Chicken Little Finally Gets Respect
Killer asteroids have fallen into the media
spotlight again. Yesterday marked the five-year
anniversary of the discovery—and subsequent
hysteria—of "1997 XF11," a mile-wide asteroid
that was initially thought to be on a course to
collide with our planet in 2028. In related news, a
scholar from a RAND think tank found his comments
taken severely out of context when several media
outlets recently quoted him as advocating
government secrecy if a global-killer were
discovered on a collision course with Earth. Most
interestingly, I just learned that a small space
rock (5-10 meters in diameter) exploded over the
Mediterranean last June, releasing as much energy
as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. As an Air
Force official noted at the time, this could have
had devastating consequences if the asteroid had
dropped in just a little to the east (say, above
hair-trigger Pakistan or India), where it might
have been mistaken as a nuclear first-strike.
Despite the gloomy nature of this space news, it
gratifies me to see the threat of cosmic collisions
being taken so seriously by the news media and
general public. When I first learned the scope of
such threats during film school, I was driven to
write a documentary (never produced) about the
topic. This research in turn evolved into my first
feature-length script COLD FIRE, a science
"fiction" thriller which portrayed a large comet on
a collision course with Earth. Though my idea was
scooped shortly thereafter by the Hollywood studios
that released DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON, it
pleased me to see the subject finally getting the
attention it deserved. The threat of such a cosmic
collision was remote, but the potential
consequences devastating.
Plummeting toward earth at as much as 50 miles
per second, an asteroid or comet doesn't have to be
big to make a big bang. The shooting stars that
make such bright streaks across the night sky are
mere pebbles that burn up on entry. The rock that
blew up over the Mediterranean with the same
destructive force as an atomic bomb was the size of
my Ford Explorer. An impact by mile-wide 1997 XF11
(which will safely pass us by at a distance of
800,000 miles in 2028, about four times the
distance to the Moon) could cause devastation
worldwide, including the deaths of thousands or
even millions. And anything larger is considered an
"ELE," or Extinction Level Event, such as the
impact of the six-mile-wide comet that wiped out
the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
The astronomers of NASA's Spaceguard Survey
finally got funded during the past decade, and are
about halfway through their 10-year goal of finding
90 percent of any "Near-Earth Objects" which could
potentially pose a threat. Though we're still a
long way off from being able to do anything if we
discover a killer asteroid heading our way, we
finally heeded Chicken Little's warning and have
turned our eyes skyward.
Development note: I've
noticed that this site doesn't look like it should
in Netscape Navigator. Rather than waste time
jury-rigging it to look right in a
soon-to-be-obsolete browser, I'll just add the
cliché "This site best viewed with Internet
Explorer."
©2003 Michael
Strickland ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
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