Look, I get the appeal of the asteroid defense argument. It’s a clean, cinematic, existential threat. One big rock and it’s game over for everyone. It’s a narrative that’s easy to sell because it’s so absolute. But that’s exactly the problem—we’re letting a Hollywood-style narrative, a framing of doom, distract us from the slower, more complex, and far more certain crisis already at our doorstep. My opponent will likely argue that an asteroid impact is an unparalleled, species-ending event, and that we must prioritize it above all else. And on its face, that seems logical. But this debate isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening in a world where resources, political will, and public attention are finite. Framing asteroid defense as the “top priority” actively pulls focus and funding from a threat that is not a potential future event, but a current, ongoing catastrophe: climate change. Climate change isn’t a hypothetical. It’s driving extreme weather, mass migration, agricultural collapse, and geopolitical instability right now. The narrative that we can shelve this burning house to build a meteor shield in the backyard is a dangerous fantasy. It’s a form of catastrophic bias—we’re drawn to the dramatic, single-point disaster while ignoring the insidious, systemic one that’s already killing people and destabilizing civilizations. And let’s be real about the media logic here. Asteroid defense is a great story. It involves rockets, lasers, and heroic last-minute saves. Climate change is a messy story about policy, consumption, and incremental change. It’s no wonder which one captures the imagination. But prioritizing based on what makes a better movie is a terrible way to govern or ensure human survival. We absolutely should fund planetary defense research. It’s a prudent insurance policy. But “prioritize” means putting it first, and that’s where the argument falls apart. We can walk and chew gum, but we need to sprint on climate. Redirecting our primary focus to a low-probability, high-impact event over a high-probability, high-impact event already in progress isn’t just unwise—it’s a failure to read the actual headlines in favor of the sci-fi ones. The asteroid might hit someday. Climate change is hitting us every single day.

My strongest point is that we're already living inside the climate crisis. It's not a future threat to be weighed against another future threat. It's the active, destabilizing force reshaping our world right now. Prioritizing asteroid defense means telling communities facing floods, fires, and famine today that their reality is less urgent than a statistical possibility. Cigaalwarsame, you're right that an asteroid impact would be an absolute catastrophe. But the media framing of that threat is what's misleading us. It's presented as a singular, solvable engineering problem—spot the rock, deflect the rock, save the world. That's a tidy narrative. Climate change is the opposite; it's a diffuse, systemic problem rooted in our entire global economy and way of life. It's politically messy, which makes it easier for media and politicians to sideline in favor of a more glamorous, tech-focused mission. But that's a dangerous misallocation. The resources and global cooperation needed for a serious asteroid defense program are immense. Diverting political capital and funding to that now directly undermines our ability to adapt to and mitigate climate impacts that are already causing mass displacement and conflict. We can't build a planetary shield if the nations on the planet are collapsing under resource scarcity and climate-driven instability. You might argue we can do both, but "prioritize" means one comes first. And choosing the asteroid scenario first is a bet against the present for a speculative future. It's like refusing to put out a fire in your kitchen because you're worried a meteor might hit your roof someday. The fire is here. It's spreading. We have to fight the crisis we're in, not just the one that makes for a better disaster movie. Asteroid defense is prudent, but it's a background insurance policy. Climate action is emergency medicine. We need to stop treating the slow-motion disaster as less urgent simply because it lacks a cinematic countdown clock.

Okay, cigaalwarsame, I’ve been thinking about your core argument—that an asteroid impact is an unparalleled, extinction-level event, and that its total finality means we must prioritize it. I get the logic. It’s the ultimate “all eggs in one basket” problem. If the basket gets smashed, nothing else matters. But that’s where the media framing does its most dangerous work. It presents the asteroid threat as a binary switch: either we stop it and survive, or we don’t and we go extinct. It’s a clean, dramatic story. Climate change is framed as a gradient—a worsening problem, but never the singular moment of doom. That framing allows us to treat it as less urgent, even though its effects are already crossing irreversible thresholds right now. You’re asking us to prioritize the defense against a low-probability, high-consequence event over the high-probability, high-consequence event that is actively unraveling the very societal and economic stability we’d need to mount any asteroid defense program at all. Think about it. The global cooperation, the trillions in funding, the decades of stable, focused technological development required to build a reliable planetary defense system? That all depends on a world that isn’t crippled by climate-induced famine, mass migration, and resource wars. Climate change is a threat multiplier that directly undermines our capacity to do anything else, including asteroid defense. Prioritizing asteroid defense isn’t just choosing one threat over another. It’s choosing to build a fortress on a foundation that’s already cracking. We can’t coordinate a global mission to deflect a rock in 50 years if we’re locked in conflict over freshwater and arable land today. So while I agree the asteroid scenario is a terrifying possibility we must monitor, making it our top priority is a profound misreading of the timeline we’re actually on. It’s prioritizing a potential future catastrophe over a guaranteed, ongoing one that is systematically degrading our ability to respond to any future catastrophe. The narrative of the “perfect threat” is seductive, but we have to deal with the messy, complicated, immediate one first.