Today is Asteroid Day
“Asteroid Day is a growing global movement, supported by international organizations, experts in planetary science, astronauts and citizens around the world to increase awareness, education and support of programs for greater detection, knowledge of the composition, mapping and deflection of dangerous asteroids. ASTEROID DAY is held each year on JUNE 30, the anniversary of the largest asteroid impact of Earth in recent history, 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia, which devastated 2000 square km/800 square miles in Siberia. ASTEROID DAY was co-founded in 2014 by Astrophysicist and QUEEN lead musician Dr. Brian May and Filmmaker Grig Richters, Apollo 9 Astronaut Rusty Schweickart and Silicon Valley operative Danica Remy.”
More info: http://asteroidday.org
Slooh: Celebrate World Asteroid Day with Live Show, Expert Guests
“On Thursday, June 30, at 4:00 pm PDT | 7:00 pm EDT | 23:00 UTC (International Times: http://bit.ly/28YW91a), Slooh is celebrating World Asteroid Day with four hours of live programming and an amazing roster of guests.”
Keith’s note: I’ll be appearing on SLOOH’s Asteroid Day broadcast to talk about the NASA politics behing asteroid detection and collection missions – and how they do/do not relate to human missions to Mars.
How is it that Asteroid Day has/had ZERO comments??
I guess I was waiting for someone to report on how the event went. I missed it because I was in the wrong time zone. But I was also thinking February 15th might be a better choice of the date (Chelyabinsk rather than Tunguska as the most destructive rather than the largest historic event.)
All Chelyabinsk did was blow out some windows. The injuries were from glass shards. Tunguska flatten about 2000 sq km of forests, complete destruction over an area over ten times the size of Washington DC. For further reference Hiroshima only had total destruction over an area of about 15 km. So it was a far worst event.
That said searching for ET seems to be higher on the “to do list” of NASA’s scientists than saving humanity, so its not surprising.
When I wrote that, I was expecting someone to complain about my use of the phrase, “most destructive.” I was thinking in terms of fatalities, serious injuries (to humans) and (financial) property damage. I think Chelyabinsk was the most destructive by that standard.
Perhaps, although there are accounts of other impacts that injured and killed individuals. But for some reason the documenting and acceptance of those events has been difficult, probably because it seems so incredible.
http://www.spacesafetymagaz…
“Finally, on Aug. 15, 1951, 62 houses were destroyed in Tehran, Iran, by a meteorite shower. Twelve people were killed and 19 injured. In addition, 300 livestock were killed. The event was reported by Iranian newspapers and the United Press and is reported to have been published in the Lowell Sun of Massachusetts. Why didn’t The New York Times carry it, given the devastation?”
No one was killed in Chelyabinsk and the great bulk of the injuries were minor ones. However the one thing Chelyabinsk and Tunguska have in common is that the evidence of damage from an impact was too strong to ignore.
But the folks who advise NASA still think finding bacteria on Mars is more important than protecting civilization on Earth.
A recent poll shows that ~13% of the public favors ‘Giant Meteor hitting the earth’ as a third-party presidential candidate.
http://www.publicpolicypoll…
“It’s a simple reality that both of this year’s Presidential candidates are unpopular. Clinton’s favorability is 39/54, and Trump is even worse off at 35/58. This has given rise to the ‘Giant Meteor for President’ movement, and we find that the Meteor would poll at 13%- far more support than the third party candidates actually on the ballot- with Clinton at 43% and Trump at 38%. The Meteor is particularly appealing to independent voters, functionally in a three way tie at 27% to 35% for Clinton and 31% for Trump.”
If a voter is sick of picking the lesser of two evils, I suppose voting for the greater evil might be relief. We could always write in Cthulhu. But this is just a creative way to say, “I’d rather be dead.” I hope America’s great experiment has not fallen that far.
I think it is getting there. It is very similar to the Europe/UK situation. The choices are to vote as the financiers want and suffer a dull, throbbing pain or vote against the financiers and have them engineer a recession/depression out of spite.
I’m voting Meteor.