"Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!"

In the wake of my last post, I was astonished to discover that later today an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier will pass within a mere 323,00 kilometers of Earth.  (For those of you without sense of scale for either one of those numbers, that's something about 400 meters in diameter coming closer to Earth than the Moon.)

Asteroid 2005 YU55 will do its fly-by at 6:28 EST, and during its run it will be 11,000 kilometers within the Moon's orbit. By the standards of cosmic distance, that's like having a bullet get closer to your face than the tip of your nose - and in this case, the bullet is moving at 46,000 kph.

The good news is that according to the good people at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there is no chance that this object will hit the Earth either during this visit or any time in the next 100 years.  Nonetheless, the idea of a chunk of rock the size of a city block getting that close makes me more than a little nervous.

However, the adjacency of YU55 to Earth logically suggests that it might just as easily have hit the Moon. (After all, the Moon is a sort of orbital poster child for impact craters - just look at it.) Hmmm...I wonder what the effects of a really big asteroid hit on the Moon would be?  Presumably a large enough hit might shatter it, making us the recipient of a lot of collateral damage from fragments.  A slow breakup might give us an orbital ring à la Saturn.  But I think it's unlikely we'd get something that looked anything at all like the half-completed Death Star from Return of the Jedi, as much as I hate to disappoint you Star Wars fans.

- Sid

No one ever mentions Robert Duvall.

One of my clients told me that apparently it has been calculated that a massive asteroid will hit our planet in 25 years.  Heard about that?

Text from Laurie Smith, Personal Trainer

Asteroid With Chance of Hitting Earth in 2029 Now Being Watched 'Very Carefully'.

Apophis: The Asteroid That Could Smash Into the Earth on April 13th, 2036.

Asteroid Could Hit Earth In 172 Years.

New Potentially Hazardous Asteroid Discovered!

Chance, could, potentially - based on those headlines, it sounds to me like it's too early to start packing for the end of the world, or at least the end of the world that involves asteroid collisions.  But the prevalence of the meme suggests that the topic is worth more of a look.

Okay, what if - which is the name of the game, after all - what if the scientific community was able to determine without any doubt at all that an asteroid was going to hit the Earth in 25 years?  Let's assume that this is the real deal:  maybe not a planet cracker, but definitely an Extinction Level Event.

Okay, what should we do?  Hmmm…..right now, nothing.

What?  Sorry, but I'm unwilling to believe that the scientific community could predict 25 years in advance exactly where the point of impact would be.  As such, building any sort of last stand redoubt to shelter a remnant of humanity would be premature - it would be more than a little embarrassing to find out that said refuge had been constructed at ground zero. 

And yes, a remnant of humanity.  I gather that we've recently hit the seven billion population point*, I can't imagine that we can come up with a solution that allows all of us to survive a real species ender.  (Just for the record, I realize full well that I won't be on the short list - the new world will not need 75-year-old graphic artist/geeks, which is where I'd stand in 25 years.)

Well, maybe "nothing" is a bit extreme.  What I'd suggest is very quietly doing research to determine the best solution for survivability, and perhaps judiciously starting to stockpile resources.

Hmmm...would I put Mars on that list of solutions?

I'd like to colonize Mars regardless, but as a solution for an extinction level event, 25 years doesn't sound like enough time to create a self-sufficient haven on Mars.  The advantage of trying to survive here is that we can already survive here.  An asteroid impact, followed by all the various collateral damage effects like tsunamis, earthquakes, and nuclear winter, or its asteroid equivalent, will permanently change the face of the planet.  However, I don't think it will be bad enough to make the air completely unbreatheable and get rid of all the water, which is what we'd be facing on Mars.

But if it is a planet cracker, something big enough to actually destroy Earth, Mars it is. In this scenario, our survival as a species is in serious doubt, but it does raise an interesting question:  how would our approach to space travel change if we only had to worry about one-way trips?

However, statistics suggest that being hit by something that large is extremely unlikely compared to a piece of cosmic debris that would just kill everyone who isn't in some form of extreme shelter. For that scenario, I actually don't mind the 2012 option - the movie, that is, not the Mayan-calendar end of the world thing.  Building floating refuges, which will immediately be called arks by everyone involved, is not a bad idea.  I don't know if we can building something on solid ground that would withstand all the primary and secondary effects, but I could see a properly designed ark making it through.

Arks have a second advantage:  mobility. (Something that 2012 didn't add to the equation until after the disaster had taken place.) When the impact point has been accurately calculated, floating refuges can be shifted to a point as far away as possible.

The other option, as we all know, is to send Bruce Willis to blow up the offending chunk of rock.  Actually, we probably don't need to blow it up, we just need to change its vector a bit, although blowing it up would seem to be a longer term solution.  I wonder how practical that solution actually is?  The asteroid that may (or may not, opinions vary) have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs was probably about 10 kilometers long - how many megatons would it take to break down that much rock to the point where the pieces would burn up in the atmosphere?

And then all we'd have to worry about is trillions and trillions of cubic feet of dust...

- Sid

* I gather that there's some debate about whether or not we've crossed the seven billion line or not, but I suspect that another 25 years will take care of it.

And more about tricks than treats.

I'm confident that I paid my debt to society by shaving my beard off and plastering my face with glue and makeup for last year's workplace Hallowe'en celebration, so I decided to go a bit easier on myself this year.  My 2011 costume was nothing more than an oversized version of my workplace ID card with an appropriate hole where the picture goes - said hole to be occupied by my actual face.

However, after last year's prize-winning zombie look, people at work have been curious as to what I was planning for a follow-up. Agatha, a member of our labour relations group, asked what I was going as this year, and I replied, "Myself."  Before I could explain further, she replied, "That's not very scary!" *

Frankly, I was surprised to get that response, but I was also somewhat pleased as well. It's good to find someone who still remembers that Hallowe'en is supposed to be about fear.

Yes, fear.  October 31st used to be a celebration of fear, where we went out, long after our usual bedtimes, into a night that youthful imagination peopled with a myriad of monsters.  But it was also an education in some ways, because it taught children that the monsters were just that, imaginary creations, with the comforting presence of a parental hand to hold onto as proof that it really was safe.

In recent years, Hallowe'en has transitioned into much more of an adult holiday (in both senses of the word).  Gone are the days of Hallowe'en being nothing but parents tolerantly marching their children door-to-door in search of goodies - today's Hallowe'en is more of a bacchanalian event, an event that provides license for costumes that are more about sex than candy.  What a terrible loss!  As strange as it sounds, I sincerely hope that lots of small children go out tonight and have the most frightening time of their lives.

Oh, and P.S. - Agatha won the prize at work this year for Scariest Costume.

- Sid

* Thank you, Agatha, that's the nicest thing that an attractive woman has said to me for quite some time. 

The introductory comic is by Randy Milholland.  http://www.somethingpositive.net/index.html