Tip of the hat to Instapundit for this New Yorks Times reminder that ran today about the big something hit Tunguska Siberia. Go see Apocalypse Then. Next One, When?
Perhaps I am in the minority But I think both Obama and McCain need to be talking about SPACE more and especially preventing things like this. However I expect that if either gave a major speech on it they would be mocked!! We are going to look silly to our grand children if we something like this hits L.A. California and we could have done something about it.
As the article quotes:
Mr. Schweickart, representing his B612 Foundation, included this closing line to lawmakers:
NEOs are part of nature. A NEO impact is a natural hazard in much the same way as are hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, etc. NEO impacts are deceptively infrequent, yet devastating at potentially unimaginable levels. NEOs are however not our enemies. We do not need to “defend” against NEOs, we need to protect ourselves from their occasional impact, as we do with other natural hazards. Unlike other natural hazards, however, NEO impacts can be predicted well ahead of time and actually prevented from occurring. If we live up to our responsibility, if we wisely use our amazing technology, and if we are mature enough, as a nation and as a community of nations, there may never again be a substantially damaging asteroid impact on the Earth. We have the ability to make ourselves safe from cosmic extinction. If we cannot manage to meet this challenge, we will, in my opinion, have failed to meet our evolutionary responsibility.
As a Catholic I believe the end game will be up there is a possibility of Cosmic extiction of course. However the good lord gave us brains to advoid things like what happen in Siberia. Sort of like how we fight and prepare for other things.
I thought this was clever and proves a good point from the above article:
Dear Sasha & Tatiana:
Well, 100 years have now passed and I finally feel comfortable in letting you know that I really appreciate the sacrifice you made (or your family that might have been made) when I slowed the Earth’s rotation momentarily back in late June 1908. That’s not something I normally do(!) but in that case I really felt I had to intervene.
You see, what’s now referred to as the Tunguska impactor, a smallish asteroid about 40 meters in diameter, was headed for an impact with Earth, directly over Moscow. It would have been a disaster of truly huge proportions, and I just couldn’t stomach that given what Russia was going through at the time. So I slowed the Earth down for a bit… just a few minutes per day for a few weeks. As a result the asteroid hit way out in the middle of Siberia instead of directly over Moscow.
Now there are surely millions of present day Muscovites who owe their lives to the sacrifice that your great-grandfather made in taking the hit for them. In all likelihood he and your great-grandmother would have had many more children than just your grandmother, but there he was in the most desolate section of Siberia, tending his reindeer herd, far, far from everyone else. I’m truly sorry that you don’t have many more cousins to celebrate the holidays with, but in the larger scheme of things it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time.
But I’m really tired of this kind of intervention; it just takes too much out of old fate to pull of this kind of thing in the future. Since so much has happened in the past 100 years in terms of technology development, you and your fellows around the planet are really able to handle this kind of thing yourselves. I mean, after all, your telescopes are now finding the larger asteroids that make close passes by Earth, and soon they’ll be finding the smaller ones like the Tunguska impactor. At least they could be doing that.
And as you know shoving an asteroid slightly off its course is far simpler (and cheaper) than going out to take pictures of yet another of Saturn’s moons!
So I’m pretty content to let the celestial clockwork and human ingenuity run their course undisturbed by pro-active fate. From my perspective it seems that with all the tools required, both an early warning capability and the ability to intervene to slightly alter an asteroid’s orbit, humanity ought to be able to get the job done without me mucking about with space-time.
So good luck. All it really takes is for you to convince your fellow human beings that they really are all related and really can, by coming to a simple agreement to act in concert, protect both themselves and future human (and fellow creatures’) generations by sharing the risk of slightly shrinking or enlarging any threatening asteroid’s orbit so that it misses the Earth. Really, you can do this, provided you can all get together. Yes, I know, that’s a big challenge. But let me tell you, it’s a far smaller feat for you to slightly alter the shape of the local universe than it is for me to slow down the rotation of the Earth!
Good luck.
Fate
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