Save Humanity From Asteroids With Reflective Paint Clouds, Says MIT Grad. Really.

Who needs hunky space miners wielding megaton nuclear warheads when an new MIT paper argues that paintballs could save mankind from asteroid annihilation. Graduate student Sung Wook Paek estimates that reflective paint-covered asteroids would increase the pressure from the Sun’s photons (light) to push a doomsday rock off course. In the 1990’s quality video below, Paek demonstrates how enormous clouds of paint lodged from cosmic paintball guns could envelop a 27-gigaton rock headed towards Earth in 2029.

Paek’s paper was the winner of the United Nation’s competition for novel ways of finding humanity-saving solutions to looming asteroids. New challenge: now that we’ve found a unique way to destroy asteroids, try to come up with a blockbuster movie based on suspiciously good looking painters.