billion in revenues. These are the objective facts, confirmed by external auditors. Moreover, SpaceX intends to make far more dramatic reductions in price in the long term when full launch vehicle reusability is achieved. We will not be satisfied with our progress until we have achieved this long sought goal of the space industry. For the first time in more than three decades, America last year began taking back international market-share in commercial satellite launch. This remarkable turn-around was sparked by a small investment NASA made in SpaceX in 2006 as part of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. A unique public-private partnership, COTS has proven that under the right conditions, a properly incentivized contractor — even an all-American one — can develop extremely complex systems on rapid timelines and a fixed-price basis, significantly beating historical industry-standard costs. China has the fastest growing economy in the world. But the American free enterprise system, which allows anyone with a better mouse-trap to compete, is what will ensure that the United States remains the world’s greatest superpower of innovation.

2) Their Garretson evidence is non-uniqued by private sector advances

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A2 Competitiveness 2/3) No link to Segal—innovation is not needed for plan, 30 million is not nearly enough to trigger the link anyway. This problem of magnitude is emblematic of the math of competitiveness theoristsYour competitiveness theorists are wrong on their mathPaul Krugman, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March/April 1994, Foreign Affairs, http://www.pkarchive.org/global/pop.html

One of the remarkable, startling features of the vast literature on competitiveness is the repeated tendency of highly intelligent authors to engage in what may perhaps most tactfully be described as "careless arithmetic." Assertions are made that sound like quantifiable pronouncements about measurable magnitudes, but the writers do not actually present any data on these magnitudes and thus fail to notice that the actual numbers contradict their assertions. Or data are presented that are supposed to support an assertion, but the writer fails to notice that his own numbers imply that what he is saying cannot be true. Over and over again one finds books and articles on competitiveness that seem to the unwary reader to be full of convincing evidence but that strike anyone familiar with the data as strangely, almost eerily inept in their handling of the numbers. Some examples can best illustrate this point. Here are three cases of careless arithmetic, each of some interest in its own right.

4) Competition theory is flawed: countries economic gains are mutually beneficialPaul Krugman, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March/April 1994, Foreign Affairs, http://www.pkarchive.org/global/pop.html

Moreover, countries do not compete with each other the way corporations do. Coke and Pepsi are almost purely rivals: only a negligible fraction of Coca-Cola's sales go to Pepsi workers, only a negligible fraction of the goods Coca-Cola workers buy are Pepsi products. So if Pepsi is successful, it tends to be at Coke's expense. But the major industrial countries, while they sell products that compete with each other, are also each other's main export markets and each other's main suppliers of useful imports. If the European economy does well, it need not be at U.S. expense; indeed, if anything a successful European economy is likely to help the U.S. economy by providing it with larger markets and selling it goods of superior quality at lower prices. International trade, then, is not a zero-sum game. When productivity rises in Japan, the main result is a rise in Japanese real wages; American or European wages are in principle at least as likely to rise as to fall, and in practice seem to be virtually unaffected. It would be possible to belabor the point, but the moral is clear: while competitive problems could arise in principle, as a practical, empirical matter the major nations of the world are not to any significant degree in economic competition with each other. Of course, there is always a rivalry for status and power -- countries that grow faster will see their political rank rise. So it is always interesting to compare countries. But asserting that Japanese growth diminishes U.S. status is very different from saying that it reduces the U.S. standard of living -- and it is the latter that the rhetoric of competitiveness asserts.

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A2 competitiveness 3/5) Alt causes solve Ferguson—Economic recovery now Needham 11, (Vicki Needham is a reporter, went to Trinity and Northwestern University, she is writing in The Hill, a high-quality blog, 7/26/11, gd, http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/801-economy/173603-consumer-confidence-unexpectedly-rises-in-july)

Consumer confidence rose unexpectedly in July despite the stalled economic recovery as long-term expectations for jobs improved, according to private research group's report on Tuesday.The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index increased to 59.5 in July, from a revised 57.6 in June, hitting an eight-month low.With a flurry of bad economic indicators in recent months, analysts expected to see a drop to 56 in July. A reading of 90 indicates a healthy economy, but that level hasn't been reached since before the recession started in December 2007."Overall, consumers remain apprehensive about the future, but some of the concern expressed last month has abated," said Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center.The index measures how consumers feel about business conditions, the job market and the next six months.Consumer confidence has fallen since reaching a three-year high of 72 in February.

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***A2 Impact Advantage (jm)***

A2 Nuclear Fallout1) There’s a fundamental disconnect: The only asteroids we NEED time to detect are the ones too small to do any damage. 2) No link to O’Neill—We have other technology—people aren’t that stupid3) Their ignoring of Timeframe and Probablity for Magnitude should be rejectedRescher 83 (Nicholas, Professor of Philosophy at University of Pittsburgh, Risk: A Philosophical Introduction to the Theory of Risk Evaluation and Management, Page 50)

The "worst possible case fixation" is one of the most damaging modes of unrealism in deliberations about risk in real-life situations. Preoccupation about what might happen "if worst comes to worst" is counterproductive whenever we proceed without recognizing that, often as not, these worst possible outcomes are wildly improbable (and sometimes do not deserve to be viewed as real possibilities at all).

4) Your impact won’t happen for 500,000 years

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A2 Environmental Destruction1) Don’t buy their hype—a large asteroid hit in 1908, and everyone forgot about itLyne and Tauber 95 ( J.E. Lyne is asst Prof Aerospace Engineering @ U Tennessee, Micheal Tauber is a consulting prof of aeronautics and astronautics @Stanford, 6/22/95, gd, http://web.utk.edu/~comet/papers/nature/TUNGUSKA.html)

More recent work has suggested that the object was a stony asteroid perhaps 60 meters in diameter.1 In contrast, Turco et al3concluded that the meteor was of cometary origin with an effective density of 0.003 gm/cm3 and a diameter of 1200 meters. The atmospheric trajectory of a meteor is influenced by mass loss due to ablation and fragmentation caused by enormous aerodynamic loads. The equations of motion for such a body have been described elsewhere.1,2 An essential aspect of modeling the entry involves accurately calculating the radiation-dominated aerodynamic heating. This can be approximated using the Stefan-Boltzmann relation:

Asteroids won’t hitBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

From the fossil record, scientists believe that over the last 570 million years there have been five distinct episodes of mass extinction, the most recent occurring 65 million years ago, as the Cretaceous period gave way to the Tertiary period. (The previous four episodes were the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, and Triassic.) None is believed to have killed off every form of life on Earth, though the Permian–Triassic event seems to have led to the disappearance of as high as 95% of all species. During the K–T Extinction, as it is known (K being the first letter of Kreidezeit, the German word for Cretaceous), “the marine reptiles, the flying reptiles, and both orders of dinosaurs died out,” in the words of the most noted modern explainers of this fact. “Dramatic extinctions occurred among the microscopic floating animals and plants” as well, though snakes, land plants, mammals, crocodiles, and various invertebrates survived, especially those smaller mammals that fed on “insects and decaying vegetation.” In all, “about half of the genera living at that time perished during the extinction event.”11 What killed the dinosaurs? is one of those seemingly eternal scientific questions that engage the specialist, the generalist, the intelligent reader, and even children. The answers over the years have ranged from a drop in sea level to massive volcanic eruptions and consequent blockage of sunlight, but for the last three decades the most commonly accepted, if still disputed, hypothesis is that an asteroid done it. In a sense, the current vogue for doomsday scenarios was born of a seminal paper by Luis W. Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen V. Michel in the June 6, 1980, number of Science. Titled “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous–Tertiary Extinction,” the article amounted to a paradigm shifter. Luis Alvarez was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, his son was a geologist, and the other two authors were chemists. The paper adduced physical evidence for an extinction event that was quite literally out of this world. Alvarez et al. discovered that iridium, an element common in meteorites but rare on earth, was found at uncommonly high levels in rock strata of 65 million years ago. They hypothesized that the dinosaur-killing body’s impact threw rock upwards, and since what goes up must come down (except a portion of the ejecta that was hurled into space) it rained down upon the dinosaurs, killing all but the burrowed smaller creatures, many of which starved to death since most plant life was burned off the earth. Upon impact, the pulverized rock – “60 times the object’s mass”12 – would have been blasted into the stratosphere, where it blotted the sun and blocked photosynthesis. The forests burned, and the soot, too, blocked the healthy rays of our local star. The K–T event created so thunderous a sonic boom that “Any creatures within a thousand miles that survived the initial impact were quite deaf once the thunderclap reached them.”13 The authors describe it this way: “our hypothesis suggests that an asteroid struck the earth, formed an impact crater, and some of the dust-sized material ejected from the crater reached the stratosphere and was spread around the globe. This dust effectively prevented sunlight from reaching the surface for a period of several years, until the dust settled to earth. Loss of sunlight suppressed photosynthesis, and as a result most food chains collapsed and the extinctions resulted.”14 (The likeliest crater caused by this hypothesized K–T extraterrestrial killer is the Chicxulub off the Yucatan Peninsula, which has been dated at 65 million years old. There are more than 100 terrestrial impact craters, or craters dug out on Earth by impacts. The most famous, and the first recognized as such, is Meteor, aka Barringer, Crater in Arizona.) It should be noted that the Alvarez et al. hypothesis was not universally accepted. As Peter M. Sheehan and Dale A. Russell wrote in their paper “Faunal Change Following the Cretaceous–Tertiary Impact: Using Paleontological Data to Assess the Hazards of Impacts,” published in Hazards Due to Comets & Asteroids (1994), edited by Tom Gehrels, “many paleontologists resist accepting a cause and effect relationship” between the iridum evidence, the Chicxulub crater, and the mass extinction of 65 million years ago.15 For instance, Dennis V. Kent of the Lamont–Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University, writing in Science, disputed that a high concentration of iridium is necessarily “associated with an extraordinary extraterrestrial event” and that, moreover, “a large

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A2 Environmental Destruction 2/asteroid… is not likely to have had the dire consequences to life on the earth that they propose.”16 Briefly, Kent argues that the Alvarez team mistakenly chose the 1883 Krakatoa eruption as the standard from it extrapolated the effects of stratospheric material upon sunlight. Yet Krakatoa was too small a volcanic eruption from which to draw any such conclusions; better, says Kent, is the Toba caldera in Sumatra, remnant of an enormous eruption 75,000 years ago. (A caldera is the imprint left upon the earth from a volcanic eruption.) The volume of the Toba caldera is 400 times as great as that of Krakatoa – considerably closer to the effect that an asteroid impact might have. Yet the sunlight “attenuation factor [for Toba] is not nearly as large as the one postulated by Alvarez et al. for the asteroid impact.” Indeed, the Toba eruption is not associated with any mass extinctions, leading Kent to believe that “the cause of the massive extinctions is not closely related to a drastic reduction in sunlight alone.”17 Reporting in Science, Richard A. Kerr wrote that “Many geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, and statisticians… find the geological evidence merely suggestive or even nonexistent and the supposed underlying mechanisms improbable at best.” Even the iridium anomalies have been challenged: Bruce Corliss of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute argues that the major extinctions associated with the K–T event were not immediate and catastrophic but “gradual and apparently linked to progressive climate change.”18 Others argue that a massive volcanic event predating the Alvarezian killer asteroid created an overwhelming greenhouse effect and set the dinosaurs up for the knockout punch. A considerable number of scientists believe that gradually changing sea levels were the primary cause of the K–T Extinction. If either of these hypotheses is true – and a substantial number of geologists hold these positions — then the “killer asteroid” is getting credit that it does not deserve.

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***A2 Probability adv***1) Your impact has NEVER HAPPENED to a human, and WILL NOT HAPPEN for another 500,000 years. It is not systemic, it is ridiculous.Morrison and Chapman 92 (David Morrison works for NASA Ames Research Center, also the Chair of NASA’;s international NEO detection workshop, Clark Chapman works for the planetary science institute, 1/25/92,gd, http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1992LIACo..30..223M&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_VIEW&classic=YES)

If this estimate is correct, then the chances of an asteroid catastrophe happening in the near future—while very low – is greater than many other threats to life that our society takes very seriously. For purposes of discussion, we adopt the onice-in-500,000 year estimate for the globally catastrophic impact. It is important to keep in mind that the frequency could be greater than this, although probably not by more than a factor of three. The frequency could equally well be a factor of three smaller. Because the risk is very low of such an impact happening in the near future, the nature of the impact hazard is unique in our experience. Nearly all hazards we face in life actually happen to someone we know, or we read about them happening in the newspapers, whereas no large impact has taken place within the total span of human history.

2) We are tracking the Asteroids that MatterStokes, Evans and Larson 02 (Grant Stokes and Jenifer Evans are at MIT, Stephen Larson is at UofA, In a $95 book, Asteroids III, December 1, 2002, gd, http://www.lpi.usra.edu/books/AsteroidsIII/pdf/3037.pdf)

In March 1998, the search system started operating in an asteroid search role as the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research project (LINEAR) (Stokes, 2000) and has since provided 70% of the worldwide asteroid discovery rate. 3. SEARCH OBJECTIVES AND MOTIVATION Efforts to find and catalog asteroids over the past 200 years were initially inspired by scientific curiosity and a desire to understand the structure of the solar system. More recently these efforts have been spurred by the NASA search goal and as part of the International Spaceguard effort. The NASA goal, mandated by the US Congress, is to discover 90% of all potential impactors with diameters in excess of 1 km by the year 2008 (NASA, 1998). One-kilometer-diameter asteroids are thought to mark the threshold size for globally catastrophic consequences in a collision, and various models indicate there are between 500 and 2100 such objects (Morrison et al., 1992; Rabinowitz et al., 2000; Bottke et al., 2000; Stuart, 2000)

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***A2 Asteroids Advantage (QQ)***1) Your Tracton 11 evidence is plain wrong. The asteroid will burn up, doing no damage to the earth. This misrepresentation of a benign threat is par for the course in the realm of asteroid fear mongering.Sutherland 11 (Paul Sutherland, a reporter (the evidence quotes some pHD), 06/23/11, gd, http://www.skymania.com/wp/2011/06/incoming-new-asteroid-will-scrape-past.html)

Asteroid 2011 MD is estimated to be between 10 yards and 50 yards wide. UK asteroid expert Dr Emily Baldwin, of Astronomy Now magazine, told Skymania News: “We are certain that it will miss us, but if it did enter the atmosphere, an asteroid this size would mostly burn up in a brilliant fireball, possibly scattering a few meteorites.”

2) Your impact has NEVER HAPPENED to a human, and WILL NOT HAPPEN for another 500,000 years. It is not systemic, it is ridiculous.Morrison and Chapman 92 (David Morrison works for NASA Ames Research Center, also the Chair of NASA’;s international NEO detection workshop, Clark Chapman works for the planetary science institute, 1/25/92,gd, http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1992LIACo..30..223M&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_VIEW&classic=YES)

If this estimate is correct, then the chances of an asteroid catastrophe happening in the near future—while very low – is greater than many other threats to life that our society takes very seriously. For purposes of discussion, we adopt the onice-in-500,000 year estimate for the globally catastrophic impact. It is important to keep in mind that the frequency could be greater than this, although probably not by more than a factor of three. The frequency could equally well be a factor of three smaller. Because the risk is very low of such an impact happening in the near future, the nature of the impact hazard is unique in our experience. Nearly all hazards we face in life actually happen to someone we know, or we read about them happening in the newspapers, whereas no large impact has taken place within the total span of human history.

3) Your O’Neill evidence misses the point. The reason nobody spotted the asteroid is because nobody cares about them—they just burn up in the atmosphere. We are tracking the big ones.

We are tracking the Asteroids that MatterStokes, Evans and Larson 02 (Grant Stokes and Jenifer Evans are at MIT, Stephen Larson is at UofA, In a $95 book, Asteroids III, December 1, 2002, gd, http://www.lpi.usra.edu/books/AsteroidsIII/pdf/3037.pdf)

In March 1998, the search system started operating in an asteroid search role as the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research project (LINEAR) (Stokes, 2000) and has since provided 70% of the worldwide asteroid discovery rate. 3. SEARCH OBJECTIVES AND MOTIVATION Efforts to find and catalog asteroids over the past 200 years were initially inspired by scientific curiosity and a desire to understand the structure of the solar system. More recently these efforts have been spurred by the NASA search goal and as part of the International Spaceguard effort. The NASA goal, mandated by the US Congress, is to discover 90% of all potential impactors with diameters in excess of 1 km by the year 2008 (NASA, 1998). One-kilometer-diameter asteroids are thought to mark the threshold size for globally catastrophic consequences in a collision, and various models indicate there are between 500 and 2100 such objects (Morrison et al., 1992; Rabinowitz et al., 2000; Bottke et al., 2000; Stuart, 2000)

3) Their ignoring of Timeframe and Probablity for Magnitude should be rejectedRescher 83 (Nicholas, Professor of Philosophy at University of Pittsburgh, Risk: A Philosophical Introduction to the Theory of Risk Evaluation and Management, Page 50)

The "worst possible case fixation" is one of the most damaging modes of unrealism in deliberations about risk in real-life situations. Preoccupation about what might happen "if worst comes to worst" is counterproductive whenever we proceed without recognizing that, often as not, these worst possible outcomes are wildly improbable (and sometimes do not deserve to be viewed as real possibilities at all).

4) Your Easterbrook evidence about asteroid finds is meaningless—these asteroids are in the Kuiper Belt. They will never hit earth. They might as well be arguing that Jupiter will strike Earth.5) Their NRCNA evidence is NOT an indite—it makes no casual claims of any type

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A/2 HegChina won’t be aggressive in spaceJia Cheng, a daily Chinese tabloid produced under the auspices of the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily,[1] focusing on international issues , Global Times, July 13, 2011 “China opposed to space arms race” http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/665946/China-opposed-to-space-arms-race.aspx

China dismissed a report that said its space development aims to deter the US from using aircraft carriers in any future conflict, saying China is opposed to an arms race in space. According to Reuters, the Journal of Strategic Studies is set to publish a report that China may already be able to match the US ability to image a known, stationary target and will likely surpass it in the flurry of launches which are planned over the next two years. China has always adhered to the peaceful development of outer space, and is opposed to its militarization, which would trigger an arms race. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Tuesday that space should only be used for peaceful purposes. China also asserts the need for international cooperation in space. It is willing to work with relevant parties to promote the peaceful development of space, Hong added. Stressing the potential threat of China's space developments to the US, the report said China's strategically disquieting application of reconnaissance satellites is a targeting and tracking capability in support of the anti-ballistic missile, which could hit US carrier groups. The report exaggerates China's military forces, Gu Guo liang, director of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times, adding that there is still a gap of military development between China and the US, evidenced by the differences in military spending of the two countries. US defense spending stands at $700 billion a year, dwarfing China's 800 billion yuan ($123.6 billion). Meanwhile, Reuters reported that China could begin testing its first aircraft carrier within weeks, sparking concerns about its expanding military clout amid rows over the South China Sea. Ni Feng, deputy director of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that the advances of China's military and space technologies are within the scope of its development needs, and China would not be able to challenge US forces simply by building its own aircraft carrier. The report came as Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen began a visit to China from Saturday. Tuesday, Mullen observed an anti-terror drill and visited an air force base of the Chinese People's Liberation Army in Shandong Province, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Gu said that Mullen's visit to China aimed to enhance mutual trusts between the militaries, and overcome suspicion. The visit to an airforce base showed that China is seeking to become more transparent in its military affairs, Gu added. He Xin and agencies contributed to this story

Space Mil is a Terrible Idea: Destroys relations, Prompts 1st strikes, Starts Arms race, Not governed by WMD, Would be destroyed militarily(Vasiliev 08, Victor Vasiliev is a part of the Permanent Mission of Russia to the UN in Geneva, 4-01-08, gd, http://www.unidir.org/pdf/articles/pdf-art2822.pdf)

So, why do we need a PPWT? First, because without such a treaty it would be diffi cult to predict the development of the strategic situation in outer space and on Earth due to the global operating range of space weapons. It would be impossible to claim that space weapons were “not targeted” at a given nation. Moreover, space weapons will enable actors to discreetly tamper with outer space objects and disable them. Second, because the international situation would be seriously destabilized due to a possibility of unexpected, sudden use of space weapons. This alone could provoke pre-emptive acts against space weapons and, consequently, the spiral of an arms race. Third, because space weapons, unlike weapons of mass destruction, may be applied selectively and discriminately, they could become real-use weapons. Fourth, because the placement of weapons in outer space would arouse suspicions and tensions in international relations and destroy the current 147 climate of mutual confi dence and cooperation in exploration of outer space. Fifth, because attaining monopoly of space weapons would be an illusionary goal, all kind of symmetrical and asymmetrical responses would inevitably follow, which in substance would constitute a new arms race, which is exactly what humankind wants to avoid.

Multiple technical barriers for both kinetic and laser weaponsTheresa Hitchens, Vice President of the Center for Defense Information, 2002. “Weapons in Space: Silver Bullet or Russian Roulette?” http://www.cdi.org/missile-defense/spaceweapons.cfm

Indeed, the technical barriers to development and deployment of space-based weapons cannot be overestimated, even for the U.S. military. There are serious, fundamental obstacles to the development of both kinetic kill weapons and lasers both for use against targets in space and terrestrial targets — not to mention the question of the staggering costs associated with launch and maintaining systems on orbit. Problems with lasers include power generation requirements adding to size, the need for large quantities of chemical fuel and refueling requirements, and the physics of propagating and stabilizing beams across long

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distances or through the atmosphere. Space-based kinetic energy weapons have their own issues, including achieving proper orbital trajectories and velocities, the need to carry massive amounts of propellant, and concern about damage to own-forces

A/2 Heg 2/

from debris resulting from killing an enemy satellite. Space-based weapons also have the problem of vulnerability, for example, predictable orbits and the difficulty of regeneration. A detailed discussion of technology challenges is beyond the scope of this paper, but a comprehensive primer on the myriad problems with developing space-based weapons is a September 1999 paper by Maj. William L. Spacy II, "Does the United States Need Space-Based Weapons?" written for the College of Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education at Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.

Countermeasures would overwhelm space weapons

Captain David Hardesty, U.S. Navy, teaches at Naval War College’s Strategy and Policy Department, 2005. “Space Based Weapons: Long Term Strategic Implications and Alternatives,” http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA521114&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

In general, space-basing weapons would offer an enemy a number of interesting targeting options. Even a small number of kinetic weapons could have a devastating effect on space-launch or satellite-control facilities, large warships in port, and sensors involved in space and missile defense. Large numbers of conventional submunitions could attack military and economic targets across the continental United States. If the attack were preemptive, the chances of defeating it or preventing extensive damage would be very low.

Brilliant Pebbles fails: will not work in an ideal worldJeffrey Lewis, 7/20/05, researcher for DefenseTech, “Brilliant Pebbles Returns”, http://defensetech.org/2005/07/20/brilliant-pebbles-returns/

Long-time space-based missile defense advocate Lowell Wood, officially a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has been talking up the Brilliant Pebbles concept that he pushed during the better part of my elementary school years. Wood was at the Capitol Hill Club for an event sponsored by the American Foreign Policy Council and the Marshall Institute. Sharon Weinberger at Defense Daily summarizes Wood’s talk (subscription only, I am afraid). Wood’s presentation was entitled “Ballistic Missile Defense in an Ideal World”. Wood’s “ideal world” is one, presumably, where the laws of physics are substantially relaxed. One of his slides caught my eye: Total life-cycle cost to the Nation to own the Brilliant Pebbles defensive system was $11 B $11 B (89 $) CAIG-validated, DoD-certified-to-Congress cost estimate Tight consensus of 3 from the bottom up cost-estimation projects All RDT&E, all production-&-deployment; 2 decades ops Total deployed constellation of 2000 Pebbles Worst-case GPALS threat: Typhoon salvo-launching off Bermuda Clearly met Reagans ..impotent and obsolete.. spec for the SDI Higher cost estimates come from critics-&-opponents Manifestly, professional nafs ?Will you believe this?!? Whatever you think of the critics, the American Physical Society and Congressional Budget Office (1996, 2002 and 2004) are not staffed by “professional nafs.“ Of all people to hurl this charge, Dr. Wood is not the person with the most credibility. His days pimping the X-Ray laser remain a source of controversy. Worse, in my view, the technically savy Dr. Wood encrypted his .pdf file — something that took me three seconds to defeat with Elcomsoft. Let’s hope Brilliant Pebbles fares better than Wood’s encryption when dealing with adversary countermeasures

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2NC xt Heg

1) Their advantage is Non-unique—the NSS has already been implemented2) Russia had a plan to deflect, but it (a) didn’t increase Heg (b) would have resulted in MORE impacts, not less. That’s Hsu3) The US has already taken the lead in fighting threats against the Earth—Solar flares. Their leadership scenario is non-unique. That’s Vastag.4) Their impact is too vague—there is no indication that space leadership leads to conventional military dominance.5) Collapse is inevitable, because our Nation does not have the resources of other countries, but plan will make the transition violent. That is Schweller.

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2NC Competitiveness xt1) The private sector is the most cost-efficient space explorer today—we can get stuff into space for less than anyone else, even China. That’s Musk2) Their plan does not cost nearly enough to trigger the link. It is orders of magnitude too little, this is not an isolated incident of faulty math, but emblematic of the faulty math present everywhere in their case. That’s Krugman3) Competition is wrong—economics are not 0-sum. That’s also Krugman.4) The economy is in the middle of a long recovery now—their evidence assumes that the economic decline of the past will continue. That’s Needham

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2NC Nuclear Fallout adv1) There are two types of asteroids—the kind too small to do damage, or the big ones. We only need nuclear weapons for the big ones, which we will see in time to mitigate fallout damage.2) People are rational—nobody would intentionally bake the earth in radiation3) Extend Rescher—their fixation on large impacthurts policymaking because what they say will never happen.4) Their timeframe is ridiculous—it will not happen for 500 years

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2NC Environmental Destruction

1) Extend Lyne and Tauber—their impact happened, and did not lead to anything memorable. Why do we care?

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2NC Probability Xt1) Their impact HAS NEVER HAPPENED AND WILL NOT HAPPEN FOR HALF A MILLION YEARS. Science says that their worries are ridiculous—that’s Morrison and Champman2) The only Asteroids that could cause an impact are being tracked now—that’s Stokes, Evans and Larson.

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2NC Asteroids Advantage xt1) Don’t buy their specifc scenarios—it wont hit us. This is just another case of fearmongering—extend Sutherland2) Their impact HAS NEVER HAPPENED AND WILL NOT HAPPEN FOR HALF A MILLION YEARS. Science says that their worries are ridiculous—that’s Morrison and Champman3) The only asteroids we are not tracking are the ones we do not care about—the only ones that matter are the big ones, and we are tracking them. 4) Extend Rescher—their fixation on large impacthurts policymaking because what they say will never happen.5) They try to tell you that there are asteroids in space. There are. They are millions of miles away. They will never hit us.

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2NC Space Weapons Advantage xt1) Their fear mongering is not true—the only Chinese that want to militarize space are the irrelevant hardliners2) Extend our evidence from the Russian delegation to the UN—Vasilev. Space Mil is a Terrible Idea because it tanks soft power, Prompts 1st strikes, Starts a space Arms race, and nobody cares if they are used—a so-called “real use” weapon.3) Their tech simply cannot happen—there is no way to maintain kinetic or laser weapons. That is Hitchens. Their plan does not solve—it is spaceflight, not detection technology, that is the problem.4) Space weapons are really easy to stop—countermeasures are cheap and easy to deploy. Space weapons are nothing but an expensive ways to destroy decoy balloons.5) Brilliant Pebbles was cancelled because it was a bad idea that wasted money and could never work. That’s Lewis.

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Ptx Links

Increasing Defense Spending in Space would devastate negotiations between Obama and Republicans, current compromise proves. Andy Sullivan; Correspondent, political and general news, (Reuters) – 1/12/2011: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/12/us-usa-poll-spending-idUSTRE70B38620110112

Some 71 percent of those surveyed oppose increasing the borrowing authority, the focus of a brewing political battle over federal spending. Only 18 percent support an increase The poll underscores the tough task ahead for U.S. lawmakers as the debt nears its current ceiling of $14.3 trillion. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week warned that a failure to raise the borrowing limit in the coming months could lead to "catastrophic economic consequences". Republicans, who won control of the House of Representatives in November on a promise to scale back government, hope to pair any debt-ceiling hike with a commitment from President Barack Obama to reduce long-term spending. Republicans have vowed to slash $60 billion from the budget as soon as March, but many of those cuts are not likely to be popular with the public. WHAT TO CUT? Only 24 percent say the country can afford to cut back on education spending, a likely Republican target, and 21 percent support cuts to law enforcement. With the Pentagon fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, 51 percent supported cutbacks to military spending. Less than half, 45 percent, support an expected Republican effort to pare environmental enforcement. Some 53 percent support cutting the budgets of financial regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, in spite of the widespread consensus that a lax regulatory atmosphere contributed to the devastating financial crisis of 2007-2009. And 47 percent support cutbacks to national parks, which were shuttered for several weeks during the budget battles of 1995 and 1996. Expensive benefit programs that account for nearly half of all federal spending enjoy widespread support, the poll found. Only 20 percent supported paring Social Security retirement benefits while a mere 23 supported cutbacks to the Medicare health-insurance program. Some 73 percent support scaling back foreign aid and 65 percent support cutting back on tax collection. The poll of 1,021 U.S. adults was conducted between Friday and Monday. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent.

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New Spending creates massive backlash amongst majority of Republicans who want to cap spending limits, destroys any chance of passing Debt Ceiling. Tina Korbe, Conservative Columnist and commentator; in the Center for Media and Public Policy – 4/13/2011 - http://blog.heritage.org/2011/04/13/sen-ron-johnson-debt-ceiling-debate-should-net-spending-cap/

While some members of Congress still attempt to unscramble all the details of the six-month spending deal struck by leadership last week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he’s already steeling himself for the next big debate.“This whole CR skirmish — and that’s about all it is — is just setting us up for what I think is the really big fight and that’s over the debt ceiling,” Johnson said yesterday at The Bloggers Briefing.Speaking at Heritage shortly before his maiden Senate speech, the freshman senator from Oshkosh said the upcoming discussion about the debt ceiling offers spending-conscious members of Congress an unparalleled opportunity to negotiate major cuts and necessary spending caps.“I think our maximum of leverage really is around that debt ceiling,” he said. “The Democrats in the Senate … they’re going to be forced to vote for that debt ceiling increase or they’re going to shut the government down. The only way they’re going to get support from the Republicans like me is if they establish those hard spending caps.”Known for his business background and private-sector perspective, Johnson prides himself on his true status as a “citizen-legislator.” He said the president’s weak position throughout the spending debate has evoked a certain realism in him.“If we had a president right now who was leading,” he said, “we could maybe accomplish something in the next year and a half. I haven’t seen that. I’m not necessarily confident that’s going to happen. So, unfortunately, unless we get enough Senate Democrats to go along with us to establish hard spending caps, this is going to be kicked down to the 2012 election and that’s what that election is going to be about.”Johnson personally favors a constitutional amendment to limit the size of spending in relation to GDP, in addition to a statute to do the same. Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has introduced such an amendment, while Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) has proposed legislation to statutorily reduce spending.But whatever the mechanism, Johnson said, spending caps are essential to solve the debt problem — the big picture that most preoccupies Johnson.“The absolute first step has to be establishing that hard spending cap,” he said. “To me, deficits, out-of-control spending, high unemployment, a sluggish economy — those are all symptoms of the root cause. To me, the root cause absolutely is the size, the scope — I’m talking about all the things the government is involved in that it never should have gotten involved in, all the regulatory overreach — and the cost of government. I’m looking for hard spending caps that actually address and attack that root cause.”

Republicans are on board debt ceiling raise due to budget cuts – spending would devastate supportBryan Yurcan. Journalist @ Christian Post.“House to Vote on Spending Bill in Debt Row.” July 19, 2011. http://www.christianpost.com/news/house-to-vote-on-tea-party-inspired-spending-bill-52497/>] AC

The House of Representatives is sett o day to vote on a spending plan that would raise the debt ceiling another $2.4 trillion but also require deep and immediate spending cuts. Republican Leaders will present the “cut, cap, and balance” plan, which would allow the federal government to borrow an additional $2.4 trillion to pay its debts, in exchange for $111 billion in spending cuts in the upcoming budget year,which begins Oct. 1.The deal will also require another $6 trillion in cuts over the coming decade, proponents of the bill have said.

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SQUO solvesSQUO solves—tech that will prevent impact is coming far before your impacts.Lamb 10 (Robert Lamb has a BA from UTenn-Knoxville, and writes for howstuffworks, 5/5/10, gd, http://science.howstuffworks.com/stop-an-asteroid.htm)

With an estimated global nuclear arsenal of 22,300 warheads, humanity certainly has the nuclear weaponry to carry out a standoff explosion [source:]. As for moving them into position, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous-Shoemaker probe successfully flew past an asteroid in 1997, orbited one in 2000 and became the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid in 2001 [source: The key would be identifying the threat early enough to stage the mission. A number of additional asteroid mitigation tactics may become more feasible in the future. Scientists believe that robotic landers could be used to deflect asteroids, either via mounted thrusters or solar flares. The flares would reflect solar radiation, gradually nudging the asteroid away in the process. One proposed technique even calls for the use of an enormous spacecraft as a "gravity tractor," using its own mass to tug the deadly NEO away from Earth. Explore the links on the next page to learn more about how even a coat of white paint could help to save the world.

Squo destruction doesn’t solve—only detectionBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

By contrast, such threats as infectious diseases and nuclear war present a more real and immediate danger to Americans, and to earthlings in general. Perhaps money would be better spent addressing those matters? Absent a panic, the lack of any popular support for “Earth defense” vexes the Earth-savers. One lesson of human history, say Robert L. Park of the American Physical Society, Lori B. Garver of the National Space Society, and Terry Dawson of the U.S. House of Representatives, is that “societies will not sustain indefinitely a defense against an infrequent and unpredictable threat.” There is almost no popular constituency for asteroid defense, and it is sheer hubris to believe that any defense we are capable of designing today will be of anything more than “historical interest” to our descendants a century or a millennium hence.57 We are not the alpha and the omega. Our most sophisticated weapons will be to our distant descendants as spears are to us.

Squo solvesBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

Thus “asteroid deflection, rather than destruction by fragmentation, appears to be the most efficient strategy.”47 (The exception would be for very small bodies, which could be safely pulverized.) This is a tentative conclusion, with an emphasis on tentative: the problem it seeks to solve may not present itself for another 50 million years. But for now, as a team of researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences determined, destroying a killer asteroid with nuclear charges “presents an almost certainly insuperable technological problem.”48 Because the “technologies that might be employed to divert asteroids can be expected to change so rapidly in the coming decades,” write Ahrens and Harris, “it would be premature to conduct detailed engineering studies or to build prototypes at this stage.” The aerospace–industrial complex might demur, but “the low probability of impact of hazardous asteroids, the high cost in the face of a low risk factor, and the rapid changes that are to be expected in defense systems technology” combine to make any significant expenditure on asteroid deflection programs at best unwise, at worst a colossal waste of money.49 The current technologies will be overtaken by new ones so quickly as to make any defense system almost instantly obsolete. Moreover, many astronomers warn against letting fear of an exceedingly remote possibility stampede us into amassing an arsenal to fight the nonexistent threat.

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Detect, not Deflect CPTEXT: The United States Federal Government should increase funding for deflections of Near Earth Objects

OUR NET BENEFIT IS STOPPING RADIOACTIVE RAIN :Status quo deflection strategy results in radioactive rainO’Neill 8 (Ian, O’Neill is a British solar physics doctor with nearly a decade of physics study and research experience, “Apollo Astronaut Highlights Threat of Asteroid Impact,” http://www.astroengine.com/2008/11/apollo-astronaut-highlights-threat-of-asteroid-strike/)

Unfortunately, the commonly held opinion is to dispense an incoming asteroid or comet with a few carefully placed atomic bombs (by a generic crew of Hollywood oil drillers). Alas, Armageddon this ain’t. Even if we were able to get a bomb onto the surface of an incoming object, there is little hope of it doing any good (whether we get Bruce Willis to drop it off or launch it ICBM style… or would that be IPBM, as in Interplanetary Ballistic Missile?). What if we are dealing with a near-Earth asteroid composed mainly of metal? A nuclear blast might just turn it into a hot radioactive lump of metal. What if the comet is simply a collection of loosely bound pieces of rock? The force of the blast will probably be absorbed as if nothing happened. In most cases, and if we are faced with an asteroid measuring 10 km across (i.e. a dinosaur killer), it would be like throwing an egg at a speeding train and expecting it to be derailed. There are of course a few situations where a nuclear missile might work too well; blowing the object up into thousands of chunks. But in this case it would be like making the choice between being shot by a single bullet or a shot gun; it’s bad if you have one impact with a single lump of rock, but it might be worse if thousands of smaller pieces make their own smaller impacts all over the planet. If you ever wondered what it might be like to be sandblasted from space, this might be the way to find out! There may be a few situations where nuclear missiles are successful, but their use would be limited.

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International CPInternational Programs solve: Don QuijoteAFP 06 (The AFP is a newswire. 04/05/06, http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Europe_Sets_Next_Phase_In_Asteroid_Deflection_Project.html)

The European Space Agency (ESA) said it had shortlisted three European consortia to submit proposals for its Don Quijote project, which seeks to deflect any future asteroid on a collision course with Earth. The teams are respectively led by Alcatel Alenia Space, Qinetiq of Britain and EADS Astrium, each of which has long experience in European space projects, ESA said in a press release on Monday. ESA, helped by an independent panel of experts, will assess their submissions in October, and the outcome will be made public in 2007.The Don Quijote mission will comprise two spacecraft .One of them, called Hidalgo, will smash into the asteroid at relatively high speed, while a second one, Sancho, will arrive earlier at the same asteroid to measure the variation on the asteroid's orbital parameters after the impact. The risk of an asteroid collision with Earth is extremely remote. But if such an event were to occur, and the rock were big, the immediate devastation could be continent-wide and there could be lasting changes to the planet's weather system. The long reign of the dinosaurs is believed to have come to an abrupt end 65 million years ago when an asteroid or comet smashed into modern-day Mexico. The collision kicked up so much dust that heat and light from the Sun were diminished, destroying much of Earth's vegetation and the larger species of land animals that depended on it. Deflection is considered a safer bet than blowing up a dangerous asteroid with nuclear bombs. An explosion would break the asteroid into chunks, with the risk these pieces could hit Earth in turn.

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Aff is Bad Science The affirmative is all spin, no factBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

Carl Sagan admitted, “On first hearing about the Asteroid Hazard, many people think of it as a kind of Chicken Little fable.”1 That they do, but Chicken Little, he of “the sky is falling!” fame, never got the Hollywood treatment in the way that the “asteroid hazard” has. The falling sky sells a planet’s worth of DVDs. “If you want to send a message, call Western Union,” famously said either or both Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner, the movie moguls who share credit for this quotable quote. And while this may be good advice at the box office, in the late 1990s Hollywood did a send a message about Big Science to the popcorn-munchers in the dark: Be afraid. Be very afraid. The killer asteroids are coming. And as a corollary: Fund asteroid hunters. Your life — and the future of the entire planet — may depend on it. This message, however distorted the details were once they hit the screen, was welcomed by one of the newest fields in end-of-the-world-prevention: astronomers who keep watch on comets, asteroids, and other bodies that may, at some time over the next 100 million or so years, deliver a cosmic concussion (or worse) to the Earth.

The affirmative is a media construction—their fact has no basis in reality. Your impact has not happened for 65 million yearsBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

First, the films, which came out one after the other. Deep Impact (1998) was director Mimi Leder’s big-budget scareathon about a killer-comet whose approach to earth can only be stopped by a spaceship crew of young models, with the assistance of the grizzled veteran Robert Duvall. President of the United States Morgan Freeman declares martial law. Government loves emergencies, after all, and as Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said in that endlessly repeatable remark, you should never waste a good crisis. The coasts are wiped out by tsunamis when a fragment of the comet hits the earth. The courageous models in space, however, destroy the major part of the comet, and in a final scene we learn that the federal government has survived — and that, really, is the main thing, isn’t it? No matter how many millions of workaday Americans get swamped, as long as the Department of Commerce and the Federal Aviation Administration are still humming along, civilization is safe. A rival doomsday film, Michael Bay’s Armageddon, also released in 1998, was hokey and entertaining and at a cost of $140 million, it could have covered the cost of all the near-earth object-tracking programs then extant. The film begins with narrator Charlton Heston rehearsing the tale of the asteroid that caused the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction and concluding, “It happened before. It will happen again. It’s just a question of when.” “When,” in Armageddon, is 18 days from the discovery that a rogue asteroid the size of Texas is headed for Earth. Its arrival will mark “the end of mankind.” “We didn’t see this thing coming?” an agitated President asks the head of NASA, played by Billy Bob Thornton. Thorton’s response is music to real-life asteroid hunters’ ears. “Our object collision budget is a million dollars,” he says. “That allows us to track about 3 percent of the sky, and it’s a big-ass sky.” Message received. Boost that budget! Or else Earth and everything on it will be pulverized someday by a big-ass asteroid. An oil-rig crew, led by Bruce Willis, saves the day by drilling 800 feet into the asteroid and delivering into its belly a nuclear device. They are aided by a vessel that was designed for the “Mars project” — a nice example of aeronautics/ astronomy fund-seeking symbiosis! Armageddon was something of a hit, and it is great fun to watch, but it would pale beside the real thing. Then again, there hasn’t been a “real thing” for about 65 million years, so we and the media sensationalists have had to make do with overblown stories of “near misses.”

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Bad Science 2/Asteroid hype is wrong: EmpericsBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

For instance, on March 11, 1998, Brian Marsden, director of the partially NASA-funded Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sent out a circular to amateur and professional astronomers warning that on October 26, 2028, at 1:30 Eastern Standard Time, asteroid 1997 XF11, which was nearly one mile across and had been discovered the previous December by the Spacewatch program, would come dangerously close to the Earth: within 15,000 miles. That it would approach closer to the Earth than even the Moon was “virtually certain,” said Marsden.2 If it struck our planet, as science writer Martin Gardner wrote, “the devastation would be too awful to contemplate.”3 Marsden published this circular “[w]ithout checking with any outside scientists,” complained astronomer Clark R. Chapman.4 Although the circular was directed mainly to astronomers, non-astronomers were also on the reception list. These included news-gathering organizations. The potential demolition of Earth is, these organizations gathered, news. And so they reported it. “[F]or 24 hours,” wrote editor Bonnie Bilyeu Gordon of Astronomy magazine, “the whole world feared.”5 Were earthlings to go the way of the dinosaurs in October 2028? Did a 30-year warning time give us enough time to plot out a defense or even plan an escape? Or were we to spend the next three decades in a state of more or less permanent panic, biding our time and just waiting for the big one to smash us to bits? Two days later, Marsden had to say “Oops.” Based on a quick check of old photos by Eleanor Helin and others at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Marsden recalculated the figure of 15,000 miles as, instead, 600,000 miles. Sorry. Go back to your lives. Brian Marsden had a henhouse full of egg on his face, and he took his share of criticism from the astronomical community for what many observers considered headline-chasing sensationalism. In fact, just 5 hours after Marsden’s circular had gone out to a trembling world, Don Yeomans of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent an email to colleagues assessing the chances of XF11 hitting the Earth in 2028 at “zero, folks.” Daniel Schorr of National Public Radio asked, “Couldn’t they have waited a few days before scaring us half to death?”6 But the man who panicked the world looked at the bright side: “The good news in all this,” he said in 1998, “is that NASA just announced it’s doubling the amount of money it spends on asteroid searches — from $1.5 million a year to $3 million. Perhaps that decision is the result of the public interest in asteroid 1997 XF11, who knows?”7 In other words, NASA may well have doubled its spending on a government program due to the panic engendered by a woefully errant report, a classic case of Bad Science. This ought to be cause for dismay.

There is a unique impact to this round—even their discourse of threat construction leads to flawed policyBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

Taxpayers’ money is being wasted because of a gross error and the attendant publicity. But instead, this is “good news” because — well, because taxpayers’ money is being spent due to a gross error and its attendant publicity. (In fairness to Marsden, MIT astronomer Richard Binzel had pegged XF11 as a rather threatening 3.5 on his 0–10 Torino scale — the Richter Scale of asteroid impacts.) You can’t buy publicity of the sort that XF11 gave the cause of doomsday. “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye!” declared the New York Post after the fact. Yes, there was a giggle factor, but the threat had been raised, and even if it was dismissed, the idea had been planted in millions of heads. The then-head of NASA, Daniel Goldin, found that after the XF11 scare, killer asteroids became the “second most common subject of public communication” – second only to the alleged “Face on Mars.” Clark R. Chapman has written that several observers within what is awkwardly known as the “hazards community” have argued that “Marsden should be praised, rather than criticized, for the XF11 announcement because the higher public visibility may yield increased funding of the observers’ programs.”8 That, in a nutshell, is the problem that skeptics have with the whole doomsday asteroid/comet industry. An exceedingly remote threat is periodically blown up in order to win taxpayer funding of favored projects. Philip Plait, who debunks pseudoscience from his website Bad Astronomy, notes that “Anytime an asteroid is predicted to pass by the Earth they envision an apocalyptic scenario, fueled by reporters who play up the danger without mentioning the odds of our getting hit are less than the chance of winning the typical lottery.” Even Plait can’t resist the imagery of a violent universe, though, as he writes, “The Earth sits in a cosmic shooting gallery, and the Universe has us dead in its crosshairs.”9 In one respect, the alarmists have won. “There used to be high giggle factor among members” of Congress when the subject of killer comets and asteroids was raised, Richard Obermann, staff director of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, said in 2008. “But it’s now a very respectable area of investigation.”10 After all, that’s how the dinosaurs met their maker, or so many physicists and geologists believe.

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Bad Science 3/Your Threats are constructedBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

. Even if the K–T Extinction was the work of a rock from space, the Alvarez team credits a “probable interval of 100 million years between collisions with 10-km-diameter objects.”19 The next rendezvous with annihilation won’t be overdue for about 40 million years. We have time. We also have fictional accounts of modern space intruders. As Martin Gardner pointed out, the subject of a collision between earth and celestial traveler has given us several works of art — of varying degrees of merit. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” concerned the “fiery destruction” of the earth by a comet. “We had long regarded the wanderers as vapoury creations of inconceivable tenuity, and as altogether incapable of doing injury to our substantial globe, even in the event of contact,” says the narrator.20 How wrong they were. For the planet was consumed by “A combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate; — the entire fulfilment, in all their minute and terrible details, of the fiery and horror-inspiring denunciations of the prophecies of the Holy Book.”21 In H.G. Wells’s lesser-known novel In the Days of the Comet (1906), humankind is jolted out of its greed, heartlessness, and selfishness by the close passing of a comet. The green vapor of its tail envelops the earth for 3 hours, putting everyone everywhere to sleep, and when the earthlings awake they are magically altered to behave just as the socialist Wells would wish them to behave. They erect a “World State” and discard the quaint idea of “ownership” and people live docilely ever after.22 The best-selling novel When Worlds Collide (1933) by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer was made into a 1951 movie in which a small band of pioneers escapes Earth before its collision with a breakaway planet. Fortunately for posterity, the survivors include the beautiful Barbara Rush. These fictions scant asteroids, which are much less lovely than comets. Asteroids, which “resemble misshapen potatoes”23 and are usually more pockmarked than an adolescent’s face, are small bodies composed of rock and metal which orbit the sun. The total mass of all known asteroids is less than that of our moon. Ceres, the first asteroid discovered, floated into human view on January 1, 1801, a happy new-year gift for its discoverer, Giuseppe Piazzi. Ceres, a body 950 meters in diameter, was in orbit between Mars and Jupiter, and thus posed no conceivable threat to Earth.

Your claims are not backed in science, but lobbyistsBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

The B612 Foundation that is so eager to sic the feds on an asteroid hunt is named after the asteroid on which Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s beloved fictional Little Prince lives. At least the name is warm and cuddly and not menacing in the killer asteroid vein. Founded in 2002, the group professes concern “about the current lack of action to protect the Earth from the impact of near Earth asteroids.”41 What is praiseworthy about B612 is that instead of just whining about the lack of government funding for its favored project, it seeks private funds to demonstrate the feasibility of asteroid deflection. Founder Rusty Schweikart’s preferred method is to nudge the asteroid by a “gravitational-tractor” method — in Easterbrook’s formulation, landing “a spacecraft weighing only a few tons,” whose presence on the asteroid is enough to push the body along a slightly different course.42 Schweikart and B612 propose to rendezvous and dock with a near Earth asteroid and then “push it (gently and for a long time)” into a different orbit. The timeframe: by the year 2015. This is an arbitrary date, but the B612 activists understand that unless you attach a deadline to a project, it’s not going to get done. The B612 Foundation, not surprisingly, accepts the most “optimistic” (if that word is appropriate) estimates of the impact community, asserting that there is a 2 percent chance of an “unacceptable collision” in the next century. Impact expert Clark Chapman, it should be noted, is on the board of directors, and Chapman is not exactly a killer-asteroid skeptic. And the foundation is not exempt from the scaremongering rhetoric of the field. “[W]e know,” its website declares, “that it is only a matter of time before we detect a NEA headed for the Earth, and yet we have done nothing to prepare for it.” Well, true, in a way, if you discount the by now numerous workshops and conferences on NEAs, the first of which was authorized by Congress way back in 1990, before Deep Impact, in those days when Bruce Willis had hair and Demi Moore. But more to the point: the “matter of time” doesn’t mean it will happen at some point in the next few months, or years, or decades, or centuries — it could well be millennia before a NEA of any significant size, even Tunguska-like, appears. We might be forgiven for not exhibiting a state of urgency. “We understand that sooner or later our survival, not just as individuals, but also as a species, will depend on being able to dissuade one of these cosmic neighbors from dropping in uninvited,” states the B612 website. Again, the devil is in the details, or more specifically, in the quite possibly millions of years that are contained in the vernacular phrase “sooner or later.” Sooner or later the Sun will burn out, too — but must we mobilize against that remote possibility at this time?

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Bad Science 4/Your impact wont happenBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

Given that there “is no known incident of a major crater-forming impact in recorded human history,” argues P.R. Weissman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and since “the credibility of the impact hazard” is justifiably low with the public and governmental decision-makers, we ought to defer the development of a defensive system until such time as technological advances permit us to do so at a reasonable cost.55 There is also, he points out — at the risk of being called chauvinist, no doubt, by the more feverish Earth-savers — the “pragmatic and/or parochial” fact that the United States accounts for 6.4 percent of the total land mass of the Earth, and only 1.9 percent of the total area, including water.56 Thus anything short of a civilization-ending asteroid would be exceedingly unlikely to hit the U.S.

Your impacts are constructed, and failBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

These papers may make headlines in the mainstream press, which leads to greater political pressure to fund projects and programs congruent with these extreme findings. As The Economist put it in an article presenting the argument of Young, Ioannidis, and Al-Ubaydli, “Hundreds of thousands of scientific researchers are hired, promoted and funded according not only to how much work they produce, but also where it gets published.” Column inches in journals such as Nature and Science are coveted; authors understand full well that studies with spectacular results are more likely to be published than are those that will not lead to a wire story. The problem, though, is that these flashy papers with dramatic results often “turn out to be false.”64 In a 2005 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis found that “of the 49 most-cited papers on the effectiveness of medical interventions, published in highly visible journals in 1990–2004… a quarter of the randomised trials and five of six nonrandomised studies had already been contradicted or found to have been exaggerated by 2005.” Thus, those who pay the price of the winner’s curse in scientific research are those, whether sick patients or beggared taxpayers, who are forced to either submit to or fund specious science, medical or otherwise. The trio of authors call the implications of this finding “dire,” pointing to a 2008 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that “almost all trials” of anti-depressant medicines that had had positive results had been published, while almost all trials of anti-depressants that had come up with negative results “remained either unpublished or were published with the results presented so that they would appear ‘positive.’” Young, Ioannidis, and Al-Ubaydli conclude that “science is hard work with limited rewards and only occasional successes. Its interest and importance should speak for themselves, without hyperbole.” Elite journals, conscious of the need to attract attention and stay relevant, cutting edge, and avoid the curse of stodginess, are prone to publish gross exaggeration and findings of dubious merit. When lawmakers and grant-givers take their cues from these journals, as they do, those tax dollars ostensibly devoted to the pursuit of pure science and the application of scientific research are diverted down unprofitable, even impossible channels. The charlatans make names for themselves, projects of questionable merit grow fat on the public purse, and the disconnect between what is real and what subsidy-seekers tell us is real gets ever wider.65 The matter, or manipulation, of odds in regards to a collision between a space rock and Earth would do Jimmy the Greek proud. As Michael B. Gerrard writes in Risk Analysis in an article assessing the relative allocation of public funds to hazardous waste site cleanup and protection against killer comets and asteroids, “Asteroids and comets are… the ultimate example of a low-probability/high-consequence event: no one in recorded human history is confirmed to have ever died from one.” Gerrard writes that “several billion people” will die as the result of an impact “at some time in the coming half million years,” although that half-million year time-frame is considerably shorter than the generally accepted extinction-event period.66

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Bad Science 5/Your claims co-opt real scienceBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

A researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Steven Chesley, calculated that 2004 ASI “had a 25 percent chance of striking the Earth’s Northern Hemisphere in a few days,” according to the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Given that it was first believed to be 30 meters in diameter (and later found to be much larger), a collision would have caused significant death and destruction on the home planet. Asteroid researchers Clark Chapman and David Morrison, alarmed by Chesley’s doomsday calculation, “contemplated picking up the telephone to the White House.” They were going to alert President Bush that the end times were closer than they appeared in his rearview mirror. Perhaps Chapman and Morrison had seen too many movies in which a scientist, having seen an ominous spot growing larger by the second in his secluded mountaintop observatory, picks up the telephone, rings the operator, says, “Get me the President of the United States,” and then the film cuts to the President informing his Cabinet that he has to tell them about a matter of “grave importance.” In any event, Chapman and Morrison held off on that call, and it was a good thing. The killer-asteroid 2004 ASI missed the Earth by 12 million kilometers, or more than 30 times the distance between Earth and moon. It wasn’t even a close shave. As the BBC reported, many astronomers harshly criticized Chapman and Morrison for almost ringing “a false alarm [which] could have brought ridicule on their profession.” For instance, Benny Peiser of Liverpool’s John Moores University told the BBC, “They completely misread the situation. There was plenty of time to get other observers on the job.” Brian Marsden of the Minor Planet Center, who had been castigated for his own overreaction in the case of XF 11, said, “They would have jumped the gun before we knew much about the object. I find it incredible that such action was contemplated on the basis of just four observations. That is just enough to yield a sensible orbit. There was no need to panic as it was obvious that the situation would have been resolved, one way or another, in another hour or two.”121 So an embarrassing act of Chicken Little-ism was averted. The sky was not falling, and the alarmists took a little public criticism for what would have been a grandiose indiscretion. The following year, Congress authorized more near-earth object detection efforts, though as Gregg Easterbrook writes, the price tag that NASA put on such a mission — $1 billion — was too steep, given the agency’s bigger-hardware priorities such as a moon base. (Easterbrook nails the real rationale behind the moon base, which, on its surface, is a distraction from the vaunted mission to Mars: “For NASA, a decades-long project to build a moon base would ensure a continuing flow of money to its favorite contractors and to the congressional districts where manned-space-program centers are located.”122 Pork must be served.) Chapman and Morrison have pondered NEOs for many years now, and they admit the inherent ambiguities. Clark Chapman concedes that “there is deep disagreement over whether we should also protect against the impacts that happen every decade or so, like Tunguska” — though the last Tunguska happened not a decade but a century-plus ago. “Even these small events can kill people, but they are a thousand times less likely to do so than are quakes, floods and the other things that kill people all the time.”123 David Morrison says, “It’s truly an apocalyptic vision that you have here,” but he concedes that “there are very human reactions as to whether this one-in-a-million-per-year risk [which may be an exaggerated number itself] is worth worrying about or not.”124 Clark Chapman adds that “such oncein100 million year events are so rare that, despite their apocalyptic horror, they need be of no concern to public officials.”125 (Note the sharp difference in estimates of the chances of a civilization-ending collision.) If a one-in-a-million — or 65 million, or one trillion — year doomsday comet suddenly raced in from the Oort Cloud, there is simply no defense known or even contemplated against it. We would be out of luck. Yet as a team of researchers wrote in Reviews of Geophysics, asteroid and comet collisions “are so infrequent that they are normally disregarded on the timescale of human evolution.”126 Prudence dictates that we not entirely ignore the incredibly remote possibility that such a collision could happen at any time during the next 40 million years, but that same prudence should keep us from panic, and prevent us from public expenditures that cannot be justified by any wisdom this side of sheer Hollywood-sized hysteria. Even without a rogue asteroid banging into the Earth, life as we know it will be impossible on the planet in a billion or more years, when the Sun swells 250 times its current size, into a “red giant” star that will swallow our home planet.127 If you wish to worry about that, fine. Same for those who stay up nights pulling out their hair over the prospect of an Armageddon asteroid. But the rest of us — at least those of us who do not make our living in the NEO detection field — have quite enough else to worry about, including a swelling budget deficit whose size may soon dwarf the rockiest chunks in the Asteroid Belt.

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Dual use LinkYour tech is perceived as a weaponBennett 10 (James T. Bennett, Dpt of Economics at GMU, “The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and panic from sputniks, martians, and marauding meteors”, ISBN 978-1-4419-6684-1, 2010, gd)

The! Gerrard writes that elements of the space and defense industries “see NEO defense as a post-Soviet substitute for President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’)” and that these “industries have begun to exert their influence to increase federal expenditures for NEO-related projects.” 68 Armed with optimistic (or, from the point of view of humankind, extremely pessimistic) estimates of the frequency of asteroid/comet impacts, they will prove a formidable lobby, made all the more tenacious by the openended — in fact, infinite — horizon for the project of saving the Earth. In the Tom Gehrels-edited volume Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids, a foursome of researchers affiliated with, among institutions, the U.S. Air Force Phillips Laboratory and the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (formerly the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization), explore how SDI technology might be adapted to the needs of the “civilian space community.” 69 Note that “civilian” is not a synonym for “private” but rather nonmilitary governmental. If, indeed, NASA can be considered non-military. The feeding frenzy is on.

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