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David Spates 520,000 miles? Missed us by that much Eeeks! That was close. In people terms, 520,000 miles is a substantial
distance. To put it in perspective, if you drove 15,000 miles
a year (which is a pretty fair amount of driving), it would take
you nearly 35 years to rack up 520,000 miles on the odometer.
That's a lot of trips to the gas pump and lots of Baby Ruth wrappers
crammed into the glove box. In cosmic terms, relative to the vastness
of the universe, 520,000 miles is an eyelash away. Last week,
Earth was that close to "one of the worst disasters in human
history," as one scientist put it, and it barely raised
an eyebrow. (I have lots of eye-oriented hair references today.
I'm not sure why.) On Monday, Jan. 7, an asteroid 1,000 feet
in diameter missed Earth by 520,000 miles. Had it struck land,
it would have wiped out an area the size of Texas. If it plopped
into a body of water, it would have created monster waves that
would have devastated most of the world's coastal cities. So, what did you do that Monday? I vaguely
remember Dennis Miller making forced obscure references during
the Baltimore-Minnesota game that night, but otherwise it was
a fairly forgettable day. Anna crawled, I chased her and fed
her pulverized squash. Jan. 7, 2002 could have been remembered
as the darkest day in human history. Thousands were killed on
Sept. 11, 2001. MILLIONS would have been killed had that asteroid
hit. I find that rather unsettling. There's not much point in worrying about it,
though. Apart from shaking my fist at the heavens, there's little
I can do about rocks falling from space. I'm not sure NASA could
do much either, other than giving us a few days' warning. The
asteroid was discovered more than a month ago by NASA's Near-Earth
Asteroid Tracking program. They knew it was coming, and they
knew the count would be 1-0. But what if they determined it was going to
land smack-dab in downtown Dallas or wherever? What then? Maybe
there's some double-super-secret global security weapon sitting
in a hangar somewhere in New Mexico, but I doubt it. Perhaps we could get folks out of the way
of an asteroid that size. How long would it take to evacuate
all of Texas? Do we have someone working on that? And you thought leaving Neyland Stadium was
a traffic headache. To paraphrase Maxwell Smart, the asteroid
missed us by that much. If you're still not grasping how close 520,000
miles is on a galactic scale, consider how people who study these
things, and incidentally are much smarter than I, measure cosmic
distances. They use a unit of measurement called a megaparsec,
which, I know, sounds like it was taken from an episode of "Star
Trek." It's a real word, though, and one megaparsec is the
distance light travels in 3.26 million years. On a much smaller
scale, there's always a light year, which is the distance light
travels in only one year. One light year is roughly 5.9 trillion
miles. Converting miles to megaparsecs is too much for my feeble
brain to consider. It's a long, long way. Too much math? I know. It can get a little
abstract for most of us. Here's a simpler way to consider how close
that asteroid came. Someone standing 100 feet away shoots a gun,
and the bullet misses your head by, say, 10 inches. For you,
10 inches is WAY too close for comfort. If that moron had been
wearing his glasses, he'd have blown your head off! Now, consider
the shot from a flea's perspective. To a teensy flea, 10 inches
is a huge distance. Everything is relative. To a person, 10 inches
is darn near a fatal shot. To a flea, 10 inches is the other
side of town. If an asteroid that size can creep up on us
with little more than a month's notice, what other nasty surprises
are drifting around out there? An asteroid that size would have
destroyed a large state or a medium-sized country. Scientists
estimate that an asteroid slightly less than one mile in diameter
would be what they call a "global killer," meaning
that it would wipe out all life on Earth. A bug or two might
survive, maybe even a handful of lawyers, but that's about it.
(I have plenty of lawyers in my family, so I feel I can poke
fun at them from time to time. Lawyers appreciate good lawyer
jokes.) So what do we do about all of this? Nothing. Don't worry about it. Life's too short for Chicken Little impressions. We should enjoy our time on this cosmic pinhead we call Earth. If you feel the need to spend your limited time wringing your hands, worry about something you can do something about, like avoiding any movie starring Keanu Reeves. If a killer asteroid comes your way, you'll be the first -- and the last -- to know about it. · · · |