Let's hope this doesn't go all Goldblum...

Well, I hope NASA is satisfied with itself. They just plowed a $330 unmanned million spacecraft into an asteroid. Huh? Yeah, million with an "M," but I mean, still...

Unmanned? What about our ragtag crews of misfits?
Is NASA trying to put them out of a job?

When bullseyeing an asteroid is an 
easier sell than lowering carbon emissions
we seriously need to reevaluate.

And yes, plowing into the asteroid Dimorphos was the point and yesterday's impact was in fact a huge success and the first step towards creating a defense against potentially extinction-level catastrophes in the future. Well, I mean, extinction-level catastrophes we didn't make for ourselves. And really, when you think about it, $330 million isn't all that much when it compared to a planet-killing rock falling to earth with the kinetic energy of a thousand nuclear bombs. So hurray! Good on you, NASA. To boldly divert asteroids no one has ever diverted before! I am 100% onboard. But couple of things:

"Let's uh...let's hope not?"

-Some astrophysicist

First of all--and I'm sure this is a pretty dumb question--but are there like, unforeseeable consequences to altering the course of asteroids? Such as causing some other impact? The idea here was only to divert Dimorphos--dumb name, I agree--by a tiny degree, but it orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos and like, NASA looked into what diverting Dimorphos would do to Didymos, right? And even if they did everything right, isn't there an amount of unforeseeable-ness to unforeseeable consequences? I mean, something something gravity, right?

Like I said, dumb question. Of course they matched all of this out. But like most non-scientists my age, my understanding of science comes from Star Trek and Jurassic Park and so there's always going to be a part of my brain slapping a table and um-ing my way through a monologue about chaos theory.

"Space rocks..uh...find a way..."

Kind of feels like an ape problem.
What? Don't look at me like that.

Ok, but in fairness, I'm not alone in my paranoia about the unknowable. The idea with the DART mission is to see firstly if we could divert an asteroid or whatever from a potential collision course, but I mean, how often does that happen? The last serious impact was like, sixty-six million years ago and is maybe what killed the dinosaurs. I'm not saying it couldn't happen tomorrow, but I'm saying that there's also a decent chance that it could be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years away, right?

But sure, it could happen next week or in a year or even a hundred years and in anywise, better to be prepared than not, right? And really, $330 million is chump change in a world where a single billionaire has seven hundred and seventy times that much and just uses it huck roadsters at Mars and to not buy Twitter. 

Also, anyone else notice how much the impact video looks like the 
meteor crash scene from the opening of Final Fantasy V?

No? Just me? Ok...