Incoming: The asteroids'll get us if we don't watch out

I've been reading The Atlantic Monthly for years - decades, actually - and it can generally be counted on to provide at least one good, solid, gloom and doom article per issue.

For June, the g-d article, "The Sky is Falling" by Gregg Easterbook, tells us that the way scientists historical measured how many asteroids have been striking earth is just plain wrong. Thanks to Columbia University's Dallas Abbott, they're now accounting for the ones that didn't land on land, but landed at sea.

As "recently" as 536 A.D. - remember, this is geologic time we're talking here - Abbott believes that:

...a space object about 300 meters in diameter hit the Gulf of Carpentaria, north of Australia...An object that size, striking at up to 50,000 miles per hour, could release as much energy as 1,000 nuclear bombs...If the Gulf of Carpentaria object were to strike Miami today, most of the city would be leveled, and the atmospheric effects could trigger crop failures around the world.

Among the side effects: "rain as corrosive as battery acid." (No more "singing in the rain" for us, I guess.)

Abbott also believes that about 2,800, an even larger space object - perhaps a kilometer across - hit the Indian Ocean, producing what may have been Noah's flood - and a tsunami as high as 600 feet. Today, this would wipe out many coastal cities.

If it were to hit land, much of a continent would be leveled; years of winter and mass starvation would ensue.

(Let me be the first to quite selfishly declare that, if it comes, I really hope it hits me on the top of my head. Winter each year is one thing - I actually like it. "Years of winter"? No, thanks.)

One of the scientific bottom lines of all this new information is that some scientists now estimate that there's a 2-10% chance that there'll be a big, ugly space object hitting earth in any given century.

There are a lot of them out there, and we're due.

Enter former astronaut Russell Schweickart and the B612 Foundation. Forget for a moment that the foundation is named after the asteroid where Antoine Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince lived. Anyone who lived through repeated bouts of Sister Mary Presumpta acting Le Petit Prince out for us in French class in a whiney, precious little voice, not going to want to be reminded of Saint-Ex's classic. I much preferred the book where he's flying the mail plain over the Pyrenees.

Anyway, the B612 Foundation is trying to get NASA to pay some attention to what's lurking out there in space, and take some of the money that's going to put a man on Mars and put it towards technology that can "significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid, in a controlled manner, by 2015."

Here's what B612 has to say:

• Asteroid and comet impacts have both destroyed and shaped life on Earth since it formed.
• The Earth orbits the Sun in a vast swarm of near Earth asteroids (NEAs).
• The probability of an unacceptable collision in this century is ~2%.
• We now have the capability to anticipate an impact and to prevent it.

There is a program in place, Spaceguard, that is chartered with discovering and tracking all the NEA's that are over 1 km. in diameter. Of the estimated 1000-1100, NASA's found 670 and:

...happily, none of them is any threat to the planet within the next 100 years.

This cannot be said, of course, for the 35% still to be discovered, nor for the 100,000 or so smaller, but still dangerous NEAs larger than 100 meters. Only a very small percentage of these have been discovered to date, and those only incidental to the current survey for the large ones.

The reality of concern to us, among others, is that the discovery of a NEA headed toward an impact with Earth could be announced at any time by the Spaceguard program. If this were to happen the public would be extremely concerned and demand to know what is being done about it.

I'll say.

But, until then, it all sounds so  Henny Penny-ish that any politician who brought it up would probably be laughed out of office. (Remember, we can't even get a lot of these folks to take global warming seriously.)

The B612 Foundation thinks that we should be prepared to deal with the eventuality that, sooner or later, we're going to have to deflect "The Big One" from putting Planet Earth, more or less, out of business.

It certainly sounds reasonable that we could take at least some of the money we spend on nonsense and put it towards this cause, doesn't it?

A few months ago, I watched an exceedingly cheese-ball movie - it may even have been called Asteroid - in which an asteroid was going to land in the good old USA, and good old astronaut of yesteryear Robert Duval was asked by good old president Morgan Freeman to save us, which he sort of did by landing on the asteroid and blowing it up.

This being Hollywood, they had to add a bit more drama to everything. As I recall, they managed to break the asteroid in two, then were able to blow the part that was heading towards the West Coast to smithereens. So Hollywood was saved. Unfortunately, the East Coast was not so lucky. We, alas, went under - except for the few who managed to claw there way inland and up to the highest Appalachian mountains, or the few who were put on buses and taken to higher ground to replenish the U.S. with scientists, doctors, and politicians. (I would not have been among the chosen. Nor would I want to have been.)

Anyhow, check out The Atlantic article. Check out the B612 Foundation.

Don't confuse this with Star Wars.

This actually sounds like it might be a good use of taxpayers money.