August 01 | 2019
NASA Has the Technology to Save Us From an Asteroid Strike, But Congress Won’t Fund It
Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action
Coalition. She has written extensively about issues at the crossroads of science and society, including regenerative medicine, aging and longevity, medical implants, transhumanism, robotics and AI, and bioethical issues in leading-edge medicine. Her books include Stem Cell Wars and
Beyond Human, and her latest book, Robots and the People Who Love Them, will be released in January 2024. Her work has appeared in Vice, Medium, The Washington Post and the Boston Globe, among others. She’s a frequent contributor to Leaps.org and is the recipient of the 2019
Arlene Eisenberg Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
If a massive asteroid were to strike the Earth, it could be more destructive than a thousand atomic bombs.
(© Bill Jelen/Unsplash)
At the biannual Planetary Defense Conference earlier this year, NASA ran a simulation of an asteroid slamming into the center of Manhattan.
For several millennia now, we've been lucky, but our luck won't hold out forever.
The gathering of astronomers, planetary scientists, and FEMA disaster-response experts attempted a number of interventions that might be possible within a time window of eight years, the given warning period before impact.
Catastrophic asteroid crashes are not without precedent, and scientists say it's only a matter of time before another one occurs—that is, if we do nothing to prevent it. It's believed that a huge asteroid crash off the coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula created a worldwide disaster that helped to speed the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
In 1908, a meteoroid less than 300 feet in diameter exploded in the air over the Tunguska region of Siberia, creating a shockwave that leveled trees for hundreds of square miles. It's a matter of sheer luck it didn't hit a major population center, where human casualties could have been enormous.
For several millennia now, we've been lucky, but our luck won't hold out forever. There are millions of asteroids circulating about in our solar system, some of them hundreds of miles across, and although the odds of a massive one crashing to Earth in the near future is statistically low, the devastation could be apocalyptic.
Back at the conference, the experts tried sending several spacecrafts to knock the asteroid off-course by slamming into it. They considered blasting it with nuclear weapons. They even considered painting it white so it absorbed less of the sun's energy, hoping that would shift the asteroid's trajectory. In the simulations, all of the interventions failed and the giant space rock crashed into Manhattan, killing 1.3 million people in a massive explosion that was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
NEOCam is designed, tested, and ready to build, but the project is currently frozen because of a $40 million gap in NASA funding.
Given more time, the scientists said, they might have succeeded in preventing the disaster. However, with today's asteroid-hunting telescopes, it's not likely we would have more warning. Our current telescopes are not powerful enough to detect all the near-earth asteroids, nor are they positioned well enough for sufficient detection. As recently as last week, for example, an asteroid traveling 15 miles a second narrowly missed crashing into the Earth, and it was only noticed several days in advance.
Now for the good news: There is a new technology that could buy us the time we need, says MIT planetary sciences professor Richard P. Binzel and colleagues who attended the conference. The Near-Earth Object Camera, or NEOCam, designed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, would detect more than 90 percent of nearby objects that are 420 feet across or larger, according to Binzel.
The powerful infrared telescope is designed to sit within the L1 Lagrange point, a stable location in space where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun cancel each other out. From there, large space bodies could be detected early enough to give scientists decades of warning when an asteroid is heading for Earth. NEOCam is designed, tested, and ready to build, but the project is currently frozen because of a $40 million gap in NASA funding.
The status of NEOCam, according to Binzel, is a case-study in short-sightedness and a lack of leadership. Congress needs to raise NASA's Planetary Defense budget from its current $160 million to $200 million to get the telescope built and launched into space, a goal that would seem eminently doable within the strictures of 2020's $4.75 trillion government budget. But Binzel describes a current deadlock between NASA, Congress, and the Office of Management and Budget as a "cosmic game of chicken."
If we don't use our technology to defend the planet, "it would be the most epic failure in the history of science."
In an excruciatingly budget-conscious atmosphere, "No one wants to stick their neck out and take adult responsibility" for getting the funding allocated that would unfreeze the project, says Binzel. But, he adds, "We have a moral obligation to act."
NEOCam would not only spot the overwhelming majority of asteroids in Earth's vicinity, it would determine their size and pinpoint exactly where they are likely to strike the Earth. And it would allow us decades to act, according to Binzel. Repeated ramming by an international armada of specialized spacecraft could slightly change the trajectory of an asteroid, he says. Changing the trajectory only a tiny bit, given the scale of millions of miles and several decades for the course change to take effect, could cause an asteroid to miss the Earth altogether.
"So far we've been relying on luck," says Binzel, "but luck is not a plan." Now that we have the technology to discover what's careening through our space neighborhood, it's our ethical duty to deploy it. If we don't use our technology to gain the knowledge we need to defend the planet, Binzel concludes, "it would be the most epic failure in the history of science."
Should Congress green light the $40 million budget for the new asteroid-hunting telescope? @NASA #NASA #astroid— leapsmag (@leapsmag) 1564681293.0
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Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action
Coalition. She has written extensively about issues at the crossroads of science and society, including regenerative medicine, aging and longevity, medical implants, transhumanism, robotics and AI, and bioethical issues in leading-edge medicine. Her books include Stem Cell Wars and
Beyond Human, and her latest book, Robots and the People Who Love Them, will be released in January 2024. Her work has appeared in Vice, Medium, The Washington Post and the Boston Globe, among others. She’s a frequent contributor to Leaps.org and is the recipient of the 2019
Arlene Eisenberg Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
July 23 | 2024
Here's how one doctor overcame extraordinary odds to help create the birth control pill
National Science Foundation
Dr. Percy Julian had so many personal and professional obstacles throughout his life, it’s amazing he was able to accomplish anything at all. But this hidden figure not only overcame these incredible obstacles, he also laid the foundation for the creation of the birth control pill.
Julian’s first obstacle was growing up in the Jim Crow-era south in the early part of the twentieth century, where racial segregation kept many African-Americans out of schools, libraries, parks, restaurants, and more. Despite limited opportunities and education, Julian was accepted to DePauw University in Indiana, where he majored in chemistry. But in college, Julian encountered another obstacle: he wasn’t allowed to stay in DePauw’s student housing because of segregation. Julian found lodging in an off-campus boarding house that refused to serve him meals. To pay for his room, board, and food, Julian waited tables and fired furnaces while he studied chemistry full-time. Incredibly, he graduated in 1920 as valedictorian of his class.
After graduation, Julian landed a fellowship at Harvard University to study chemistry—but here, Julian ran into yet another obstacle. Harvard thought that white students would resent being taught by Julian, an African-American man, so they withdrew his teaching assistantship. Julian instead decided to complete his PhD at the University of Vienna in Austria. When he did, he became one of the first African Americans to ever receive a PhD in chemistry.
Julian received offers for professorships, fellowships, and jobs throughout the 1930s, due to his impressive qualifications—but these offers were almost always revoked when schools or potential employers found out Julian was black. In one instance, Julian was offered a job at the Institute of Paper Chemistory in Appleton, Wisconsin—but Appleton, like many cities in the United States at the time, was known as a “sundown town,” which meant that black people weren’t allowed to be there after dark. As a result, Julian lost the job.
During this time, Julian became an expert at synthesis, which is the process of turning one substance into another through a series of planned chemical reactions. Julian synthesized a plant compound called physostigmine, which would later become a treatment for an eye disease called glaucoma.
In 1936, Julian was finally able to land—and keep—a job at Glidden, and there he found a way to extract soybean protein. This was used to produce a fire-retardant foam used in fire extinguishers to smother oil and gasoline fires aboard ships and aircraft carriers, and it ended up saving the lives of thousands of soldiers during World War II.
At Glidden, Julian found a way to synthesize human sex hormones such as progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone, from plants. This was a hugely profitable discovery for his company—but it also meant that clinicians now had huge quantities of these hormones, making hormone therapy cheaper and easier to come by. His work also laid the foundation for the creation of hormonal birth control: Without the ability to synthesize these hormones, hormonal birth control would not exist.
Julian left Glidden in the 1950s and formed his own company, called Julian Laboratories, outside of Chicago, where he manufactured steroids and conducted his own research. The company turned profitable within a year, but even so Julian’s obstacles weren’t over. In 1950 and 1951, Julian’s home was firebombed and attacked with dynamite, with his family inside. Julian often had to sit out on the front porch of his home with a shotgun to protect his family from violence.
But despite years of racism and violence, Julian’s story has a happy ending. Julian’s family was eventually welcomed into the neighborhood and protected from future attacks (Julian’s daughter lives there to this day). Julian then became one of the country’s first black millionaires when he sold his company in the 1960s.
When Julian passed away at the age of 76, he had more than 130 chemical patents to his name and left behind a body of work that benefits people to this day.
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June 14 | 2024
Therapies for Healthy Aging with Dr. Alexandra Bause
Sabine van Erp / Pixabay
My guest today is Dr. Alexandra Bause, a biologist who has dedicated her career to advancing health, medicine and healthier human lifespans. Dr. Bause co-founded a company called Apollo Health Ventures in 2017. Currently a venture partner at Apollo, she's immersed in the discoveries underway in Apollo’s Venture Lab while the company focuses on assembling a team of investors to support progress. Dr. Bause and Apollo Health Ventures say that biotech is at “an inflection point” and is set to become a driver of important change and economic value.
Previously, Dr. Bause worked at the Boston Consulting Group in its healthcare practice specializing in biopharma strategy, among other priorities
She did her PhD studies at Harvard Medical School focusing on molecular mechanisms that contribute to cellular aging, and she’s also a trained pharmacist
In the episode, we talk about the present and future of therapeutics that could increase people’s spans of health, the benefits of certain lifestyle practice, the best use of electronic wearables for these purposes, and much more.
Dr. Bause is at the forefront of developing interventions that target the aging process with the aim of ensuring that all of us can have healthier, more productive lifespans.
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Matt Fuchs is the host of the Making Sense of Science podcast and served previously as the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org. He writes as a contributor to the Washington Post, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Nautilus Magazine, Fortune Magazine and TIME Magazine. Follow him @fuchswriter.