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MatthewBaker comments on Optimal Philanthropy for Human Beings - Less Wrong
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I didn't downvote you, but what you're saying is essentially "if you accept our tribe is the most awesome and smartest, then it makes sense to donate to our tribal charity". Which is something every single group would say, in slight variation.
Here's results chart for various asteroid tracking efforts. Catalina Sky Survey seems to be doing most of the work these days, and you can probably donate to University of Arizona and have that money go to CSS somehow. I'm not really following this too closely, I'm mostly glad that some people are doing something here.
I honestly believe that the Singularity is a greater threat then asteroids to the human race. Either an asteroid will be small enough that we can destroy it or its too big to stop. Once you make an asteroid big enough to cause risk to humanity its also a lot easier to find and destroy. However, a positive singularity isn't valued enough and a negative singularity isn't feared enough among humanity unlike asteroid deflection efforts and that's why i focus on SIAI.
You actually need to detect these asteroids decades in advance for our current technology to stand any chance, and we currently don't do that. More detection efforts mean tracking smaller asteroids than otherwise, but more importantly tracking big asteroids faster.
Arbitrarily massive asteroid can be moved off course very easily given enough time to do so. That's the plan, not "destroying" them.
Still, considering there's a very low chance of a large asteroid strike and most the most quoted figure Ive heard is that we have more than 75% of NEO objects that are of dangerous size being tracked. I think a negative singularity is more likely to happen in the next 200 years then an asteroid strike. However, it is a good point that donating money to NEO tracking could be a good charitable donation as well i just don't think its on the same order of magnitude as the danger of a uFAI.
With asteroid strike everybody agrees on risk within order of magnitude or two. We have a lot of historical data about asteroid strikes of various sizes, can use power level distribution to smooth it a bit etc.
With UFAI people's estimate are about as divergent as with Second Coming of Jesus Christ, ranging from impossible even in theory through essentially impossible all the way to almost certain.
Money spent on mind uploading is a better defense against asteroids than asteroid detection. At least for me.