Maybe it's your helmet visor. Otherwise, get Adobe Flashplayer 10.

Yes, because clearly if we spend money on looking at rocks in space, humanity can finally reach its goal of living forever.

Or we could just raise funding on the search for vast deposits of unicorn blood.

In the end, Zyx, we all die. And we have far better ways of killing ourselves than the Universe seems to care to throw at us, for the moment.

Furthermore, if we did pump large sums of money into this, you're aware that we still may not see whatever comes? Not everything can be solved by throwing money at the problem, and quite frankly, the majority of space is pretty damn dark.

Funding this would also take funding away from NASA, which after the Bush administration, is already asphyxiating.

Not so, says the current generation of environmentalism goals. And their own ongoing quest for a future worth living for but still granted to THEIR precious childrens.

And yet, money can buy whatever we (as in Humanity, btw) decide or not; health or death, budgeted by conflictual choices, militarized by arsenals.

Catch a ride to Mars, dump the UN flag.

Party time, comet X is on its way.

What NASA can't (or wouldn't through decisions, btw) do, somebody else will and the USA would have to beg for a pie slice as usual..  without Russia, your obsolete fleet of shuttles wouldn't have a dockable ISS. Without Canadian Robotics, you wouldn't assemble it. Without Japanese technology edge, you wouldn't change batteries or deploy solar panels. Without European cashflow, you wouldn't launch probes.

Cooperation could save Earth in a space threat scenario, not pride or politics.

The "space threat" scenario would only be a danger over tens of thousands of years; we're almost certain to all be dead before anything sizeable strikes Earth.

They kept saying things like that when discussing things like "500 year floods" or the odds of cat 5 hitting New Orleans. The problem with planning like that is if you're wrong even once, you're screwed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

That happened only a hundred years ago, and could happen again next year, or not for another hundred years. How much of an investment is it worth to prevent another such impact, especially if is going to hit somewhere more valuable than Siberia?