Forum Post: Can protecting the earth revive the economy?

With the recent explosion of a meteor over Russia, that unleashed nearly 500 kilotons of energy, more than 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and injuring around 1,200 individuals, a new interest has been taken in technologies that could prevent such events, or even much bigger ones, from again doing harm to humanity.

Its thought that a massive meteor once struck the planet earth during the times of the dinosaurs, causing most of them to become extinct, and that such an event could eventually happen again one day, doing vast harm to humanity, or even eliminating us from the face of the planet.

For these reasons, a new interest has been taken in spaced based systems that would not only protect the earth from asteroids and meteorites, but from nuclear weapons as well, if a third world war were ever to erupt, or if a rogue nation were to suicidally attempt the use of a nuclear missile.

Like JFK's space program, which had tremendous economic benefits, producing ten dollars worth of economic growth for every dollar put into it, its thought that a Strategic Defense of the Earth, like the previously called Strategic Defense Initiative, would have immense economic benefits as well.

Russia Today reported:

Russia Today, citing the Russian newspaper Komersant, reported on Tuesday, that Russia is proposing to break the deadlock over the planned European Missile Defense System with an alternative plan that would go beyond the original Ronald Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative and take up the full scope of scientific and technological cooperation envisioned by Lyndon LaRouche in his original plan for U.S.-Soviet cooperation in bringing an end to the era of Mutually Assured Destruction.

While details of the Russian proposal are yet to be fleshed out, a senior U.S. intelligence source today confirmed that the Russians had put the idea of a Strategic Defense of Earth (SDE) on the table in the past month, as part of the ongoing talks with the U.S. and NATO over the European missile defense system. Below are excerpts from the Russia Today coverage "Star Wars Alternative to Missile Defense" (the full text can be found at http://rt.com/politics/missile-defense-earth-nato-085/):

"In a move to overcome the Russia-U.S. deadlock over the missile defense, Moscow has reportedly come up with a new initiative: a global system to guard against missiles as well as asteroids and other threats from space....

"The idea was put forward by Dmitry Rogozin, Moscows envoy to NATO, writes the daily [Kommersant], citing diplomatic sources.

"The package of proposals has yet to be formalized. The idea has been nicknamed Strategic Defense of Earth as an allusion to The Strategic Defense Initiative better known as Star Wars suggested by former US President Ronald Reagan in 1983. The costly and highly-criticized plan for ground and space-based systems intended to make America invulnerable to nuclear attacks.

"The point of the Russian Star Wars initiative is to focus on fighting threats coming from space rather than just missiles. The Washington-backed missile defense shield is customized purely for countering missiles launched somewhere in the Middle East, a source told Kommersant. Moscow proposes a different approach. It would be an integration of anti-aircraft, missile and space defenses.

"Thereby, the system would be targeted against possible threats to Earth coming from space, including asteroids, comet fragments, and other alien bodies, the source is cited as saying. The system should be capable of both monitoring the space and destroying any dangerous objects as they approach our planet....

"[The Russian] concept gives an opportunity to propose [the US] even a more global task to save the world. And also do it together with us rather than on their own, Kommersants informant noted.

"According to the paper, President Dmitry Medvedev showed interest in the proposals and instructed Dmitry Rogozin and presidential aide Sergey Prikhodko to work further on the initiative."