More Things To Worry About In The Middle Of The Night

Instead of fretting about trivialities like saving for the kids' college tuition, or paying your own college tuition, or getting that paper written so your parents won't give you a lot of grief about how much college tuition they're paying so you can waste time on the Internet, here's something much more exciting to fret about.

There's a chance the Earth will be hit by a small asteroid in 2036 and right now there's nothing we can do to stop it!

That gets the heart rate up, doesn't it? 

The asteroid is called Apophis (after the ancient Egyptian all-devouring serpent of Chaos), and it orbits the Sun in an ellipse which crosses the Earth's path.  We're due for a close approach in 2013, and a closer one in 2029.  During that last encounter the Earth's gravitational attraction could deflect Apophis into an orbit which would intersect the Earth itself in 2036.

Then what happens?  Then the 390-meter astroid would strike the Earth with the power of a 10,000-megaton bomb.  The area for hundreds of miles around the impact site would be devastated, and climate effects could affect the entire world for years afterward.  And since the Earth's surface is, of course, 3/4 ocean, it's likely the impact would cause tsunamis over large areas of coastline.

What are the odds?  Currently about 1 in 5,000.  Not very comforting.  How many people play the lottery, even though the odds of winning that are 1 in several million?  How many people worry about flying on airplanes, even though the chance of accident is something like 1 in 100,000 trips? 

So what can we do about it? 

Nothing. 

Not now, anyway.  Right now we don't know enough about the structure of asteroids to be able to deflect or destroy something like Apophis.  Right now there aren't boosters capable of hitting it far enough from Earth to avoid damage.  Right now we can't send a manned mission beyond low Earth orbit (and you'd almost certainly need a human to oversee landing a bomb precisely on a speeding asteroid).

So if you're the worrisome type, someone who frets about global warming or the dangers of nuclear power, or chemicals in the water, here's something to put at the top of the list.  Giant rocks from space.  Contact your congressman or your senator (non-American readers can contact your despotic overlords and tyrants).  Tell them how the dinosaurs died.

Comments

[danielle]

this is scary will it really happen?

[Cambias]

As I mention above: odds are currently about 1 in 5,000. Low enough so that I don't actually lie awake thinking about it, but high enough that I sure hope someone at NASA or USAF Space Command is lying awake thinking about it.