At any moment now, we could all die. Every last one of us. For many, it would happen quickly, quite literally in a flash. For others, it would happen as a wave of water and earth coming on at hundreds of miles an hour. A slower death, yes, which is either better or worse depending on how one looks at it. But still a death. And, for those last lucky few, it would come as darkness and freezing and no food.
So by lucky, I mean lucky in sort of a different way than you’ve ever heard it before. A way in which it more relates to pain and suffering and sorrow. That kind of luck. It’s a new kind, really, and I think it will be all the rage in a few years, and maybe already is for fans of Bright Eyes. Come to think of it, I probably don’t mean lucky at all. But I’ve lost the topic.
What I’m talking about is this: asteroids. And, what I’m talking about is also this: those asteroids striking the Earth before we even see them coming.
But, you say, of course we’d see them. Bruce Willis would see them! Frodo Baggins would see them and marry me so we could be saved in an underground bunker. But you’d be wrong, which is either sad because you would surely die, or happy because at least you wouldn’t have those tense hours of waiting, knowing you were never going to find out what happens at the end of “Lost.”
I’ve been reading an excellent book by bestselling-author Bill Bryson. The book is called “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and it is a modern classic of science writing (at least I hope it is, since the New York Times is quoted on the front as saying it is destined to become one, and it would be quite embarrassing for them if it has failed to do so. At any rate, it ought to be. It’s very good).
In Chapter Thirteen (unlucky, like the death of our planet), Bryson talks about how we don’t even see the thousands of asteroids that cross our orbit each year. The first one we ever saw wasn’t even until 1991, when it had already flown by and, thankfully, missed. Another came in 1993, and was both larger and closer. The distance of both stood at 106,000 and 90,000 miles, respectively. Such distances sound huge when you think of them in terms of, say, how far you have missed by when trying to drive to Denver. But in cosmic terms, Bryson says, either one of those is “the equivalent of a bullet passing through one’s sleeve without touching the arm.”
This, it has been estimated, happens as much as two or three times as week, and all with no fanfare.
So why, you might ask, haven’t we been spotting them sooner? Why are we just letting them come on when at any time those bullets could stop passing through our sleeves and start hitting our arms?
The short answer is that no one is looking. Astronomy as a whole has become, with devices such as the Hubble Telescope, obsessed with the far-off. Astronomers want to study distant galaxies and imploding stars. They want to study the stuff of science fiction films, because that is where things are interesting. That is where, I think, they are all hoping that they will make the next breakthrough. That they will find aliens or worlds or the edge of the universe. And so they keep looking too far, looking right past all the large chunks of fast-moving rock that could wipe out civilization in a moment.
Bryson goes on to use the analogy that Earth is like a car on the freeway. In fact, it is the only car (we don’t care if other planets are struck, for this exercise, though the McDonald’s Corporation might, as I heard a rumor that they are looking to open their first store on Jupiter by the summer of 2014). The road, however, is constantly being crossed by pedestrians who don’t stop to look either direction. And we don’t know where 90 percent of those pedestrians even are, or when they might be coming to the curb.
So, think that you are driving this car, the Earth. And you are driving in the dark, unable to see. But you refuse to look or to even turn on the lights, because it is much more interesting to look further down the road, to where you can just barely see another car over the next hill. So you blunder on blindly, ignorantly, and hope you don’t hit any of those pedestrians who are running in front of your car two or three times a week.
That is how it is, though almost no one realizes it. Here is a short synopsis of how the movie “Armageddon” would have gone in the real world, and not in Hollywood:
Bruce Willis would sit down to breakfast. He would eat a piece of toast. Then he would see a bright light outside the window, a light that would last for a few seconds at best. Then he would be dead.
I implore astronomers everywhere: please start looking!
BYLINE:
Jonathan Schlosser is a writer and part-time library worker. He has published some short fiction and is working on finding a publisher for his novel. He has a B.A. in Writing, which means that, for a living, he is allowed to put away books at the library. He is also allowed to tell parents to tell their children to be quiet. He lives in Grand Rapids, MI. Email Jonathan at: jon.j.schlosser@gmail.com.
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