Wasn’t that story riveting? If you didn’t have time to read it yesterday, here are a few bits of it to whet your interest:
. . . Only after the rain of space objects ceased could life begin; by
then, most asteroids had already either hit something or found stable orbits
that do not lead toward planets or moons. Asteroids still exist, but most were
assumed to be in the asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, far
from our blue world. . . .
. . . These standard
assumptions—that remaining space rocks are few, and that encounters with
planets were mainly confined to the past—are being upended. On March 18, 2004, for instance, a 30-meter
asteroid designated 2004 FH—a hunk potentially
large enough to obliterate a city—shot past Earth, not far above the orbit
occupied by telecommunications satellites. (Enter “2004 FH” in the search box
at Wikipedia and you can watch film of that asteroid
passing through the night sky.) . . .
. . .
Extrapolating from recent discoveries, NASA estimates that there are perhaps
20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets in the general vicinity of
Earth. . . .
. . . The object that hit
the Indian Ocean [around 2800 BC] was three to five kilometers across, Abbott
believes, and caused a tsunami in the
Pacific 600 feet high—many times higher than the 2004 tsunami that struck Southeast Asia. Ancient texts such as Genesis and the
Epic of Gilgamesh support her conjecture, describing an unspeakable planetary
flood in roughly the same time period. If the Indian Ocean
object were to hit the sea now, many of the world’s coastal cities could be
flattened. If it were to hit land, much of a continent would be leveled; years
of winter and mass starvation would ensue. . . .
. . . [A]s Nathan
Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of
Microsoft, put it, “The odds of a
space-object strike during your lifetime may be no more than the odds you will
die in a plane crash—but with space rocks, it’s like the entire human race is
riding on the plane.”
. . . NASA supports some
astronomy to search for near-Earth objects, but the agency’s efforts have been
piecemeal and underfunded, backed by less than a
tenth of a percent of the NASA budget. And though altering the course of space objects approaching Earth appears
technically feasible, NASA possesses no hardware specifically for this
purpose, has nearly nothing in development, and has resisted calls to begin
work on protection against space strikes. Instead, NASA is enthusiastically
preparing to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars on a manned moon
base that has little apparent justification. “What is in the best interest of
the country is never even mentioned in current NASA planning,” says Russell Schweickart, one of the Apollo astronauts who went into
space in 1969, who is leading a campaign to raise awareness of the threat posed
by space rocks. “Are we going to let a space strike kill millions of people
before we get serious about this?” he asks.
F Truly cool that this is a cataclysm we could head off.
Maybe we should
try?