- Armageddon
There are many ways the world could end. Nuclear winter, alien invasion, super-volcanoes, the sun going supernova, everyone plugging in hair dryers at the same time. And it will happen some day - maybe not for billions of years, long after the human race has died out, or maybe it will happen tomorrow out of the blue.
None of the outcomes scares me as much as a rock the size of Texas slamming into the planet at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.
Sure, alien invasions and zombie apocalypses would suck. But at least we could try to fight back. And most likely, those things would be our fault, that could have been avoided, so at least we have ourselves to blame. But if the world ends because of a freak cosmic collision with no warning that... just seems anticlimactic.
It's happened before. It is widely accepted that a massive asteroid impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Scientists just recently discovered evidence that a much larger rock (estimated to be 1000km across) smashed into the Earth about 3 billion years ago that probably shaped the geological face of the planet. It's fair to assume another impact could reshape it again, and we as humans are pretty happy breathing oxygen, thank you.
There are untold billions (trillions?) of rocks floating out in space, travelling at massive speeds. NASA is hard at work mapping what they can, but they can't spot everything. Large asteroids pass close to the Earth all the time with little-to-no warning. It's inevitable that one of them will eventually pass close enough, and be large enough, to cause significant damage on impact. And it may happen so suddenly that we have just a few weeks or even days to say goodbye before life as we know it is obliterated in the blink of an eye.
There's no reason to panic. The "inevitable" part is a huge stretch of time in cosmic terms. Yes, that could be tomorrow, but it could just as easily be a billion years from now. And since such an event would be so sudden and cataclysmic, it's hardly worth worrying about. We can't really stop it or plan for it. It's just something that might... big might... happen someday.
Still, makes you wonder, doesn't it?
9 comments:
I believe the media and all involved love to scare the S%&^# out of people and make people even more fearful about anything. Nothing we can do about these big rocks and I am certain they have come close to Earth for millions of years.
OKAY, now you got me scared! But last week I was at the AT&T store, throwing in the towel and going back to a sophisticated smart phone and an elderly gentleman stepped in to pick up his amazing IPhone five which read his finger print and I said... "Sometimes, I just feel like I am living in a Sci Fi movie" he responded "Do you realize your phone has more technology , that what was used to put a man in the moon in 1969." .... AMAZING huh? Yep Rouge Asteroid would suck because we could be helpless and see it coming !
I cannot worry about rogue asteroids when we have so many scary politicians out there just dying to ruin our day.
ps love your blog! and thanks for visiting mine!
Interesting post. I'd like to think there's a big laser out there prepared to vaporize such an asteroid... there might not be, but I like to think there is :)
Oh, they absolutely come close all the time and miss. But sometimes... they do hit. It might only be once every 100 million years or so, but it does happen. It just depends on how much you want to dwell on long-odd fears...
My phone is hundreds of times more powerful than my first desktop 386 from only 20 years ago (and only cost about a 10th of the price). The good news with the rapid advance of technology is that in the near to medium future we may very well have the ability to predict and defend against this kind of threat. Not all tech is wasted on crap like Twitter and Instagram...
This is true. While a random asteroid strike could be more globally catastrophic, it only MIGHT happen. Crummy politicians WILL happen, and their impact is even less avoidable (we can't shoot down our senators with ballistic missiles).
This may be a possibility in the future, but with current technology it's not really feasible. And the problem isn't necessarily even stopping the asteroid. It's that we may not even see it coming...
...And who says we can't?
Post a Comment