Talk:Planetary defense

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Articles for deletion

This article was nominated for deletion on 1 January 2006. The result of the discussion was Keep. An archived record of this discussion can be found here.


On 2005-01-02 I rewrote this article, saving it from deletion. It still needs to be expanded; it and the related articles (Near-Earth asteroid, Near-Earth object, impact event, end of civilization) need to be refactored, some parts merged. —Quarl (talk) 2006-01-08 10:32Z

[edit] Planetary defenses in science fiction

I added this section because of the huge amount of influence science fiction has in planetary defenses. I don't know much scifi, but I thought I'd start it out anyway. - Rudykog 22:42, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Relationships with other articles

Asteroid deflection strategies currently has a notice "The following text needs to be harmonized with text in the article Planetary defense." Off-the-top-of-my-head logic suggests that Planetary defense is a more generalized topic, since it is not restricted to impactors. So it should cover other topics such as misbehaviour of the Sun (e.g. coronal mass ejection), natural threats from outside the Solar system (e.g. supernova at astronomically close range, for example within 20 light-years) and deliberate attacks by aliens or by human factions (invasion, bombardment, relativistic kill vehicles, etc.) That implies that Asteroid deflection strategies should contain most of the material about defence against impactors, and the relevant part of Planetary defense should summarize and link to Asteroid deflection strategies.

I'm not sure yet whether Planetary defense should contain "Planetary defenses in science fiction", for 2 reasons. First, it could just become a list of potentially enormous length. Second, there's little scope for reasoned analysis as most fictional methods are obviously unrealistic, e.g. an attacking fleet can go round ground-based or orbital defences, ground-based missiles suffer the huge disadvantage of having to lift against the planet's gravity, it's very difficult to propose a realistic method of invading a planet, etc. Philcha (talk) 16:51, 2 January 2008 (UTC)