Towards Plans for Mitigating Possible Socio-Economic Effects due to a Physical Impact of an Asteroid on Earth

The objective of this paper is to consider the possible socioeconomic policy responses to the impacts of near earth objects (NEOs), mainly asteroids and comets that might hit the earth. While scientists and engineers are able to design mitigation measures, society as a whole and decision makers in particular need to appreciate the fragility of global financial and capital value chains, especially in an era of globalized trade and capital flows; even a comparatively small NEO strike anywhere on the globe could display the same kind of capital market volatility as experienced in 2008 during the Financial Crisis and in March 2020 after the Coronavirus pandemic was declared. For large disruptive events, these effects will be even more drastic, and internationally coordinated regulatory actions would have to be enacted as a mitigation strategy in order to reduce the ensuing disruption of the lives of citizens. Paradoxically, technical mitigation measures might introduce additional unknowns: for a time period of up to several years there will persist not only the question of whether the planned mitigation will work at all, but also there will be a residual uncertainty as to where in the possible corridor of several thousand kilometers in length a partially deflected object might eventually impact. This could lead to a situation, in which a mitigation, even though successful, might cause more damage in terms of economic disturbance, than would have been caused by a surprise impact. There will be straightforward consequences, such as a drastic fall of the real estate values in the impact corridor and a flight to safety. However, there will be other, less obvious, but even more severe consequences as investor confidence falls, delivery chains get interrupted and trade contracts cannot be honoured. The global financial markets will react in possibly surprising ways, triggering a global economic upheaval. We therefore advocate the need to develop a broad strategic action plan, of which socioeconomic policy actions would be an important component of such a global response. Such a strategy might then feed into a global disaster recovery plan, possibly adopted and endorsed by the UN, the IMF and other world bodies.