By Noah Dawson

With all of the doom and gloom in the headlines seemingly every day, I wanted to give some attention to a recent event that’s almost unquestionably good for humanity: the successful liftoff of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

While the launch itself was nothing out of the ordinary, with the payload making its way into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the goal of the test is remarkable. For the first time in our decades long history of space travel, a mission is being carried out to demonstrate our ability to redirect the path of an asteroid.

The mission is straightforward. The payload will simply crash into a small asteroid, imparting enough kinetic energy to slightly alter the asteroid’s trajectory. The target itself isn’t actually currently on a collision course with Earth, but the test will confirm we have the capability to alter the orbit of an asterteroid should we detect one that is on a collision course.

Think for a moment about what this means: A massive asteroid impact is a mass extinction event. Earth has seen this happen before. Luckily, humanity has not yet experienced such an event, but we cannot count on luck to provide for the perpetual continuation of our species. And, while we have theoretically had the capability to redirect an asteroid by impacting it since the dawn of the space age, no tests of this capability have been launched until now.

When thinking of the wider cosmological context, this is an even bigger deal. According to the Fermi Paradox, there seems to be a discontinuity between the size and age of the universe and the amount of intelligent life observed. In other words, the universe appears vast and old, yet, to our knowledge, we seem to be pretty much alone. One of the most common answers to the paradox is the great filters hypothesis. The hypothesis points out that, in order for a species to reach the point where it is truly spacefaring, it must survive a series of filters. Think of how easily humanity could have annihilated itself almost immediately after developing nuclear weapons. How many civilizations would have been so lucky? How many would be wiped out by mass disease? How many would have the capability to stop a massive asteroid before it reaches their planet? We know the dinosaurs didn’t make it beyond that filter. This test, if successful, might just push us beyond that filter.

It appears we as a species might just live to fight another day.