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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)
Ants, Odd Behavior and Zombie-creating Parasites
Ants are interesting creatures. Awful eye sight, great sense of smell, really strong in comparison to their body size and weight.
Ants also show up in literature. In The Once and Future King
In real life not only can ants lead lives of quiet desperation they also run the risk of becoming host to a nasty creature called the lancet fluke.
Fans of the movie Alien know that the nastiest thing about the alien was its gestation within a human host. The alien would go through an initial form that would impregnate a host and the bouncing baby alien would come out shortly after (hilarity ensues).
The lancet fluke is nowhere near as boring as the alien: impregnate the host, blow out its chest and run (yawn). In an interesting twist the lancet fluke does mind control (very high on the cool scale).
The terminal hosts are mammals like cows or goats, while the intermediate hosts are snails and ants. The terminal host excretes the fluke’s eggs during the process of…waste management, the eggs are promptly eaten by a snail (yes, I just used the words promptly and snail in the same phrase) where the eggs do a little bit of this and a little bit of that and eventually irritate the snails respiratory system enough to make the snail cough out the newly transformed fluke cysts into the outside world where they wait to be eaten by ants (who said the food chain was simple?).
Why would an ant eat the cysts? As it so happens the lancet fluke cysts coughed up by the snails are surrounded by a mucus that has pheromones that are appealing to the ants (yummy, tasty and sexy).
The interesting part is what happens after the ant eats the pheromone encrusted cyst. They become zombies. Literally, and only during the evenings (no coffins, however).
After an ant ingests the lancet fluke cysts the cysts open releasing flukes into various parts of the ants anatomy. A select group make their way to the ant’s nervous system and take over. During the day, the ant goes to work, tells jokes, has meals at home and pays her bills (males are typically around just to have sex with the queen and die. Oh, the good old days!).
At night, the ant finds that it has an uncontrollable desire to hang from the top of a blade of grass (why do I hear a Dane Cook joke in there?). It finds a comfy blade, climbs it and then locks its mandibles as close to the top as possible. And waits. What is it waiting for? The ant doesn’t know, but the lancet fluke does**: it is waiting to be eaten by some unlucky animal who will become the terminal host. Some cow, goat, or whomever, is going to come by, eat the grass, inadvertently eat the ant and by extension eat the fluke.
Why only at night? During the day, to paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, it is hot. The ant could die; the fluke cannot allow that to happen and so returns control of the ant’s brain back to the ant. The ant gets to run back to home and hearth away from the hot sun and make up excuses for missing dinner by admitting to fighting crime after work.
All that to ask the question: could there be an equivalent parasite in humans?
I first read about the lancet fluke in Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
You can read more about the lancet fluke at Damn Interesting, Suite101com and Wikipedia.
Update (7/12/12): an interesting study on suicide in women linked to a cat parasite: http://vitals.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/02/12529379-cat-parasite-linked-to-womens-suicide-attempts.
* The Once and Future King is a wonderful book. I highly recommend it even as it takes the legend of King Arthur in directions I am sure the original mythologists hadn’t considered: like pacifism.
** I use the word know loosely. The lancet fluke has no brain. It’s behavior is purely mechanical. The various forms of the lancet fluke are executing genetic behavior that has survived over time and has allowed them to be fruitful and multiply. Kind of like us, only we call if free will
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