Misplaced Priorities...

You may have missed a rather startling event that occurred a few months back.

NASA had a challenge; prove it could strike an incoming asteroid or comet and deflect it away from Earth.  On September 26th of last year it proved that it could.  

Several months ago NASA shot off a rocket with the intent of ramming it into a moving target.  Dimorphos, to be exact.  Didymos is a near-Earth asteroid with its own little bitty moon.  And that moon is named Dimorphos.  To say it's small would be an understatement.  Its only 170 meters in diameter.  And its 6.8 million miles away.  Dwell upon that for a minute... 

So we shot off a rocket several months back with some apparatus in its nose called DART.  And it hurtled toward Didymos and Dimorphos at more than 14,000 miles per hour, planning to hit it dead-on on September 26th.  And God help me, it did!  

I don't know why I happened to tune in that night, but I'm certainly glad I did.  It was on the Science channel and they broadcast the event as it unfolded.  There was a camera in the nose of the "bullet" we sent toward Dimorphos, so we all had a ring side seat.  It was thrilling!

The idea was to see if we could alter the path of an incoming Earth-killer, using the technology we currently possess.  The DART exercise was our first effort in "planetary defense," and it seems we hit the bulls eye!  Both literally and figuratively!

Our scientists aimed DART so skillfully that it would just barely miss Didymos, a far larger moon, by only 17 meters!  We're talking 50 feet here!  Exactly as planned!  And we got to watch it sling by, with Dimorphos in view all the while in the background!  The size of a pixel on your TV screen.  Growing ever larger at one frame-per-second.  With the clock ticking down to the time when our NASA engineers had predicted our "planetary defense" system would strike.  

And I can't tell you how impressed I was...and still am...that it did its job exactly as designed.  Like hitting a bullet, WITH a bullet, the camera winked out as it struck Dimorphos to uproarious applause from the Control Room.  I was applauding as well.  It was truly uplifting.  My faith in our ability to perform such a feat was thereby restored.  

And then I began to ask myself as the happy talk subsided, if we can send a rocket waaay out there to deflect an incoming asteroid,* and save the planet in the process, why can't we get our homeless veterans off the street?  Why can't we stop our folks from shooting each other?  And murdering and stealing and raping and pillaging and plundering?  And beating the crap out of each other?  And maybe stop our politicians from lying to us and stealing from us?  And maybe make people stop saying stupid crap on social media?   

Are our priorities misplaced?

*  BTW, that "bullet" named DART actually did deflect Dimorphos from its orbit.  I just hope it doesn't now crash into Earth as a result...