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National Near Miss Day 2024
Duck! It’s National Near Miss Day and you just never know when a rock the size of Pittsburgh will fall out of the sky and press the big RESET button once again…
Craters
Without Jupiter cleaning out the early solar system, the Earth would be pock-marked with meteor collisions. We would suffer from asteroid impacts every day. CNN studios would probably be a gigantic crater it if wasn’t for Jupiter. ~Michio Kaku
You have to wonder if the dinosaurs had social media, political corruption, perpetual war lobbies, woke social canceling campaigns and all the stuff that makes our lives so very interesting right before the big one hit the atmosphere.
It would be fairly ironic if we all got blasted by an errant space rock after years of people obsessing over excess plant food in the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, I can’t get that lucky.
Life will go on. People will still block traffic (Isn’t that illegal? Shouldn’t their protest permits be rescinded and the members be driven off or arrested? You’d certainly think so.) and throw soup or paint at works of art (How are these museums not checking for paint cans at the door? It’s not like these people are stealth. You can spot them a mile off.) and virtue signal until we all die of cognitive dissonance.
We’ve been at risk of near misses for millions of years. Sometimes they hit. Like Forrest Gump said, “You never know what you’re gonna get.” A city way out in Siberia, not too far from the Kazakhstan border found out the hard way
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It’s a great thing that this doesn’t happen all the time. Life is uncertain enough without shockwaves blasting window glass into people’s eyes or demolishing their cars.
The statistical probability of being at or near the point of impact of a meteor large enough to cause injury or property damage is considered infinitesimal. Even so, it’s astronomically higher than the probability of taxes being the solution to “Climate Change”. So, there’s that.
Given the topic of the day, feel free to add this to your statistically insignificant points of existential horror file and get back to whatever enjoyable thing you were actually planning to engage in today.
Space Rocks
Less Than Five – What’s the Difference Between Comets, Asteroids, Meteoroids, Meteors & Meteorites?
Apparently, with some of the near misses (which are actually measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of miles in space), there was a study done about what we might do if we knew one was guaranteed to actually hit us.
The conclusion was that the only way to know an asteroid is going to fall into Earth’s gravity well and pull a Dinosaurs 2.0 on us would be within the span of a day or so. The path of asteroids is so erratic that they can’t really predict the path. Any that we know for sure are going to enter the atmosphere would be detected in such a short window of time that we wouldn’t be able to do a darn thing about it.
Forget the movies where they nuke it. That would just break it into lots of pieces that are also guaranteed to hit the planet in a lot of places instead of one big crater.
Forget the movies where they attach little engines and push it out of its deadly path. We don’t have the technology to pull that off yet.
Basically, if it comes, we’re screwed. Isn’t that encouraging?
After all the static about “Climate Change”, politics, woke culture, Disco and whatever else, we could be exterminated without a trace by a sizeable rock on an unfortunate trajectory.
Oh well, you’re more likely to slip in the bathroom and die in the fall than you are to be blasted or incinerated by the aftereffects of a huge meteor.
Don’t worry. Be happy. It could happen, but it probably won’t in our lifetimes.
End Of The World
Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world – but our internal soundtrack doesn’t turn off. We’re also thinking about pizza or passing a slow tractor or making a turn, and for a magical instant, our lives seem to be in conversation with the stars. ~Elif Batuman
Of course, with a quote like that I have to include a video like this…
It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) (Remastered 2006)
Yeah, so I don’t really like all the doom and gloom any more than I like REM. Sorry, but Michael Stipe’s singing sounds like a bag of cats to me.
Asteroids and world-ending calamity is typically more in the purview of science fiction. That would apply more to my Far-Flung Reaches series than to The Sentinels.
Well, I’m having a hard enough time getting on with my superheroes without delving into any space opera tangents.
I’ve been trying very hard to get my head back into the superhero genre. It’s not working all that well.
Mostly, I’m distracted by the work I’m behind on in my day job and the corresponding lack of sleep that has come with trying to catch up on it.
So, while I’d be disappointed and annoyed if all of human civilization was snuffed out by a giant meteor, at least I’d finally get some sleep.
That’s all for today. I hope you’re having a lovely weekend.