Missing the target

Lately I've been seeing a lot of buzz on social media apropos of the Earth being hit by a killer asteroid.

Much of this appears to be wishful thinking.

Most of it seems to focus on the asteroid 2007 FT3, which is one of the bodies orbiting the Sun that is classified as a "near-Earth object" -- something with an orbit that crosses Earth's, and could potentially hit us at some point in the future.  It bears keeping in mind, however, that even on the scale of the Solar System, the Earth is a really small target.  This "deadly asteroid," we're told, is "on a collision course with Earth" -- but then you find out that its likelihood of its actually striking us on the date of Doomsday, March 3, 2030, is around one in ten million.

Oh, but there's "an altogether more sinister estimate" that 2007 FT3 could hit us on October 5, 2024, but the chances there are one in 11.5 million.  Why this is "altogether more sinister," I'm not sure.  Maybe just because it's sooner.  Or maybe the author of the article doesn't understand how math works and thinks that the bigger the second number, the worse it is.  I dunno.

Then there's the much-hyped asteroid 99942 Apophis, which was first thought to have a 2.7% chance of hitting the Earth in April of 2029 (more accurate observations of its orbit eliminated that possibility entirely), and then gets a second shot at us in April of 2036.  The 2036 collision depends on it passing through a gravitational keyhole during its 2029 close approach -- a tiny region in space where the pull of a much larger planet shifts the orbit of a smaller body in such a way that they then collide on a future pass.  Initially, the keyhole was estimated to be eight hundred kilometers in diameter, and this caused the physicists at NASA to rate Apophis at a four out of ten on the Torino Impact Scale -- the highest value any object has had since such assessments began.  (A rating of four means "A close encounter, meriting attention by astronomers.  Current calculations give a 1% or greater chance of collision capable of regional devastation.  Most likely, new telescopic observations will lead to reassignment to Level 0.  Attention by public and by public officials is merited if the encounter is less than a decade away.")  If it hit, the impact site would be in the eastern Pacific, which would be seriously bad news for anyone living in coastal California.

The close approach in 2029 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Phoenix7777, Animation of 99942 Apophis orbit around Sun, CC BY-SA 4.0]

This, of course, spurred the scientists to try to refine their measurements, and when they did -- as the scale suggested -- they found out we're not in any danger.  The gravitational keyhole turns out to be only a kilometer wide, and Apophis will miss it completely.

In fact, there are currently no known objects with a Torino Scale rating greater than zero.

It's always possible, of course, that we could be hit out of the blue by something we never saw coming.  But given that we're talking about an unknown risk from an unknown object of unknown size hitting in an unknown location at an unknown time, I think we have more pressing things to worry about.  Sure, something big will eventually hit the Earth, but it's not going to happen in the foreseeable future.  NASA and the other space monitoring agencies in the world are doing a pretty good job of watching the skies, so maybe we should all just turn our attention on more important matters, like trying to figure out how nearly half of Americans think the best choice for president is a multiply-indicted, incompetent compulsive liar who shows every sign of incipient dementia.

In any case, I'm not concerned about asteroid impacts, and all the hype is just more clickbait.  So if you live on the West Coast and were planning on moving inland, or are considering cancelling your plans for a big Halloween bash this year, you probably should just simmer down.

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A rain of dust

One of the problems with the modern industrialized worldview -- and yes, I know this is an overgeneralization, but still -- is our tendency to think we're capable of controlling everything.

I'm not so much talking about simple day-to-day occurrences.  At least on a theoretical level, we're all aware we could get clobbered by a truck while crossing the road.  But the bigger stuff all seems so solid, so unshakeable, that it's hard to imagine it ever changing.  Of course the grocery stores will always have food, there'll always be electricity available when we plug in our toasters, water will flow when we turn on the faucet.  On an even bigger scale -- it'll be warm in the summer and cool in the winter, the crops will grow, the rain will fall.

You don't have to know much science -- or history, for that matter -- to realize how false this attitude is.  Even small perturbations to the global ecosystem can have drastic consequences.  (Just as a handful of examples -- the 1984-1985 drought in Ethiopia that left 1.2 million dead and 400,000 refugees; the drought in the Yucatán in the early 10th century C.E. that is thought to have caused the downfall of the Mayan Empire; and the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. brought on by drought and lousy farming practices.)

The fact is -- and it's a point I've made before -- we need to be extraordinarily careful in pushing at the global ecosystem, because it can respond catastrophically to purely natural circumstances.  Adding global-scale human foolishness into the equation is a recipe for disaster.

As an example of how distant events can have unexpected global consequences, take the study published last week in Science Advances suggesting that a collision between two asteroids half a billion kilometers away triggered a drastic plunge in temperatures and the initiation of an ice age.  The event, which took place in the mid-Ordovician Period (466 million years ago), involved the destruction of an asteroid on the order of 150 kilometers in diameter, creating a dust plume that rained down upon the Earth.  The dust and debris blocking the sunlight triggered a drop in global temperatures and a sudden (geologically speaking) turnaround in the climate that spread ice sheets over much of the high latitudes in both hemispheres.

Of course, cosmic dust is falling into the Earth's atmosphere all the time, but this event caused a massive spike in the amount.  "Normally, Earth gains about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material every year," said study co-author Philipp Heck of the University of Chicago in an interview with Astronomy.  "Imagine multiplying that by a factor of 1,000 or 10,000."

The outcrop in Sweden that the researchers studied.  The layer containing the debris from the collision is visible as a gray line about 2/3 of the way up the cliff face.  [Image courtesy of Philipp Heck and the Field Museum]

The result of the cool-down was a huge increase in biodiversity as life forms evolved to cope with the change.  But before you start in on the "life finds a way" line of thought, and that this'll save us from the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, allow me to point out that the massive Ordovician chill was slower than today's warm-up by orders of magnitude.  "In the global cooling we studied, we're talking about timescales of millions of years," said Heck. "It's very different from the climate change caused by the meteorite 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs, and it's different from the global warming today — this global cooling was a gentle nudge.  There was less stress."

So yeah.  Having a thousand times the amount of dust flung at us from the explosion of an asteroid 150 kilometers across is still not as drastic as what we're currently doing to the climate.

Oh, and in a rather horrid coincidence, that quantity of debris is roughly equal to the amount of plastic we produced in 2015, 79% of which was landfilled.

So the idea that somehow the Earth is obligated to remain hospitable to human life regardless what we do to it -- or what happens outside of our sphere of control -- would be ludicrous if it weren't so terrifying.  It's why ham-handed efforts to "own the libs" by nitwits like Laura Ingraham (who tried to be funny by "attempting to drink a light-bulb stuffed steak using plastic straws") fall flat if you know anything at all about science.

Go ahead, Laura, laugh it up.  You better hope that we "libs" are overestimating the danger posed by the pro-industry, pro-fossil-fuels, damn-the-ecology-full-speed-ahead policies favored by people of your stripe.  And don't even start with me about how environmentally-conscious people are "hoping for disaster" or "trying to destroy the economy."  Fearing that something is likely to happen isn't the same as hoping it will happen, which should be clear to anyone who has an IQ larger than their shoe size and concern for anything other than short-term financial gain.

So once again, we have a piece of research about a distant event millions of years ago providing a cautionary tale about what's happening here and now.  I wish I had some kind of positive note to end this on, but increasingly, it's looking like our current behavior is likely to throw us past a tipping point -- and our long-term legacy might be appearing to some scientist in the distant future as a gray stripe in a rock outcrop.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Astronomical Whack-a-Mole

Because we all clearly needed something else to worry about, today we have: the mega-asteroids of doom.

This comes up because of a new program at NASA, now that the Trump administration has freed them from the necessity of worrying about climate change.  Called the "Large Synoptic Survey Telescope," this project involves building a huge telescope in Chile that will be looking for "potentially hazardous asteroids" (PHAs).  The idea is that they'll scan the sky looking for any hitherto-unrecorded astronomical object that shows apparent movement against the background stars in an hour.  "Anything that moves in just one hour," writes project leader Michael Lund, astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University, "has to be so close that it is within our Solar System."

It's not like this is an inconsequential threat.  Barringer Crater, in northern Arizona, is a huge hole in the ground that was caused by collision with a nickel-iron meteorite fifty meters in diameter.  The Chesapeake Bay Impact Event, about 35 million years ago, is 85 kilometers across, and was caused by an object about three kilometers wide -- the impact was enough to cause a tsunami that hit the Blue Ridge Mountains.  The mother of 'em all, though, is the 150 kilometer wide Chicxulub Crater, 66 million years ago, which blew up a layer of dust that settled out as clay all over the Earth -- and is thought to have kicked off the Cretaceous Extinction, the final straw for the dinosaurs (except for the ones who were the ancestors of modern birds).

What is cheering, however, is that these events aren't frequent.  The Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013, which exploded 32,000 meters above the Earth's surface but still was able to generate a shock wave big enough to injure 1,200 people.  The object that caused the blast is thought to have been about twenty meters across -- nothing compared to Chesapeake Bay and Chicxulub, but still a little on the scary side.

[Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

No one doubts that there are lots of objects out there that could potentially play Whack-a-Mole with the Earth.  The LSST gives us hope of finding them before they find us.  The unfortunate part, however, comes when Lund addresses the question of what we could do about it if we discovered that a huge rock was on a collision course with Newark:

If an asteroid is on a collision course hours or days before it occurs, the Earth won’t have many options.  It’s like a car suddenly pulling out in front of you. There is little that you can do.  If, however, we find these asteroids years or decades before a potential collision, then we may be able to use spacecraft to nudge the asteroid enough to change its path so that it and the Earth don’t collide. 

This is, however, easier said than done, and currently, no one really knows how well an asteroid can be redirected.  There have been several proposals for missions by NASA and the European Space Agency to do this, but so far, they have not passed early stages of mission development.

 So it looks like if you found out that day after tomorrow, your home town was going to get clobbered, you'd have two options: (1) get in your car, drive like hell, and hope for the best; or (2) put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.  I suppose that's better than nothing, especially considering that the alternative is thinking you're going to take a nice nap in your hammock and instead getting vaporized by an enormous superheated rock.

But even so, there's the problem of what it's going to be like for the rest of the Earth, the ones not in the impact zone.  Any impact -- even a relatively small one, like the one that formed Barringer Crater -- is actually going to have an enormous effect even on very distant places, just from the standpoint of kicking up a crapload of dust.  (Recall that when the volcano Tambora erupted in 1815, it caused "the Year Without a Summer," during which crops froze in mid-July and hundreds of thousands of people died of starvation.)

Nearer to the impact site, things get even worse.  Consider the Chelyabinsk meteor, which by comparison is a popgun -- not to mention the fact that it self-destructed 32,000 meters up, and never hit the surface.  The shock wave would be astronomical.  Pun intended.  Closer still, and the heat blast would flash-fry anything in its way.

You don't even get a pass if the impact is in the ocean, because then you've got hundred-foot-high tsunamis to worry about.

So yeah.  Not fun.

The best-case outcome, here, is that Lund and his colleagues scan the sky with the LSST for a while, and say, "Welp.  Nothing much out there.  I guess everything's hunky-dory.  As you were."  Or, that any projected impact will take place thousands of years from now.  (I figure that anyone around then will just have to fend for themselves.)  Or, perhaps, that we could use our technology to redirect the asteroid away from colliding with us.  Lund says this is already being looked into:

The B612 Foundation, a private nonprofit group, is also trying to privately raise money for a mission to redirect an asteroid, and they may be the first to attempt this if the government space programs don’t.  Pushing an asteroid sounds like an odd thing to do, but when we one day find an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, it may well be that knowledge that will save humanity.

I'll be watching the results, though, because being a little on the anxious, neurotic side, I definitely need another thing to keep me up at night.  On the other hand, it's at least temporarily taken my mind off all the other problems we're facing.  Which is good, right?

Of course right.

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just mindblowing fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.

All I want for Christmas is a Death Asteroid

So it's December, which means it's time for Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Our Fellow Humans, and Death Asteroids.

I'm not sure what it is about this time of year that brings out the fatalism in so many.  You might recall that the Mayan Apocalypse, for example, was scheduled on December 21, 2012, prompting mass panic amongst the woo-woos until December 22 rolled around and it became apparent that contrary to popular expectation, the world had failed to end on schedule.

It's disappointing when you can't even count on an apocalypse to show up on time.

In any case, this year, the End of the World is going to be brought about by an asteroid with the euphonious name 2003 SD220, which is scheduled to make a near pass to Earth on Christmas Eve.

2003 SD220 [image courtesy of JPL]

Well, near, that is, in the sense of "11 million kilometers away," which is 28 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.  So we're talking "near" in the astronomical sense, just as geologists consider anything under about 50,000 years old "recent," even though 50,000 years seems like a long time even for someone as old as I am.  But such sensible and soothing words have not had the least effect on the woo-woos, who are jumping about making panicked little squeaking noises about how the asteroid is going to kill us all, notwithstanding the fact that all of the previous Ends of the World they predicted have not, technically, happened.

The asteroid is 2.5 kilometers across and is moving five miles per second, which is a pretty good clip for something that large.  But from there, irrational fear takes over and logic goes right out the window.  It will be close enough, we are told, that its gravitational pull will cause us to experience deadly tsunamis, earthquakes, and the eruption of dormant volcanoes.  And that's if it doesn't actually impact the Earth directly, which would be an "extinction-level event."

Never mind that there are plenty of mountains on the Earth that are 2.5 kilometers tall, and their gravitational pull doesn't cause tsunamis etc.  And they're a hell of a lot closer than 2003 SD220 will ever get.

But maybe it's because it's traveling so fast.  Maybe by some new and undiscovered type of physics, moving fast makes something's gravitational pull increase.  I dunno.

So NASA, who must be really fucking sick and tired of people who don't understand science getting everyone stirred up every couple of months, issued a statement.  Paul Chodas, manager of the Near-Earth Object Office of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the following:

There is no scientific basis -- not one shred of evidence -- that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates. 

In fact, NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program says there have been no asteroids or comets observed that would impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable future.  All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a 0.01% chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years. 

The Near-Earth Object office at JPL is a key group involved with the international collaboration of astronomers and scientists who keep watch on the sky with their telescopes, looking for asteroids that could do harm to our planet and predicting their paths through space for the foreseeable future. If there were any observations on anything headed our way, we would know about it. 

If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction... we would have seen something of it by now.

Can't you just hear the annoyed sighing that went along with his writing this?

But of course, that statement had exactly the opposite effect from what Chodas wanted.  If NASA was saying the asteroid is harmless, that must mean they're covering something up.  It must be deadly.  It must, in fact...

... be four times the size of Jupiter.

And yes, there are people who are seriously claiming that.

Why haven't we seen it yet, if it's so big, is something of a mystery.  After all, we can see Jupiter itself just fine, and it's currently 57,000 times further away than the asteroid is.

Maybe the asteroid is made of dark matter.  Makes as much sense as anything else these people say.

As for me, I'm not worried.  2003 SD220 is going to be far enough away that it won't be visible without a pretty good telescope, which is actually kind of disappointing.  So on Christmas Eve, I'll be nestled up all snug in my bed, and I sure as hell won't have visions of Death Asteroids dancing through my head.

Asteroid dodgeball

One has to wonder what people get from forecasting the end of the world.

Because some people are really into this.  You've got your religious/End Times Crowd, but they're not the only ones.  There's the We're All Going To Die In An Epidemic Cadre, the Yellowstone Supervolcano Will End Life As We Know It Club, and the ever-present Economic Collapse Will Result In Global War Association.

And is it just me, or do these people seem kind of... happy about the whole idea?

Me, I'm not so thrilled by the prospect.  It's not that life is perfect, but hell, I'll take what I have over everyone in the country dying of Ebola, or being smothered by a giant ash cloud, or even the rivers running red with the blood of unbelievers.

And of course, those aren't the only ways the world could end.  Massive earthquakes, tsunamis, even alien invasions could do the trick.  And if that's not enough, we now have an article bouncing about in the social media that claims that we're all about to die...

... in an asteroid collision.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The site Cosmos Up, which sounds more reputable than it actually turns out to be, ran an article last week called "Dangerous Asteroid Rapidly Approaching Earth?" in which we find out that the euphoniously-named 2014 UR116 is about to play a cosmic game of Whack-a-Mole with the Earth.  Here's how they describe it.  Grammar and spelling is as-written, so you can get the overall charming effect of the original:

A large asteroid named 2014 UR116 is moving into an orbit, most likely involving a collision with Earth. Asteroid flies inside the solar system.

His route is similar to the trajectory of the Chelyabinsk meteorite. He flies by planet, Venus and Mars, and is a real danger for the inhabitants of the earth.

He does that, does he?  I'm scared already.

Russia’s only network of robotic telescopes MASTER created by Lomonosov Moscow State University University in collaboration with the three domestic universities (Ekaterinburg, Irkutsk and Blagoveshchensk), Kislovodsk Station of the Pulkovo Observatory RAS and the University of San Juan (Argentina), an asteroid discovered in 2014 UR116, – more than 300 meters in diameter – which can collide with the Earth. This was reported by the laboratory site space monitoring MSU.

So far, sounds at least vaguely scientific.  But then, the author goes on to tell us the following:

Exact trajectory of the asteroid 2014 UR116 yet impossible to determine, but theoretically it could collide with the Earth, and Mars and Venus. The energy of the explosion, in the event of a collision with the Earth, a thousand times greater than the explosion of Chelyabinsk asteroid.

It's going to collide with the Earth and Mars and Venus?  One right after the other, or something?  On the other hand, if they mean that we can't tell which one it's going to hit, that's kind of a high uncertainty value.  According to the site Wolfram Alpha, the current distance between Earth and Mars is 157.9 million miles.  If that's the size of the error bars in their trajectory calculations, I'll take my chances, you know?

But of course, "We Don't Know And It Probably Won't Hit The Earth, But Even So, It's A Pretty Big Chunk Of Space Rock" doesn't make nearly as snappy a headline as "Dangerous Asteroid Rapidly Approaching Earth."

Still, you have to wonder why the people currently forwarding this article on Twitter and Facebook seem so... cheery about the whole thing.  Myself, I think that being at ground zero of an asteroid strike would be unpleasant, at least during the 2.8 nanoseconds before I was vaporized by the impact. You'd think people would be circulating articles saying, "Hey, Isn't It Cool That We've Found Another Asteroid That Won't Hit Us?" instead of articles saying "Fuck, We're All Gonna Die."

Yet another way in which I don't get human nature.  I'll add it to the list.

Well, that should take care of your "Bieber Fever."

So San Francisco made it through yesterday without being obliterated.  I'm pleased about that, because San Francisco is a great place and it would suck if it was destroyed by an earthquake even if it is a hotbed of "sexual immortality" (as one of the prophecies of doom called it).

Of course, the same bunch of prophets also called it a "Bowl of Iniquity," which is just funny.  It sounds like the breakfast they serve in hell's deli, doesn't it?  ("Hey, hon, can I have another Bowl of Iniquity, with some milk and sugar?  Thanks.")

But of course, this failure of the Lord to keep his word and smite the hell out of California isn't going to stop the prognosticators of doom from moving on to the next Holy Warning.  In fact, a reader told me we already have one that has cleared the starting gate, and it's a doozy.  Ready?

FEMA has been caught in the act of sending shiploads of plastic coffins and other corpse-transport devices...

... to Puerto Rico...

... because there's going to be an asteroid impact in the Atlantic Ocean...

... causing an enormous, 200-foot-tall tsunami...

... in order to kill everyone at the October 19 Justin Bieber concert in San Juan.

Well.  I certainly can't top that.  And I have to state, for the record, that I can understand why the Lord might want to smite Justin Bieber.  Destroying Puerto Rico in order to do it sounds like it might be a bit of an overreaction, however.  On the other hand, if you read the Old Testament you'll find that this sort of thing happened all the time, with the Lord having a bad morning and smiting the shit out of everyone who happened to be in the vicinity, so I guess there's precedent.

The Lord Works In Mysterious Ways, after all, and if killing everyone in Puerto Rico is his way of dealing with Justin Bieber, then who am I to question it?

So, there you have it.  The next prophecy to look forward to.  Much more creative than a silly old earthquake, don't you think?  And just think!  If it's true, we'll never have to hear "As Long As You Love Me" again.