A Little Knowledge/Dangerous Things

I was at a performance of William Missouri Burroughs' play Mad Gravity last night. It turns out the play involves a bit of audience participation, so at one point a character asks the audience if anyone knows the difference between an asteroid and a comet. My date pointed to me, so I offered that asteroids were rocky denizens of the inner Solar System while comets were icy wanderers of its distant outskirts.

It seems that the plot involved a close approach and possible impact by a comet.

I didn't get around to mentioning it, but overall comets are a heck of a lot more menacing than asteroids. Orbiting mostly in our near neighborhood, asteroids are pretty familiar, and the big ones on nearby trajectories are pretty well cataloged. If a really big one (major extinction class event) has our number, modern astronomy should see it coming for a few hundred years before impact, probably giving us enough time to persuade even the dumbest Republican climate denialist that we ought to do something about it. Also, asteroid orbits are mostly fairly similar to ours, so impact velocities would be "only" a few tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.

Comets, though, are invisible till they get pretty darn close, and falling through that big potential well of hundreds of astronomical units are moving very fast. Because they are spewing gas, dust and rock by the time they get this close to the Sun, even a near miss might be pretty calamitous. Warning times in weeks or less would imply that the most effective action we could take would be to bend over, place our heads between our legs, and kiss our asses goodbye.

Of course in 50 years, we might have other options.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more