Persuasive Essay On Asteroids

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According to ushistory.org, governments are formed to protect people from conflicts and to provide law and order. Although an asteroid wiping out the entire earth is not technically a conflict, it would probably be difficult to do those things if the earth was uninhabitable and everyone was dead. So, of course the government has an obligation to search for and protect people from killer asteroids. At the moment, NASA has the Planetary Defense Coordination Office as part of its planetary science division. PDCO is responsible for all NASA-funded projects that search for and catalog asteroids and comets that pass near the earth. It is also supposed to take a leadership position in organizing efforts between agencies and governments in case of an impact threat.
NASA currently has a few ways that they could try to stop an asteroid from impacting the earth. The first is a gravity tractor. This is a spaceship that …show more content…

If the world’s population is decimated, money isn’t going to matter anymore. The less obvious question is how much money should be spent on searching for NEO’s. Impacts that are large enough to destroy a city or civilization statistically only occur every 1,000-100,000 years, so the chances that something will strike us are incredibly low. However, if one were to strike the planet, millions would die. So, the choices are: take the very small risk, or spend millions of tax dollars on making sure that the risk is eliminated. For me, the choice is obvious. Since PDCO is part of NASA, the government would have to increase NASA’s budget to increase PDCO’s. That means more science funding as well as the added benefit of the world not being destroyed. The government would not even have to increase taxes, We are wasting more money than we should on things like the department of defense, that if we decreased their budget we could increase NASA’s by

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