But heutzutage, thanks to the efforts of our science-men and science-women, we track thousands of near-earth objects that one day could conceivably put the smack-down on us puny humans.
Could we do anything about it if the alarm sounds? Well, no. Not really. Not yet. Not at current funding levels.
But maybe we should look into this, is my point.
I will tread lightly here because the Internet is the world's biggest monkey house, where manufactured outrage is the norm and only those who shriek the loudest have a chance of being heard. But here is a genuine inconvenient truth: the Earth is a big dumb rock floating in space. Big dumb rocks floating in space attract other big dumb rocks floating in space, which occasionally smack into them. It's not magic. It's not because of the nefarious plans of some super villain. It's not even unusual. It's just what big dumb rocks floating in space do. And have been doing since forever. Look at Barringer Crater or Manson Crater. Clearwater Lakes or Sudbury basin. The Siljan Ring or Nördlinger Ries. Take a look at the moon, if you don't believe it.
And now the punchline. Unlike the never-ending stream of horrors we are warned of every day -- wars, disease, famine, rising sea levels, antibiotic-resistant bugs, red meat, good cholesterol, bad cholesterol -- a substantial asteroid strike is the one thing that can end humans as a species. Literally. And the experience won't be all boss and action-packed like Mad Max. It will be all wimpery and emo like The Road.
More bad news: an asteroid strike will happen. Guaranteed. Not tomorrow. But some tomorrow. The universe is even nice enough to send us occasional reminders, like some cosmic serial killer taunting the police. In February of 2013, a 40,000-metric-ton rock known as 367943 Duende passed within 21,000 miles of Earth. To put that in perspective, it passed inside orbiting communications satellites. As George Carlin would say, that's not a near miss. That's a near hit. A collision is a near miss.
The Wikipedia page (link) on 367943 Duende reads like a demented good-news/bad-news Vaudeville act:
- The good news is last time it passed by it was much farther away.
- The bad news is last time we only noticed it seven days after it was gone.
- The good news is Duende is only about 30 meters across, not 50 like we thought.
- The bad news is the impact energy of a 30 meter rock is ~2 megatons, or 100x more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
- The good news is updated orbital data suggests we can cross off Duende as a future threat.
- The bad news is there's millions of rocks this size in the Kuiper belt alone (and >100,000 that are over 50 miles across).
A 40,000-metric ton rock isn't a species-killer, but an impact would have been a bad day for someone. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the entire episode is that 367943 Duende isn't bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. If it hadhit, you wouldn't have even seen it coming. You'd be watching The Price is Right in your underwear like any other day and then, boom, quark soup.
One final good-news/bad-news. If there's a planet killer out there right now with our name on it, that need not be a death sentence. The good news is that there's smart people who have ideas about how to coax us out of the path of a stone cold killer -- or, rather, coax it away from us -- and brave people willing to fly out into space and implement the coaxing. However, it's something that requires preparation. By the time you look up from the middle of the intersection and see some drunk ran the red light, it will be too late.
The bad news is that preparation is proving to be a hard-sell.
Why should we give tax dollars to a bunch of nerds just so they can drive a space dune buggy around on Mars?
I sympathize, I really do. And while I happen to think a Mars dune buggy is cool, and it pains me that you do not, I understand where that attitude comes from.
But here's the thing. The point of NASA isn't to plant miniature American flags on Mars, it's to get enough experience working in space so that when a big dumb rock puts us in its cross hairs, we might be able to do something about it. It is beyond my ken why NASA doesn't explain this. Is it because they would be accused of being alarmist? It's no more alarmist than looking both ways before you cross the street or making sure the iron is unplugged before you leave for work.
Footnote: My affection for NASA is not meant to disparage Roscosmos, the NSAU, ESA, CNSA, or private USS Enterprise. I'm simply pleading my fellow citizens who would rather buy box seats and bibles than another moonshot. If y'all haven't noticed, over here in the colonies we're currently dismantling the Enlightenment.
There's people who think NASA gets half of the federal budget (although fewer then there used to be -- I think when America's Funniest Home Videos got canceled many of them lost the will to soldier on). If you know better, kudos (the true figure is about half a percent). But here's some numbers that tell a continuing tale of misplaced American priorities, which is just a polite way of saying many y'all ain't thought this through:
NASA budget FY2013: $18 billion
(source: Wikipedia)
NFL revenue FY2013: $25 billion
(source: Forbes)
(source: Wikipedia)
NFL revenue FY2013: $25 billion
(source: Forbes)
Football is America's true religion, and to suggest there might be a downside to that obsession is to invite death threats. So I'll just say this. Spend your paycheck however you would like. Season tickets and official merchandise. Terrible towels and corn dogs. You can vote to raise taxes to build stadiums but not to build schools, and you can raise your children to worship semi-literate beeftots and not the guy who stopped polio. Memorize the batting average of every shortstop who played hockey for the Redskins and not know or care who wrote Moby Dick or what the Krebs cycle does.
But you're not going to be watching the Superbowl, or the World Series, or the World Cup, or the Stanley Cup anymore after Duende's big brother comes to town. Not when you and the kids are out foraging for food and dodging iridium mud tornadoes. Think of it as a game day broadcast blackout, except it's everywhere and it never ends.
Footnote: Yes, yes, there's a borgaschmord of nonsense Americans dump more cash into than NASA -- iPhones, Pokeman, snow globes -- but what's the point of having a bitchin' website if you can't snark the peer group who tormented your adolescence on the rope-climb? Deal.
Maybe we'll be saved by guys with big biceps. Maybe. Or maybe we should pay a little more attention and money to the guys in the short-sleeve Oxfords with the slide rules and chain-smoking Chesterfields. If Melville had equipped Ahab with more than a pointed stick things might have turned out better for him (yes, I know the title quote isn't from Moby Dick. Whattyawantfromme? The readings I got assigned in college were the kind that had problems at the end of the chapters).
The white whale is out there, boys and girls. It has friends, and they are coming for us. It is only a question of when. Perhaps while you were reading this two of them bumped shoulders as they jostled in their Ort cloud pod, where they had been circling harmlessly for millennia. Hold my beer, one of them says and heads off on a new and tragic trajectory.
I'll close with a quote from A. Whitney Brown's The Big Picture which I am shamefully paraphrasing because TBP is the kind of book you lend out and people never return:
How short-sighted it will seem if all of human existence, all of the triumphs and defeats, all the inventions, the diseases cured, the wrongs righted, the battles won and battles lost -- all of it -- are all erased by some big rock? That one day we look up at the night sky and see a bright star that should not be there and all we can do is shrug and say: Well, I guess that's it for us monkeys.A Tyrannosaurs probably looked up one night and saw a bright star that should not be there and shrugged. Then again, Tyrannosauruses did not have big biceps. Maybe that's what doomed them.
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