Target Sun & Earth
by
Glen A. McKerron Having read John S Lewis's book "Rain of Iron and Ice", and noting all the newspaper announcements regarding "Near Misses" of large meteors over the past few years, it does not require much thought to arrive at the conclusion we are in danger of being struck by one or more devastating cosmic missiles.
In fact I predicted the increasing frequency of these natural missiles in my orbital stretch theory above. I am not psychic, my predictions are based on scientific facts we cannot afford to ignore much longer if we intend to survive.  Now I ask: What I can do to help us all out in this dire situation?
What concerns me most, is both our complacency, and total lack of preparedness. We are told by the scientific community at large, that we have a "watch" in place, and plans to take action when the need arises.  Like George Noory on his late night talk show "Coast to Coast AM" has noted, - "The incoming objects seem to be getting more frequent," and "We don't seem to be spotting them until after they are no longer an immediate threat."  This is totally unacceptable.
We need more eyes in the sky, and people to man them. The medium sized telescopes currently used to spot these missiles are not obviously fine enough in quality to do the job.  Could this be the fault of our modern practice of only engineering things to be good enough to do the job? In which case we don't know how good that must be, and fail to make them good enough.  I have been told the minimum sized telescope that can spot one of these missiles is a 14" telescope. A properly made 14" Main mirror with a 48" focal length can resolve a diffraction limited 2/(2440 * 550e-9 * (48/12)) = 373 lines per mm. when used in a 12" Clear Aperture f:4.0 telescope.