What the DART Mission Says About Human Nature and the Economy

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A month ago, a spacecraft launched by NASA 10 months earlier collided with an asteroid called Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid, Didymos. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (or DART) vehicle was traveling at about 14,000 miles an hour when it struck its target some 7 million miles from Earth.

Engineers watched a stream of photos showing Dimorphos, a roughly football-shaped agglomeration of rock with numerous irregular outcroppings, growing from a speck of light to fill the screen as the craft approached. They rose to their feet in excitement as the images ended, signaling the craft’s destruction on impact with the asteroid. It was the first planned collision of a man-made object with an object beyond Earth’s gravitational field, and it was designed to test our ability to alter the path of such an object should it be detected to be on a collision course with the Earth itself.

Putting it in perspective, we can say that about 66 million years after an asteroid strike caused the extinction of most macroscopic life forms on Earth and cleared the way for the evolution of diverse new species including our own, NASA and its partners at Johns Hopkins University had succeeded in calculating the routes of both an asteroid and a human-constructed projectile so as to achieve a perfect head-on collision. The impact produced a plume of dust visible from Earth-orbiting devices including the Webb and Hubble space telescopes, as well as an accompanying Italian-built photographic module that separated itself from DART hours before the impact.

Through the head-on collision, the roughly 1,300-pound DART craft managed to change the course of Dimorphos’s orbit around Didymos, shortening each orbit by about half an hour—far from negligible, given an estimated orbital time of 11 to 12 Earth hours. The achievement provides a basis for supposing that, with sufficient warning, humans will soon be able to thwart potential collisions with objects like Dimorphos, which are large enough to destroy a city-sized region, by slightly altering their trajectories while they’re still far enough away so that a small deflection spells the difference between hit and miss.

What about larger chunks of space rock, impacts with which could prove even more catastrophic to the Earth and its inhabitants? Remarkably, NASA scientists say they’ve already surveyed the solar system sufficiently to rule out such collisions for the foreseeable future, allowing the agency and its partners to focus on smaller asteroids like Dimorphos. While Dimorphos’ maximum span is that of a few football fields laid end to end, the much larger asteroid believed to have caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary extinction event is estimated to have had a width in the 10-to-15 km. range. Scientists are now determined to continue developing the means to scan our cosmic neighborhood for these smaller risks and to further develop DART-like techniques to protect the planet, should one be found to be headed in our direction.

What does this have to do with economics and psychology? At least two connections stand out.

First, the protection of Earth from asteroids is arguably a textbook public good—that is, a costly producible good or service unprofitable for a privately-owned company to provide the public with since everyone enjoys the same benefit from it whether they pay a share or fail to do so. Such a good or service can be produced by for-profit firms, but usually only if the funding is provided by a government, which has the authority to tax people and businesses in order to pay for it. If some of the public goods yield real value, as most would feel an averted asteroid strike would do, we have to thank the availability of an institutional mechanism—government—playing this among other important roles in our complex economy.

Second, the devotion of hundreds of scientists and engineers to such projects, hinted at by the description of the atmosphere in the control room at the moment of impact, as well as by press interviews with personnel involved, suggests an aspect of human nature that is incongruent with economics textbook assumptions that people work more or less exclusively for the money they earn. At least some members of the DART team appear to display a sense of mission, pride, and responsibility likely to be explained in part by prosocial and identity motives that animate work in spheres like teaching and healthcare, sometimes classified under an umbrella term of “helping work.”

Even at times when human scientific achievement might appear to place our species on a “higher” plane than that of less brainy animals—successfully pinging chunks of rock hurtling through space is clearly out of reach even for close cousins like bonobos—what makes us tick, especially in spheres like science, is still our nature as social animals. As Michael Tomasello points out in Becoming Human, science has progressed over the centuries only because individual scientists strive to communicate their findings to colleagues so as to enjoy human interaction and esteem.

To be sure, the case can be made that preventing the low likelihood destruction of one or two cities by asteroids should have low priority compared to avoiding the havoc that climate change has already begun to cause, or to ameliorating the existential threat posed by it to hundreds of millions living in low-lying coastal regions and in large regions fed by agricultures dependent on glacier-fed rivers. A direct strike from a Dimorphos-sized asteroid would also kill far fewer people than would a substantial thermonuclear exchange of the kind increasingly difficult to rule out if conflicts between the U.S. and Russia or China should escalate out of control due to miscalculation and bluster.

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But it still stands as testimony to the human spirit that we’ve not just made the technological strides of significantly lessening the chances of some kinds of catastrophe, but also have a sufficiently cohesive society to field teams of dedicated engineers and scientists willing to work around the clock to do it. I’d rate the DART mission and the larger set of efforts of which it forms a part as providing a higher return on the dollar than many other things our society spends resources on.

So let’s indeed continue to recalibrate our division of resources and efforts among competing worthwhile ends, but let’s not forget the importance of the synergistic relationship between government and the economy, and let’s keep fostering pro-sociality and team spirit rather than the Hobbesian “war of all against all” into which so much of our society and world appear to be descending of late, so that the human adventure might go on for at least a few more generations.