(First of all, this is the Nuke Free Zone's one-hundredth posts. Woo, go us! Neat that we hit this point just as we start to get some notice from other guys out in the blogosphere. Thanks for the readership and the links, guys!)
Every once in awhile, someone takes a shot at you and misses.
From the BBC:
Astronomers have revealed how they came within minutes of alerting the world to a potential asteroid strike last month.
Some scientists believed on 13 January that a 30m object, later designated 2004 AS1, had a one-in-four chance of hitting the planet within 36 hours.
Now, this is bad enough - the really nasty thing is that the meteor in question was five hundred meters across instead of thirty, according to later observations.
Think about that for a second.
There was a twenty-five percent chance of a 1,600-foot wide meteor smacking into this planet on January 13, and today, February 24, was the first we heard of it.
I'm a space nut, if not a space fanatic; just about everyone who knows me knows this. I'd like to see measures for protecting against meteors actually try to make it into the general discussion. If there's one reason I'm in favor of space programs, regardless of the cost, it's because our survival as a species absolutely depends on it. If we remain fixed to the planet's surface, we're going to pay the price eventually, because this is one of those things where "It can't happen here" simply isn't an option.
During the past ten years or so there have actually been a number of noticed impacts. Last September, a meteorite struck India, injuring a lot of people but thankfully not resulting in any fatalities, and scattered other impacts causing damage have occured in Honduras and the United States within the past decade or two. There's also the larger events, such as Tunguska which came within a few minutes of destroying Moscow, and a Tunguska-scale event in I think the 1960s which an airliner was lucky enough to see from a safe distance.
The "once in a million years" rambling about this sort of thing is decieving, and makes a lot of people think that if one happened at Tunguska then we're safe until the year 1,001,900 or something similar. For all we know, a 50-meter rock could hit a major city in fifty years, or a one-kilometer rock could land in the Bay of Bengal tomorrow afternoon. This isn't a case of might; this will happen sooner or later.
However, it is possible to cope with these sorts of things - with a fairly modest increase in funding, smaller rocks could be tracked, and with a slightly larger increase in income, even a dinosaur-killer could be defended against, tripe like Armageddon aside. Before either of these become remotely feasible, however, we need to start viewing space exploration as something necessary to the survival of mankind and not simply the expensive diversion that it is.
I really, really want to see our eggs in at least two baskets. I won't feel "safe" at the species level until I hear of children being born offworld. I don't pretend to think the proper measures would be cheap, whether they be defending against (or at least warning of) potential large impactors, establishing colonies elsewhere, or at least just getting out of this fear-driven hugging of the surface that seems so popular. However, the long-term consequences - and we can't predict how long-term "long-term" is going to be - of not doing anything are far higher than it is possible for us to pay.
On January 13, hundreds of millions of people got a reprieve from an event which would make any disaster humans have lived through look trivial by comparison. Next time, we might not be so lucky. I'd like to think it wouldn't take a bus-sized rock into the center of a major city to get people to realize that this is a real concern, but I don't know. Regardless of whether people hide from it, this planet is insufficiently safe as it stands, and we can do a lot more to change that than people are willing to believe.
Besides, placed alongside survival of life on this planet - or, even more dauntingly, life in the universe as a whole - I can't think of a price tag that would be considered too high. I mean, I'd like to have descendants kicking around in future years, or generations, or centuries. I wouldn't like them to stare the end of the line in the face because their ancestors didn't think they were worth the concern.
Posted by zibblsnrt at February 24, 2004 05:45 PM