Would we want to band together to fix it anyway? I would have thought smaller teams from US, Russia, China and EU could all come up with independant solutions and see which works.

If an asteroid is hurtling and don't want people fucking around in committees.

Why do you think that individual smaller efforts are more likely to succeed than a single unified global effort. I see no evidence to support that. We're obviously going to spend a few years researching this before we start figuring out how to stop the asteroid to determine if we should be fighting this asteroid menace as a whole, or individually.

There's no guarantee a "single, unified global effort" will be better than multiple different efforts though, plus it sounds like putting all your eggs in one basket.

If events in 2016 has shown anything, it is that people are naturally divisive. We all live in our own bubbles and want to do things our way all the time, win all the time and be right all the time. Unless you're willing to compromise, it'll be hard to just tell people to team up with you and do things "the global way".

There's no guarantee they won't interfere with and nullify each other. For instance, one team lands a big ion thruster on the rocket to push it out of the way. The next detonates a nuke next to it. They screwed up the positioning so it didn't deflect the asteroid enough, but did wreck the ion engine. Oops.

At the very least you need some communication between the "competing teams".

Because "all of us", collectively, is usually stupider than "any of us". It's hard to beat small focus'd tactical teams. Large committees get bogged down.

Even way back when there were few commercial incumbent interests in web standards a the W3C or IETF being this way or the other, and the groups were small, focused and collegial, it took a fair amount of patient doing to achieve outcomes. For something more global and "significant" -- getting the respective rep teams of 10-large banks to agree on technical standards for money transfer -- oh, boy....

You've clearly never worked in anything dictated by multiple voting parties with different interests.

There would be no such thing as a 'global unified effort' in this scenario. There might be a 'global effort', but it will be dragged down by countries arguing over which will provide what resources and for what reward.

I don't think it would even get as far as thinking about the "thousands of years" bit. $WE would just think, "OK, we survived, but our neighbors were already weaker than us before, so they're bound to be in really bad shape.".

(I have a pessimistic view of humanity. Individual humans are actually usually pretty nice, but we're just too easily led and since 'leaders' tend to have traits that are antithetical to general well-being...)