Embracing a scientific world-view has been a great comfort to me. I no longer fear ghouls coming out of the night at me, because I know they (probably) don’t exist. [A few weeks ago, after awakening in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I had a sudden shock as I saw the specter of a woman standing motionless in my apartment. I was shit-in-my-pants terrified, thank god my bowels were already empty. Instead of running screaming into my room, I decided to turn on the light. The old lady-ghost turned out to be a music stand. Yay, skeptical investigation.] I don’t worry about organic food versus GM anymore because I know that non-GM foods are modified too, just by a slower and less precise process. I no longer dread pharmaceuticals, save perhaps the business people at the top. And yet I know that if there’s any problem with them, it’s perhaps that they are SO good at making their products that they are free to charge more than Uncle Scrooge could afford to pay. Yes, scientific thinking has cured my fears from much of my past life. It has, however, given me a brand new one. That would be big rocks from space.
Who needs a toothpick?
NASA recently found a 71 foot meteor it called GA6 traveling fairly close to Earth’s orbit. We lucked out because it passed us by. It, of course, passed us by very closely (within the orbit of the moon), and here’s a pleasant thought: the gravity of our planet could very well have altered GA6′s path so that the next time it comes around it could come smashing into us. Now… The AP story I read about this described GA6 as a “small asteroid,” but I prefer to think of it as “a piece of rock 1/3 the size of the meteoroid that caused the Tunguska event.”
Before I continue, pretty much all the information I’m going to use here has been cribbed from Phil Plait’s (The Bad Astronomer and former president of the James Randi Educational Foundation) excellent book, Death From the Skies! Great book, unfortunately, it’s cut down on my sleep by about forty percent.
There’s this Bud Light commercial that played during the superbowl showing scientists partying because an asteroid is fast approaching and they think they’re all going to die. At the end of the commercial, a meteoroid about the size of a pebble “binks” off the telescope. Fun commercial, everyone laughs, here’s the thing, any rock big enough for pieces of it to survive the trip from space to the earth is big enough to do real damage. Meteoroids of a meter in length can explode in our atmosphere with the force of hundreds of tons of TNT. These are nothing I sneeze at. And the meteor that just missed us? Let’s go over the figures again. 71 feet across. 22 times longer than a rock that explodes with the force of HUNDREDS OF TONS OF TNT. A rock three times as wide across as this one, and that’s within an order of magnitude do not forget, a rock three times as big that exploded in the upper atmosphere knocked people off their feet hundreds of miles away from ground zero. It sent out a shockwave knocked over trees creating a ring hundreds of square miles large. The only reason it DIDN’T kill millions was because, luckily, the meteoroid exploded over Siberia, one of the most desolate places in the world. A twenty two meter meteor may be small, but if you ask me, it’s not small enough.
This is why we need NASA, because NASA can put the money into creating a gravity tug which could theoretically save us and every other species that live on this planet from going the way of the dinosaurs. I mean, I’d like to see us get to Mars in my lifetime, but I’d also like to see my planet continue. In the words of The Tick, “It’s where I keep all my stuff.”
Yeah, I’m probably blowing all this a bit out of proportion, but stuff from space is dangerous, and we spot plenty of these rocks too late for my comfort. There’s plenty out there big enough to take out our whole species, and the only way we’re going to stop it is through funding. And Benny? As much as you’re going to feel this is a political statement, the only pockets that we’re going to be able to dip into to stop them are those of the government. There’s no money in saving the planet, and therefore, we can’t trust the job to private industry. We need a political body smart enough to see the dangers from space and brave enough to champion funding to stop them. The UN is beginning to make noises about planning for asteroids, but they are still poorly funded and have little ability to act. Until we can really fund the people that can save us, we’re playing a big game of Russian Roulette with the Universe. Granted, there’s quite a few empty chambers, but personally, I’d like to know when the bullet’s coming.
