Asteroids have hit the Earth millions of times. We can see them as shooting stars every night. When they get bigger, things get complicated. It is only a matter of time until a big one hits us. And since we can do something about it, we should.

You see the Earth as a bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament in the black sky. It's so small and so fragile - you realize that on that small spot is everything that means everything to you; all of history and art and death and birth and love.

It would take an extremely large spacecraft to deflect a large asteroid that would be headed directly for the Earth.

We not only need to train people, we also need to develop deflection technologies.

If we do our homework right, never again should an asteroid that can do damage on the ground impact the Earth. We're living in a time-with our technology-we have the capability to eliminate that major shaper of evolution . . . the evolution of life on this planet.

There's no accepted global policy on what to do about asteroid impacts.

While we didn't know the dinosaurs personally, we do know that they were wiped out by an asteroid impact.