I’m presently reading Brian Cox’s ‘Human Universe’. I am enjoying it immensely and find it extremely interesting.
Towards the end is a sobering chapter on asteroids.
An asteroid weighing 12,000 tonnes and travelling 60 times the speed of sound hurtled in from sunward on February 15th 2013 at 9.13 am. It broke up high in the sky with a force of twenty Hiroshimas above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. 1500 people were injured.
Alexei Pushkov – a Russian minister – said ‘Instead of fighting on Earth, people should be creating a joint system of asteroid defence.’
The Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908 went off with the power of a hydrogen bomb flattening 2000 square kilometres of forest. It would have easily flattened an entire city.
Events of that magnitude occur every 300 years.
Chicxulub which hit at the Yucatan peninsular in Mexico, carving out the bay of Mexico 66 million years ago, put pay to the dinosaurs and caused mass extinction. It is estimated to have had the force of 8 billion Hiroshima bombs!! That is a thousand times the whole world’s arsenal of atomic bombs!
An event on that size is estimated to hit every 100 million years or so.
It looks to me as if it is inevitable that we will be hit by a major city smashing asteroid, or bigger, sooner or later.
The sad thing is that we presently have the technology to be able to detect it coming and do something about it. Except that we neither have the will or the wit. We’d rather put our resources into warfare.
The salutary fact is that we could have an advanced asteroid watch system for as little as one third of what Wayne Rooney is currently being paid.
Sometimes I think we deserve all we get.
If we pooled our resources we could easily come up with a way of deflecting or breaking up incoming asteroids. That is not beyond us and probably not even very pricey.
The fundamentalists believe that god will protect them.
ISIS, along with a number of US evangelicals, probably think its a good idea because it’ll get them to heaven quicker.
I think the whole of humanity is seriously insane.