but i find it mind blowing that there's clever boffin's that can manage to land a small probe on a comet travelling at who knows how many thousand of mph that's 300 million miles away :worship:
It's no more pointless than football, motor racing, large hadron colliders or new gadgets like mobile phones being brought out every year, we have many cures for cancer and these days more people survive than die from cancers and thanks to the way research is funded and huge charities there is plenty of money for cancer research, and to be honest putting a load of rocket scientists to work curing cancer is never going to end well.
Makes me laugh people who are "anti-space" yet the technology it funds or has been developed directly or indirectly is used everyday and I bet they don't boycott that
You are aware, aren't you, that there is a constant significant risk of an Earth impact by a comet or asteroid? If we are lucky they land in remote places, like the ones in Siberia last year and in 1908. If one of those had hit a city it would have had the effect of a nuclear bomb. Try this one : [ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event[/ame] - an eyewitness 40 miles away was burnt and thrown back some yards.
Ones larger than that could wipe out human life on earth. It is only because the Earth's weather and oceans tend to erase evidence of past strikes (except in deserts, such as the Arizona crater) that we are a bit unaware of how many strikes there have been in the past. Or the craters are so large that we fail to recognise them ; few people realise that the Gulf of Mexico is a meteor crater. The moon, having no weather, gives a more realistic picture.
We could do nothing to stop a really big object coming our way, but we are working towards being able to nuke smaller ones, with developments like the current project.