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Duck and Cover: Asteroids…Coming to a Crater Near You
This post makes the cat nervous. As it should.
I was in Seattle this past week at a work-related conference [this is not what makes the cat nervous though simply thinking about work does it for me]. During a rant discussion I was having with my colleagues I mentioned something that I am fond of bringing up simply for its shock value and to prove that we live with our heads in the ground. As a side-effect of having colleagues who are much more technical than I they will typically call me on many of my facts opinions and then I have to prove that I was not just trying to win a bet argument, but making a salient point of utter importance to no one in particular the human race.
Which brings me to today’s rant post.
Asteroids. They are the stuff of legend, cartoons and movies.
We don’t really care all that much about asteroids even though they do bring with them the risk of the end of the world…or as we like to call it back home: last call at the bar.
This week’s disputed fact: did the Earth miss becoming an omelet by 6 hours back in 1989 (I originally stated 1987, but the year was not the point in dispute; the actual event was so I won’t go to Trivial Pursuit prison for being off by 2 years)?
The answer is…drum roll, please…yes (also known as I Was Right). To quote from CNN Interactive:
On March 23, 1989, an asteroid about a half-mile wide crossed the Earth’s orbit about 400,000 miles from Earth. The Earth had been in that same spot a mere six hours earlier.
[Scroll down to the fifth paragraph..or use Find on your browser (you know, Ctrl+F. Press the Control key and the F key at the same time…you know, with two fingers…preferably with one hand…one hand…that’s two. Whatever).]
Score! Second source confirmation! And CNN no less, not that bastion of truth the National Enquirer.
So, in case no one caught the real point of the factoid: we missed the End of the World party by 6 hours. 6 hours! You see? There are advantages to being fashionably late…or not showing up at all.
According to the Wikipedia article on near-earth objects (and everything in Wikipedia is true, isn’t it?):
If the asteroid had impacted it would have created the largest explosion in recorded history, thousands of times more powerful than the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever exploded by man.
[Perhaps Daniel Faraday should have used Tsar Bomba instead of Jughead to better effect…oh, wait, he succeeded. Never mind.]
Also from the above CNN story:
On October 9, 1992, a meteorite smashed through the rear end of a car in Peekskill, New York. No one was hurt, but the Chevy Malibu was totaled.
The GEICO gecko must have been quite upset; I’m sure the Malibu wasn’t thrilled either.
In the course of looking for stories about the 1989 near-collision I came across another interesting story: Australia, the wonderful land down under, almost hosted its own End-of-the-World rehearsal:
At 12.40 yesterday morning, as the city slept, a previously unknown asteroid swept about 60,000 kilometres over the south-western Pacific.
…
In astronomical terms it was a close call. Estimated to be between 30 metres and 50 metres wide, it passed almost seven times closer than the moon.
…
In 1908 an object possibly up to 50 metres across flattened some 2000 square kilometres of Siberian forest.
The above happened…wait for it…March 2, 2010. Yes, that was just over 3 weeks ago. An object close to, or equivalent to, the Tunguska meteor, missed Earth by 37,283 miles. Before you think that is plenty far reread what the article stated: that is almost seven times closer than the moon (for the mathematically challenged: the moon, on average, is 238,857 miles from the Earth. If the Australian meteor missed us by 37, 283 miles that means that it was 1/6.4 the distance to the moon…in other words less than 1/7 of the distance to the moon). Not exactly walking distance, but in astronomical terms the bullet missed us because we breathed in instead of out.
So how does this affect the human race and you in particular? For most of you: not at all. Go back to drinking.
For the rest of you: if you are wondering if anyone on this planet is even looking at stray pieces of rock heading our way the answer is also yes. NASA published a 115-page paper titled Spaceguard Survey which discusses the hazards of asteroid and comet impacts. Any person or group that scans the skies for large near-earth objects is considered to be part of the Spaceguard goal; in other words we spend more money on candy bars than on figuring out how to avoid joining the dinosaurs.
BTW, 1989FC, the official name of the March 1989 asteroid, is four times larger than the Tunguska meteoroid. It crosses our path again in 2012. Maybe the Mayans were right. Watch the skies!
The cat is happy to be in the box.
The Importance of Gloating
There is an old saying: would you rather be happy or right? Fighting about these things is counter-productive; be both.
[Update 12/31/11: Feel like helping track near-earth asteroids? Go to http://orbit.psi.edu/oah/ and donate your spare computer time using BOINC software!]
Interesting Pictures
The fireball produced by the Tsar Bomba: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tsar01.jpg
Interesting Articles
The CNN Interactive article: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9803/12/collision/index.html
Australian Meteor Craters: http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/trek/4wd/Over11.htm
Tunguska Event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
Dealing with the Threat of an Asteroid Striking the Earth, April 1990 (mentions the March 1989 asteroid): http://pdf.aiaa.org/downloads/publicpolicypositionpapers/Asteroid-1990.pdf
When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombies Infection: http://www.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~rsmith/Zombies.pdf (okay, so this has nothing to do with meteors or asteroids. The title of this section is Interesting Articles not Interesting Articles That Have Nothing to Do with Zombies.)
ZOMBIE ATTACK, Disaster Preparedness Simulation: http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~jybarra/zombieplan.pdf (read previous rationalization)
Three 9s
Plan 9 from Outer Space
Universal questions.
How did people fill their time before the Internet?
Does anyone remember what it was like to use a phone without having to reboot it?
When I was younger (and by younger I mean right after I graduated from college) I remember playing working with a Vic 20, and then an Atari 800, and then an Amiga 1000 and then an Amiga 2000 before I finally learned enough about programming to get a job. As it turns out my fear of not finding work in the computer science field 20 years ago was somewhat overblown. Lack of qualified people in a field can do that (think early 80’s).
I don’t remember rebooting my phone, but back then the princess phone was still pretty recent. I don’t miss it, but I do remember how cool touch tone phones were.
Deep Space 9
Will we be rebooting our televisions any time soon?
It is easy, in hindsight, to look back and realize what a geek I was. If only I’d known back then; I might have invested better.
I have a new definition of geek: someone who is so obsessed with bending technology to their will they instead bend space time using just the power of their mind. This allows them to jump forward in time minutes or, more often, hours in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, going back in time does not currently appear possible though there are rumors that Bill Gates has in fact accomplished this feat; this would explain how Microsoft has changed direction so many times and still succeeded (of course, being friends with Anthony Stark doesn’t hurt).
District 9
You take chicken, for example: maybe [the machines] couldn’t figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything.
– Mouse from the Matrix
Where the religious, or those aspiring to be religious, or maybe those who think they are religious, or maybe those who would like to be religious, or perhaps those trying to understand why anyone is religious, find solace in watching movies like The Ten Commandments or The Passion of the Christ, geeks (or at least I) find solace watching movies like 12 Monkeys or District 9.
The thing about growing up as a geek is that it didn’t start until after I graduated from college. I have to admit, with my head bowed low, that I was a liberal arts major. I always enjoyed math and science, but the voices in my head always said that those were hard subjects and that I wouldn’t do well with them. Oddly enough my SAT scores disagreed, but who listens to SAT scores when you have voices? I graduated with a B.A. in Communications, worked in television for about 3 years and left. I just didn’t get the satisfaction I was looking for as a union engineer loading up video tape and working the Chyron.
After twenty years in the software field I now know what my mind craved all those years: spending life in a cube writing software that would never make it into production.
Perhaps Christopher Johnson will return in three years and transform us all back into humans. Or not.
I am afraid to look in the box…
In Pursuit of the Next Stupid Idea
In the Beginning
In the beginning there was nothing. And it was pretty cool because no one had to worry about cleaning up.
“First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di’s clothes. I couldn’t believe it.”
– Jacobs from Airplane 2,
Once we humans came along cleaning up would be the least of our worries. With all of the various technologies we came up with, rocks being in plentiful supply, we made what had to be the first really far-reaching invention: fire. Now we could cook meat, build fireplaces and burn things down; this led to the invention of fire marshalls.
After that came the next most incredible invention of all time: the wheel. Now we could build cars, burn fossil fuels (using fire. Refer to previous paragraph), and run people over. This led to the rise of GEICO.
It has been downhill ever since. Between the never ending arms race (it started with stone arrow heads all the way up to the Jericho missile) and the need to get the latest electronic doo-dad the human race feels the need to invent more and more things to either make it easier to kill large numbers of people or large numbers of brain cells.
Billions of Brain Cells Cried Out in Terror and Were Suddenly Silenced
Speaking of brain cells, you can’t have a conversation about inventions without talking about one of the the coolest invention in the world that has been subverted into the biggest time waster of all: the television (unless you happen to be watching Battlestar Galactica).
Philo Farnsworth, while he wasn’t busy working at his parent’s farm, invented what became television. While RCA was busy stealing his ideas, he managed to file quite a few patents including one for the Image dissector camera tube. In what was to become a staple of the medium, one of the first pictures was of his wife; Pamela Sue Anderson was not far behind. In addition, the first images were 3.5 inches tall thereby proving that Farnsworth also foresaw the coming of the iPod bikini.
The Law of Unintended Consequences
In subverting television from the sublime to the ridiculous we have a great example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Edison, probably the most famous inventor of all, but not above taking credit for the work of others including Nikola Tesla, had other ideas for his phonograph. Edison expected his invention to be used for dictation and other business tasks while the washed masses wanted to listen to Weird Al (BTW, I am a big fan). Where did this leave Edison? In the same spot as Farnsworth: watching his invention make lots of money for other people because he had the failure of imagination to see the coming of such hallmarks of our culture as Iron Chef America and Howard Stern. Don’t cry for Edison, he died quite wealthy; Tesla was not so lucky.
Rise of the Machines
Of course, no discussion of inventions and their insanity would be complete without that other hallmark of the 21st century: the computer. Talk about unintended consequences. While we can look at future fantasies like the Terminator as unlikely, the uses of technology to send us into a tailspin will be worse, but much more mundane. The loss of privacy is well underway in countries like China and the United States and there are no signs of its abatement. Makes you long for the days when an abacus was the leading edge and the concept of zero was thought to be a pretty cool thing.
System.exit()
With all that I can’t wait to discover my own patentable idea so that I can sell it to some heartless multi-national corporation, or Bill Gates, for a gazillion dollars. Just the thought of playing golf with Warren Buffett some day makes me wish I had learned golf. I will have my own entry in Wikipedia and historians will curse my name for creating a solution to poverty that caused the utter destruction of the world as we know it.
I can’t wait.
In the interest of full disclosure I do own stock in Berkshire Hathaway and other stocks, most of which (as of 10/10/08) are worth less than toilet paper.
Hidden Clause 
