Britain turned its gaze from domestic worries toward the distant corners of the galaxy on Tuesday, launching a task force to assess the risk of asteroids hitting planet Earth.
On the first working day of the new millennium, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government unveiled a panel of three wise men to examine the threat of collision with what it called Near Earth Objects (NEOs).
"The risk of an asteroid or comet causing substantial damage is extremely remote,'' Science Minister Lord Sainsbury said. "This is not something that people should lie awake at night worrying about.''
"But we cannot ignore the risk, however remote, and a case can be made for monitoring the situation on an international basis,'' he said.
Sainsbury said the panel of two scientists and a former diplomat would assess the nature of the hazards posed by asteroids and the potential levels of risk.
It would also consider how the United Kingdom should best contribute to international efforts to deal with NEOs.
The government said none of the NEOs already identified posed a threat to the Earth in the foreseeable future. But on a wider time scale of millions of years asteroids had caused serious damage to the planet.
"Last year an object passed between the moon and Earth which, if it had hit us, would have done a lot of damage,'' said panel member Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations.
Asteroid strike "more likely than lottery win"
The announcement of the task force was welcomed by Liberal Democrat parliamentarian Lembit Opik, who waged a one-man campaign last year to persuade the government of the seriousness of the threat.
Opik, who warned parliament in March that the risk of being killed by an asteroid was greater than winning Britain's national lottery on any given week, praised Sainsbury for what he said was a brave political move to launch the task force.
"Lord Sainsbury's decision will be vindicated by the report, which I'm sure will show it is a real danger to survival,'' Opik told Reuters.
"Roughly speaking it seems that once every 100,000 years an object hits the Earth of sufficient size to wipe out a quarter of life on Earth,'' he said.
Opik, who picked up his interest in asteroids from his astronomer grandfather, said there were 5,000 objects crossing the Earth's orbit big enough to pack a devastating punch.
He said a 0.6 mile-wide asteroid landing in the Atlantic would trigger a tidal wave 17 miles high and cause a nuclear winter lasting for months.
"Europe would be obliterated and drowned. Most of America would be incinerated then drowned,'' he said.
Opik said the role of the task force would be to quantify the dangers and assess what could be done to avert catastrophe.
He said if an asteroid could be identified on a collision course with Earth it could be deflected from its path by an unmanned probe carrying small amounts of nuclear explosives.
"We have the technology to do it but we don't have the information about what's coming our way,'' he said.
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