It’s Just a Thought

Asteroid 2024 YR4 is not going to hit Earth.  Yay?  It’s also not going to hit the Moon either.  Yay?  Apparently, this celestial rock which is 200 ft in length and weighs about 310,000 tons will be sliding by our orbit in a few years and will miss the moon by a couple of thousand miles.  Apparently, there are now safeguards in place to check if any known asteroids have the potential to hit Earth and also evaluate what potential damage they could do.

A2024 YR4 is considered a city killer.  It has been estimated that its impact would be the equivalent of 7.7 megatons of trinitrotoluene (TNT) detonating, which is a pretty big explosion.  Once they refined their calculations, they became convinced that it would miss Earth by a good large margin.  When a lunar impact looked more likely they began fussing because they speculated that an explosion on the Moon would throw up a lot of debris and it might destroy many satellites around Earth.  But when they used the James Webb telescope and measured the orbit more carefully even this scenario was ruled out.  It’s not going to hit anything.

The YouTube video author concluded that the investigation and analysis of the asteroid’s trajectory was a major victory for science and global cooperation.  Well, maybe.  But up until someone started checking the paths of asteroids, haven’t we been at this risk basically forever?  I guess the last sizable asteroid (or maybe comet) that collided with Earth was the Tunguska blast in 1908.  That was more than a hundred years ago.  And it took forever for anyone to even figure out what the hell happened.  Based on this track record something like this will happen less frequently than once a century.  And no one will be killed but a lot of trees will be flattened.  But something like once in 66 million years an asteroid 8 miles long will hit Earth causing a mass extinction event.  That rock was 200 times bigger than A2024 YR4.  How about if we stop worrying about anything less than 1% of the extinction rock.  So that would be twice as big as the recent rock.  So, if a 400 ft asteroid is crowding Earth, then maybe I’ll start getting nervous.  Or maybe I won’t.  We already have nuclear war, earthquakes, tsunamis, super-volcanoes, “global warming,” plagues (like COVID) and transgender mass murderers to worry about.  I don’t think I have the bandwidth to start worrying about rogue asteroids rolling into Earth or now into the Moon and destroying my wi-fi reception.

You know, maybe I’d be happy if an asteroid hit the Moon and sent a million meteors raining into the various satellites we have clogging up the sky over our heads.  Maybe that’s exactly what we need.  If cell phones stopped working and once we walk away from our desks we couldn’t be reached by every idiot on the planet maybe we’d actually be happier.  It’s just a thought.