Re: This rock, this watery pearl, this pale blue dot.
- From: rick_sobie@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 11 May 2006 15:10:00 -0700
"An asteroid big enough to devastate 2000 square kilometers but small
enough to escape detection missed the Earth by just 120,000 kilometers
on 14 June.
The approach of asteroid 2002 MN was the closest recorded by
astronomers since asteroid 1994 XM1 came slightly closer eight years
ago.
However, asteroid 1994 XM1 was estimated at only 10 meters across, too
small to cause much damage on the ground. Asteroid 2002 MN is estimated
to have a diameter of 80 meters, comparable to the object that exploded
a few kilometres over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908, causing
widespread devastation.
"It's the largest object known to have come this close within decades,"
Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told
New Scientist.
Many other near misses must have gone undetected in the past,
astrophysicists say.
Too fast
No one spotted asteroid 2002 MN until 17 June, three days after it sped
by the Earth at 10.6 kilometers per second. "
So it would enter the atmosphere and impact, within a second. You would
see it when it started to glow, not before because it is a dark object
but you would see it and a second later kaboom.
We are lulled into a false sense of security by movies into believeing
that somehow, we could launch ICBMs to intercept an asteroid well they
don't work in space, we have no rockets since Saturn 5 we are sitting
ducks. Even if we spotted one, we couldn't stop it.
And that is only one of the threats we face which could render us, the
human race extinct. But if not extinct then set us back quite a bit.
If lets say Yellowstone supervolcano erupted, and released poisonous
gas, that would of course wipe out much of the civilization in the
western world.
You see that once something occurs, it is too late to build your
fortress. You have to already be in some form of protected
circumstance.
But if you look at the situation from an objective perspective, what
you see is that mankind could not muster up enough energy to give a
hoot, if life carried on or died screaming.
We just don't care. Simple as that. It is barely worth living.
What people do, is they build wooden stick houses designed to last as
long as they expect to and not a moment more.
Why? Well they don't care if life goes on, life is a burden, they just
want to get through it themselves.
And if we did care, and if life was worth living, worth preserving, we
would be engaged in building fortresses to preserve it. For all we
know, and the only evidence we have, this is it. Right here on earth,
and the rest of the universe is dead.
And still we don't care.
And we live on a garden planet.
Suppose people moved to colonize Mars, would they care more? No life
there would be harder, less enjoyable, in a short while they would not
care if it persisted or perished.
So what of other civilizations out there then, would they be more
inclined to think life was worth preserving or would they be more like
us, who go about just killing it off with pollutants etc without hardly
a second thought?
The truth is, that statistically, after listening to space with radio
telescopes we should have had a very large sample of suspected signals
that could not be identified as being of natural origin if Drake was
right.
Statistically you would need a curve, of signals, and somehwere in a
vast amount of received signals, you might find a civilization that we
might understand, or have something in common with, or learn something
from etc.
To get one signal, and then to assume we might understand it, or
benefit in any way from it, is as strange a thought as us, being the
only sign of life, in the entire universe.
Yet here we sit.
And we don't even care, if it persists, or just wafts away forever.
We don't care because life, is not really worth the living, or else we
would care, and we would be working to ensure its survival.
We have our moments when we make noises to preserve it, but just so
that it lasts the 60 or 70 years, beyond that who cares.
So philosphically speaking you can only arrive at one conclusion based
on the evidence at hand.
Life is a bitch, and then you die.
.
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