Don't bother with nukes, just lasso in that comet

An aerospace engineer from the Air Force Institute of Technology has devised an idea, don't use nukes to blast a comet headed for Earth outta the sky, use a giant lasso. A lasso? Yes, you read that correctly. The lasso would have to be anywhere from six-miles long (that's as big as Mt. Everest) to 60,000 miles long, reported Wired magazine. And the anchor it would have to be tied to? Well that's probably gotta a planet or something as big as that to stop a comet. And it wouldn't be as quick as a nuke either, it could take 10 to 50 years to pull that comet out of its path, reports Wired.

So is this practical? Sources interviewed for Wired said no, absolutely not. Imaging a giant John Wayne saving the Earth, however, is a little funny. What's really strange here though is that the Air Force is wasting its time and money on a guy coming up with harebrained ideas to an actual real-world threat. One of the predominant theories on how the dinosaurs became extinct is from a comet or asteroid hitting the planet.

Wired reports that "NASA’s Near Earth Object Program, which tracks asteroids and comets that could approach the planet, has cataloged more than 5,500 objects. About 1,000 of these are classified as “potentially hazardous,” meaning they could wipe out a city, spawn giant tsunamis or, in the worst case, eradicate life with a planet-shrouding cloud of debris." Let's tighten up there fellas, not everything can be solved like the Old West days with guns and rope!