This. It’s a crucial step for our civilisation to be able to protect earth from any incoming dangers be it asteroids or Umuamua type objects. There must be a global effort with all countries to build such a system.
Good luck with that... currently we are failing to muster a global effort for tackling climate change, which is a much more pressing issue than an asteroid which may or may not hit us. I know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up is satirical, but reality often outdoes satire, so I wouldn't be surprised if things would play out exactly like in that movie...
This pessimism has its place, but in this specific case, it is not accurate.
Congress did decide that NEO's are an important problem, and eventually money was appropriated to address it, and a technical solution to the detection problem has been found. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEO_Surveyor)
There is an open doubt whether a fully functional coffee machine is currently orbiting Venus, however one of these hypotheses is different than the other.
Hint: expertise matters, evidence matters, and in a field where buildings/laws/fields of study get named after successful contrarians, a long streak of effectively unanimous consensus should not be undervalued.
The coffee machine has no implications on my current life span. It may be true, but who would waste their time caring about this?
Show me the /unanimous/ consensus that this is an immediate /existential/ issue. I don't believe such a thing exists. When attempting to understand the difference between those who care about an asteroid and climate change, which was the question, this is the critical point to concern yourself with.
Overwhelming agreement among experts is as gold as standards get.
But FWIW, I don't think anyone believes that climate change is a quick duration species-existential event. Massive slow-roll geopolitical destabilization leading to societal collapse? That's definitely on the table.
Hmmm… what level of agreement would constitute sufficient cause for massive change?
Eventually happen? What percentage of the Great Barrier Reef is gone?
How about this every single climate change skeptic I have offered this wager to has declined to take me up: if in the next calendar year, the average global temperature for a given month is below the average global temperature of that month in the year you were born I will pay you 10 times the amount you are willing to wager. If the opposite is true, that the month this year is warmer than the same month in the year you were born you must pay me the amount you are willing to wager.
> by doubting, you've already ruled it out, haven't you?
So you are attempting to create an environment where reasonable doubt is impossible. This behavior is actually part of the reason I have doubts.
> we know corals will be dead in the next few decades
Do we?
> The mass extinction event is underway and we aren't doing enough to stop it.
This is a clever dodge of the original question. Can you explain to me when our current inaction reaches a point where no response will ever be able to overcome the drivers of this mass extinction? Do you have an estimate you can share?
The good news is that the near-unanimous consensus among experts is that climate change is not an existential issue. Almost no climate scientist thinks that climate change could wipe out the human race. (That's compatible with it having very large effects on human welfare, substantial percentages of global GDP.)
