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Back off, asteroids–We’ve got nukes  Email   PrintPrint      A
directed-energy weapon could do the job, Dearborn said, but not
in the state that the technology is in today. A laser such as
that at the National Ignition Facility, a nuclear fusion
experiment at Lawrence Livermore, could adjust a typical
asteroid’s course enough to avoid a collision—changing its
velocity by about one centimeter per second—but doing so would
take about 6,000 years. "I’m not saying that our children’s
children won’t know a lot more than we do, and I certainly hope
that they do," Dearborn said, but laser technology isn’t up to
the job just yet. A non-nuclear blast—or a simple ramming
mission—could also work, but those approaches would require
numerous launches to match the power of a single nuclear device.
Of course, nuclear weapons make many people uneasy in any
context, and not everyone is on board w