> The plan put forward by Laughlin and his
>colleagues Don Korycansky and Fred Adams,
>involves carefully directing a comet or asteroid
>so that it sweeps closely past our planet and
>transfers some of its gravitational energy to
>Earth.
>
> "Earth's orbital speed would increase as a
>result and we would move to a higher orbit away
>from the Sun," Laughlin said.

Wow. All the tree-hugging pinko hippy liberals got all upset when NASA used the Earth to slingshot the Cassini probe to Saturn because it had some Plutonium on board and there was an infintesimal chance that it might intercept the Earth and spread deadly Plutonium everywhere. (Not only were the chances of the probe actually hitting the Earth infintesimal, the engineering of the probe was such that it was DESIGNED to avoid spilling Plutonium everywhere in case this statistically infintesimal event DID happen.) I can't IMAGINE what they'd say about THIS.

Of course, that being said, I think I'd be on the hippy-liberal pinko side on this one. Not so much in the sense that the comet might hit the Earth, but in the sense that, do we really KNOW what changing our orbit would really do? Sure, maybe it solves global warming. Or maybe it solves overpopulation by triggering some runaway ice age event and freezes us all. *shrug*

-- Dave