Congress hears options for asteroid defense: Pay now or pray later
Source: NBC News
Congress got the word from NASA on Tuesday about its options for dealing with the threats posed by asteroids and comets: Lawmakers can either provide adequate funding for detecting and characterizing near-Earth objects, and diverting them if necessary — or they can pray.
Threats from space are generally the stuff of science-fiction movies such as "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact," but members of the House Science Committee took a hard look at the realities during Tuesday's hearing, which came in response to the Feb. 15 meteor explosion over Russia as well as a close encounter that same day with a much bigger asteroid known as 2012 DA14.
The lawmakers didn't always like what they heard. The committee's chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, told the panelists more than once that the progress report they delivered was "not reassuring." But representatives from both parties were receptive to the idea of putting more resources into the effort to counter cosmic threats.
White House science adviser John Holdren noted that the funding devoted annually to cataloging potentially threatening asteroids has risen from $5 million to more than $20 million over the past couple of years. But even at that level, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden estimated that it would take until 2030 to catalog 90 percent of the near-Earth objects between 140 meters and 1 kilometer in width, as mandated by Congress.
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Read more: http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/19/17373781-congress-hears-options-for-asteroid-defense-pay-now-or-pray-later?lite
There's another hearing Wednesday.
Links to the webcasts are at http://nasawatch.com/archives/2013/03/asteroid-threat.html
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...no matter how many trees we hug. 
Remaining here is the single most stupid thing we could do, and there are a lot of stupid and avoidable ways to die as a species. And due to solar evolution, our current understanding is such that the Earth's biosphere most certainly does NOT have 6 billion years (aside, I think you mean 5 billion - we're roughly halfway through Sol's lifespan). It has maybe another 100 million years before the amount of incoming solar radiation is too much to effectively handle by higher-order lifeforms. Without significant technological intervention well-beyond our currents means, the deep future on Earth belongs to bacteria and fungi.
Hence the need to start taking these first steps towards spreading our civilization off-world.
And as if we can't address more than one issue at a time. Please. 
Thanks for reminding me. 
I just hope we aren't too late. So much time and opportunity squandered in the second half of the last century, so much could go very wrong making this our final century. We're so close to ensuring our survival and yet simultaneously so close to ensuring our extinction. It is suicidal insanity to stop progressing upward and outward...
I just look around; I know from certain traditional space exploration standpoints, it seems like we've been in limbo for 40 years... still, the difference in distance between LEO and the moon, is huge. Between the Moon and Mars, even more exponentially huge.
And yet, here we are, we've discovered something like 700 exoplanets, we have sent spacecraft to every real planet in the Solar System (sorry Pluto, but you're still next, at least after Ceres- which I am actually pretty curious to see) our knowledge of the universe is growing by leaps and bounds and the visionaries are doing what we sci-fi nerds always dreamed the visionaries would do.. I look at a guy like Elon Musk and I think, wow.
I think it's a VERY cool time to be alive. 
