Space's dangers

I was amazed to read how many threats are lurking in space:

There are between one and two million near-Earth objects (NEOs) -- chunks of space rock whose orbits may pass within 30 million miles of Earth -- that pose a significant impact threat to the planet.

Of the 4,535 NEOs detected and tracked (704 of which are real whoppers), none are on a definite collision course, but there could be millions more, many of them potentially lethal, lurking in the cosmos.

It also looks like the US and China are the two countries most likely to get hit by one of those rocks, and while some measures have been taken to find and track the largest of these threats, even a small one could cause a lot of damage and death.

The options, in case of a collision risk, are to nuke it or hit it with some kind of spacecraft (both these options however, are likely to generate multiple threats from a single one) or to gently push it out of our way:

A craft would push or pull the object. Not sideways -- too energy-intensive -- but backward or forward to slow it down or speed it up. A few pounds of force applied over several months would alter a medium-size body's rate of travel such that it would miss hitting Earth by four or five minutes and thousands of miles. An asteroid tugboat would attach to a NEO and deliver a speed-altering nudge.

A gravity tractor would hover close to a NEO and use mutual gravitational attraction to divert it ever so slightly. A solar sail would move a NEO with the subtle pressure of light from the sun.

A much better option, if you ask me.