Earth is doomed
The dinosaurs never saw their asteroid coming. At least we’ll die knowing NASA tried to take a picture.
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The dinosaurs never saw their asteroid coming. At least we’ll die knowing NASA tried to take a picture.
Humanity is at times forced to confront the great cosmic mystery of our existence, making us look up, ponder our fragility, question our purpose, and then laugh nervously as we realize we may not actually stand a yeoman’s chance.
I am referring, of course, to NASA’s freshly released “images” of interstellar comet 3I/Atlas, a visitor from the distant darkness of who knows where.
If you haven’t seen them yet, imagine an X-ray of a cotton ball, or a ghost photographed with an ancient Nokia 3310.
Yep, these are the pictures that the world’s most advanced space agency — armed with billion-dollar equipment, supercomputers, and a fleet of orbiters — produced after pointing their cameras at this interstellar visitor.
One image shows a blurry glow with the annotation “Comet Trajectory,” which is helpful because without the arrow, you’d think a smudge got stuck on your screen.
The other image, taken by the Lucy spacecraft, provides additional clarity only if you squint, rotate the monitor, and pray. The comet sits inside a red circle as if NASA itself had to admit, “Look, it’s somewhere here.”
If Earth is ever in danger from an incoming asteroid, these pictures confirm we will know about it only when the sky starts glowing and the neighbors begin panicking.
Before NASA broke its silence on account of that US government shutdown (yes, they’re that pathetic), the internet was having a grand time, and Kim Kardashian even asked the agency to confirm whether the comet is harboring E.T.
Conspiracy theorists are convinced the smudge is the “nose” of an extraterrestrial battleship. NASA, for its part, patiently repeats: “It’s a comet.” Which is exactly what NASA would say if it were an alien battleship.
But let’s assume for the sake of everyone’s blood pressure that 3I/Atlas is not a cosmic version of an Amazon delivery drone. It’s still an interstellar object, only the third we’ve ever detected passing through our solar system.
Scientists are understandably excited. They talk about “unprecedented insights,” and “extrasolar origins,” and how this thing possibly predates the Sun. One NASA scientist even admitted to getting “goosebumps.”
Goosebumps are wonderful. They do, however, rank low on the planetary-defense checklist.
This is because while the scientific community debates whether the smudge is a spaceship or a snowball, the rest of us remember one uncomfortable fact: Earth has been hit before, and it did not end well.
The Chicxulub asteroid, a 10 to 12-kilometer monster, slammed into what is now Mexico 66 million years ago, turned the sky into a blast furnace, shut down photosynthesis, and politely evicted the dinosaurs from existence.
That asteroid didn’t care about goosebumps.
To prevent a sequel, NASA runs the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, scans the skies with telescopes like Pan-STARRS, and fires radar beams from facilities like Goldstone.
They even tested a planetary-defense punch in 2022: the DART mission, which successfully shoved a small asteroid off its original orbit. Humanity celebrated this as if we had finally learned how to fight back.
Unfortunately, Bennu (the most closely watched “Earth killer”) is 490 meters wide and weighs roughly 60 million tons. DART smacked something the size of a football stadium. Bennu is the size of mankind’s gargantuan false bravado.
If Bennu ever strolls toward Earth in the 22nd century, NASA might once again issue an image resembling a sneeze on film and say, “There it is.” At that point, our best defense might be to gently ask it to go around.
So yes, Earth is doomed. Not today, not tomorrow, but someday, when a rock too big to nudge and too fast to photograph properly decides it’s our turn again. The dinosaurs never saw their asteroid coming.
At least we’ll die knowing NASA tried to take a picture.
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