Postponed
It’s ok, the asteroid won’t hit for at least a century. Of course if you have descendants you might be worried for their descendants, but…sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, I guess.
Earthlings can breathe a sigh of relief after US space agency Nasa confirmed the planet was “safe” from a once-feared asteroid for the next 100 years at least.
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“A 2068 impact is not in the realm of possibility any more, and our calculations don’t show any impact risk for at least the next 100 years,” Davide Farnocchia, a scientist who studies near-Earth objects for Nasa, said in a statement on Friday.
It waved from a distance recently.
The asteroid recently made a distant flyby of Earth on 5 March, passing within 17 million km (10 million miles) of the planet.
Astronomers were able to use radar observations to refine their estimate of the asteroid’s orbit around the Sun, allowing them to confidently rule out any impact risk in 2068 and long after.
You can take that one off the list for now.
I would be 98 year old in 2068. I suspect I could then quite welcome an asteroid strike…
Well, my son isn’t going to be alive by then, either, and he doesn’t have any children, so maybe my descendants are already non-existent. Still, I do have a large family of nieces, nephews, and cousins, and they have mostly reproduced themselves, so I guess I need to worry about them? Not to mention the rest of humanity…but global warming may have so diminished the quality and quantity of life by then it may go relatively unnoticed.
So yes, let’s continue ridiculing (not this commentariat) SpaceX blowing up “toys” because it’s not fixing climate change.
OK, this asteroid won’t be wiping us out any time soon, but what is frequently overlooked in these Phew! That was close reports is the fact that we have no idea how many huge chunks of rock, metal and ice are out there in orbits that cross that of Earth. Yes, a lot of these asteroids have been located, named and are tracked, but these are thought to be just a drop in the ocean. The big problem – aside from the fact that the average asteroid reflects less light than a lump of coal and is miniscule compared to the amount of space there is to search for it – is that they are not all orbiting in the same plane as the planets and the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter but have completely random inclinations so there’s really no way of knowing where to look or when.
Chances are that the one that does for us will be seen for the first time shortly before it hits, if indeed it is seen at all. So, not all bad news after all.
Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior put forth a proposal to strip-mine all the national parks on the grounds that Jesus Christ was about to return (the signs were all there…!) and so, with Kingdom Come set up, there could be no possible reason to object.
Everyone would be too busy singing ‘Praise Him on High’ and ‘Hallelujah’ (nb, not the Leonard Cohen number) to even notice that every inch of wilderness had been bulldozed.
So, could well be that Jesus will come riding down from Heaven on an asteroid, and start sorting a few things out. The signs are all there, I tell you.
I can see it now: Jesus re-entering Jerusalem on the back of an ass… teroid.