I am sure you have thought about it once. Or at least someone you knew had thought about it once. Or perhaps it was someone who knew someone you knew did who had, but I am most certainly sure that someone that you have no connection with whatsoever has never given a distant thought to what I am talking about. What am I talking about? What is my point in all this talk about people that I probably don't know? (You probably have forgotten about the title of this article at this point, along with the reason you are reading it, yet that too is not my point). Yes, I was going to talk about Astrophysical Engineering. So it seems fair enough that I start telling you what it actually refers to. As its name implies, it is the branch of engineering that deals with astrophysical objects; sorry to disappoint, but it is not the kind of engineering that goes into making your daily horoscope. In case "astrophysical objects" sounds obscure, these are the objects that astronomers peek at with large telescopes at night.

To stress that these objects are extreme in many aspects, we mention that objects like the Earth (and yes, there are quite a few places very much like our Earth) are sometimes not counted as astrophysical objects. This is due to their small sizes, relatively small that is, and on no particular day of week (not even on Saturday), will you be able to imagine how small the Earth is compared to a galaxy or how large it is compared to your iPod. Astronomers sometimes call planets astrophysical objects; this often happens on nights when they are more in contact with the softer side of their cosmic identity, i.e. when they regard the solar system as home. Apart from all this talk about confusion in cosmic identities -a condition, which I am told is very hard to overcome- the engineering part of Astrophysical Engineering, is truly amazing. Astrophysics is well studied, though I wouldn't bet on it being correctly understood, but to put astrophysical theories in practice is plain outrageous. For these objects, it is not only size that matters: other properties like mass, temperature and even spin are hardly pleasant to engineer on, or for that matter to even engineer something around.

The term "Astrophysical Engineering" first reached my ears when Killa' Mike, a colleague of mine, asked me whether it would make a good minor for him. To both of mine and Mike's dismay, the minor doesn't exist at the University of Florida. Like all great ideas that first come across me, I laughed at its mere possibility. Then I had a deja-vu of those other great ideas at which I laughed before, and concluded that Astrophysical Engineering is very probably possible. Sure enough, I found a few books on the subject not counting the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which might be describing the future of this field (the exact era depends on your speed, of course), or as Douglas Adams, the author, would have liked it, how it was in the distant past of our Galaxy. Hopefully a more in-depth article follows this present one, explaining the more technical results of Astrophysical Engineering. However, I will leave you with the following tease as a first step. What do you do when an asteroid is about to hit the Earth?

Well, you definitely don't send an oil drilling team led by Bruce Willis. How about a gravitational tractor that uses gravity as a towline! NASA's Johnson Space Center recently worked out a model for such a spacecraft that can tow a 200 meter diameter asteroid by simply hovering near the asteroid and never landing on it.