I don’t know why, with all the technological prowess humans now possess, we seem to be so unconcerned with the fact that we might go the way of the dinosaurs. We just barely missed getting blasted by an asteroid as big as the one that leveled 770 square miles of Siberian forest in 1908.
This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”
“It snuck up on us pretty quickly,” said Brown, an associate professor in Australia with Monash University’s School of Physics and Astronomy. He later noted, “People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.”
We don’t want to get hit by rocks this large.
“It would have gone off like a very large nuclear weapon” with enough force to destroy a city, [Brown] said. “Many megatons, perhaps in the ballpark of 10 megatons of TNT, so something not to be messed with.”
In 2013, a significantly smaller meteor — about 20 meters (65 feet) across, or the size of a six-story building — broke up over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk and unleashed an intense shock wave that collapsed roofs, shattered windows and left about 1,200 people injured.
Solving this problem isn’t easy. It requires, first of all, much more advanced notice than we received in this case. Then it requires technological solutions that haven’t yet been invented. We might be able to use a spaceship’s gravity to deflect the asteroid off a collision course, or maybe we could attach solar sails to speed it past us. Either way, we’d have to be able to intercept it at a considerable distance, which means we’d need ships on standby the way NORAD has planes on standby to protect American airspace.
But we’d rather bitch at each other about religion and holy lands and whether or not it’s okay to kneel during that national anthem. We’re lucky we still have a chance to have better survival skills than the dinosaurs, but so far I see no evidence that we do today.
