They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure, but is there much humans can do to stop natural disasters from happening in the first place?
. There are massive events that can fundamentally change human society locally and/or globally or even threaten life on Earth. Yet, really, they are only disasters because they change the status quo. Just think about how the Chicxulub asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous opened the door for the rise of mammals.
And herein lies the rub for our desire to prevent these types of massive and destructive events: the scale of processes. Didymos is a relatively small asteroid and if DART works, we can hope that it would on a larger scale with larger asteroids. However, maybe that would we make it worse -- maybe we break the big asteroid into smaller bits that hit more places? We also need to think about what we can do with existing technology and what the future might make feasible ... and at what cost.
The furthest we've drilled into the crust gets us to the depth of magma storage, but that was a borehole no bigger than a pie plate. And nuking a volcano? Sure, that's a great idea if you want aLandslides: , aren't realistically preventable. Instead, we just need to avoid building where ancient landslide deposits reside or where slopes are unstable.nuking a hurricane to stop it