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To: fork@spamassassin.taint.org
Subject: Re: Asteroids anyone ?
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From: Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>
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Date: 25 Jul 2002 22:51:21 -0400

>>>>> "J" == Jon O <jono@networkcommand.com> writes:

    J> Has anyone considered the fact that these occurrances appear to
    J> be increasing. I'm aware that maybe more publicity surrounding
    J> some and certain agencies have been granted more funding, but
    J> I'd like to see some data which shows if these are increasing
    J> or not.

I've seen data that shows 1200 rocks (TV-set sized and smaller)
crashing into the Ottawa skies /every/ /single/ /night/, and that's
just the background noise.  Plots of that data show us passing through
hundreds of 'tubes' of debris, each indicative of some other larger
something out there, only a small handful of which have been
discovered.  This is without even considering the one's headed this
way out of the Oort for their First Big Trip.

One thing you will just have to get used to is hearing news of a
possible collision; we have only started funding the projects to look
for these things since Hollywood took an interest with Armageddon, and
we have only just recently turned on a bunch of new toys to do
automated sky surveys.  There are also some new (and very clever)
amateur projects co-ordinating multiple telescopes to detect these
criters, one of which plans to network dozens of ground based machines
around the world.  You may remember a few years back the 2028 doomsday
story -- consider them good ghost stories, then go back to work.

20,000 years ago, one of them the size of Mt Everest just ever so
slightly grazed us and left a scar 400km long in the side of South
America before it scooted out into space.  First nations people would
have been there then, and it would have seriously ruined their day.
Orbital elements tell us that our modern technology would have perhaps
given us 90-min advance warning.   

The near-miss earlier this month wasn't seen until it was already past
us; we can't detect rocks on their trip behind the Sun, and when they
come out slingshot to relativistic speeds, well, it's just too darn
late to do much of anything about it.  On the inbound trip, even at
their max full-moon angle, these things are most often magnitude 16 or
way worse, which is many magnitudes fainter than what you see in the
deepest dark-skies; no one thought to paint them shiny and white.
They day before it "hits" my software says NT7 will be magnitude 14 --
it's easier to see the space station.

What's worse, the Sun is not a smooth hard spheric marble, it's a
twisted gelatinous hunk o' hunk o' burnin' love, so the precise warp
curve of space right near it's backside is (ahem) somewhat problematic
to compute precisely.  It's also spewing considerable plasma flux in
all directions, and then there's all these other big gelatinous roaming
globs (Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune) and some significant roaming
rubble (us), and damn it, they are all spinning too, and most of them
have a magnetosphere!

Shit. Forget it.

Learn to play the banjo. Take peppermint Rye-Kee Shee-At-Zoo relaxation
therapy and oodles of Ag-nasial I&I-drop suppliments, eat no kind of
frozen portion, and floss.  Good planets are real hard to find, so
enjoy the one you got while it's here.  Call your ma. Do an anonymous
kindness for your better half, another for a total stranger. Having
all the best toys is useless when they all spontaneously combust from
a global Wormwood shockwave. You should be diggin' it while it's
happenin'

Like, just live your life like there's no tomorrow, ok?  Don't bank on
being able to redeem yourself later. Yeah, sure, Osama could whack you
with some nail-coated fuel-air bombs, heck a mis-informed TopGun could
do it too, but the Good Lord could do it too, with pure, clean and
galactically EnviroFriendly kinetic energy, and He don't stand in line
for no Airport Security Check. Hell, fire and brimstone are
classically given in the reverse order; best to be on the impact side
of the planet.

Learn to stop worrying and love the Rock.  Besides, the rats and
cockroaches will survive, and they already know how to kickstart
evolution right back into Enrons, WorldComs and Calcuttas.  They even
have all our wiring and plumbing diagrams and half of our socks.

Are we going to get hit?  Yup.  

When?  Every 65 million years and, oh my lord, will you /look/ at the time!

Where/what/when? Space is pretty big.  Take the largest thing you can
imagine, double it, and add 10%: That is just the local pancake region
between us and the Sun. There's the whole rest of the disk of the
ecliptic and, which is where the NT7 observation came from, it has
only recently occurred to the meteor hunters to "look up" (or down);
almost the first shot looking /out/ of the ecliptic disk, and hoo-whee
there's this big sucker on an "11 tries for a dollar" close encounter
of the smack-em-good kind.

This is what I love about astrophysics: we have theories as good as
anyone else (way better than psychology), and we debate and argue and
expound and conference and bellow and blurt about them, but every time
we turn on some new kind of robot sensor device to actually /look/ at
Reality, well she slaps us right in the face and says in her best Mae
West "Guess again, boys" -- no other science gets that chance (ok,
maybe some do) and there is nothing, _nothing_ more worthless than last
semester's astronomy text.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@teledyn.com> TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Innovations Through Open Source Systems: http://www.teledyn.com
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)

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