Space Rocks (pun intended): Why It’s Not the End of the World

Dr. Tim Spahr is the Director of the Minor Planets Center, funded by the Smithsonian, funded by NASA. He’s in charge of recording all the near Earth objects (NEOs) floating around in space, and the guy to whom the government turns when there’s question of one of these space rocks colliding with our little planet. Last Thursday he gave a lecture to my Astronomy 001 class insisting that, though 1 in 2000 asteroids come close enough to the Earth to pose threat of collision (and there are hundreds of asteroids regularly posed to do so), 96% of all the large near-Earth objects have been discovered (that is, those objects which would actually pose a threat if they crashed into the Earth -- not small rocks which routinely fall to Earth and which people don’t always notice). Ergo the Minor Planets Center would be in the know if there were a major threat on the scale of, say, mass-extinction event-causing space rock.

The point he was trying to make was that there’s little conceivable threat of any sort of asteroid extinguishing life on Earth. Whew. Now I can use my energy to worry about real problems like what kind of cereal to have. And then, suppose there’s no milk of the 1 or 2% varieties? Do I go with whole or fat-free? I can only imagine what sort of chaos would break loose should such an event transpire. All I can say is that I’m not going to be caught unawares when the rabble pours into the streets for a nice night of dinner and looting. As I learned from the classic treatise on the subject of post-apocalyptic life, Max Brooks’s “The Zombie Survival Guide,” should access to a crossbow be unreasonable, a hot air balloon will do nicely.
 

Which acts as a good segue to this next paragraph. Recently Clark has been host to a sort of symposium on “The End of Things,” a film and lecture series about… the end of things. Last night I caught a lecture by K. David Harrison of Swarthmore College on the extinction (and preservation) of language in an increasingly globalized world. Which is interesting, but so are zombies. I heard on the grapevine (which, admittedly, is a bit wilted now considering how October it is) that associate dean Jason Zelesky“The Walking Dead” on the 15^th. Perhaps it’s time to consider what all this end of the world hullabaloo (pardon my French) is actually doing for society. For those of us almost old enough to properly remember Y2K there’s a sort of apathy for any theory that the world’s about to end. It’s just run of the mill disappointment. It’s like, hey, media, you said that the world was going to end in 2000, but it didn’t, so I’m just going to stand here with my arms crossed and head tilted slightly to one side and say, “Really? Again with this apocalypse business?” But most people don’t really believe the world’s going to end in the near future. Or, if they do, they keep calm and carry on because what if the world’s not over tomorrow? It’s going to awfully inconvenient, and probably awkward to come into work on Monday and pretend like you weren’t recently chanting on a mountain to get beamed up before the Judgment. “Hey, Steve, how was your weekend?” “Uneventful.”
 

Luckily, says Dr. Spahr, the military has various plans for what to do should impending doom by space rock be staring humanity in the face. One such is a gravity tractor, which isn’t as complicated as you’d think. It’s like a big object launched to hang out next to the asteroid and convince it to pull to one side of the Earth instead of crashing into it.
 

“Hey, asteroid, what’s up?”

“Oh, you, know, just goin’ to fall into that planet over there.”

“Yeah, that’s cool, but I hear there’s this great party off in deep space just to the side of that planet.”

“Oh, man, I’m in!”
 

And that’s how science works.
 

Another option is the nuclear strategy. Apparently, every time there’s word of an asteroid near Earth the military’s just like, let’s nuke it! Even if there isn’t a threat, people sometimes want to do it just to see what happens. (As far as I’m aware, as of this writing, there haven’t been any nuclear devices launched outside of our atmosphere.) Scientists are usually the voices of reason to say, no, no; that’s a bad idea. Let’s not.
 

The concept of the end of the world is an interesting and pervasive thing in our culture, and even I’m not immune to its influence, having just read the first of six parts of Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on ROCU, in which the World gets destroyed by aliens to make room for a hyperspace expressway. Listen in next Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern to find out what happens and to, maybe, pick up some tips for your own survival. Do you know where your towel is?