The meteor that just landed in Russia was a wake up call, a jolt to the system, a catalyzing shock, a slap in our planetary face. Fortunately, nobody got killed. Plenty got hurt, shards of glass embedded in their faces and stuff like that, but it doesn’t sound like anybody got seriously messed up. They’ll have a few scars and a great story to tell everybody, in every bar they’re in, for the rest of their lives. They are among the very few earth dwellers who have actually, literally survived an invasion from outer space.
Broken Glass and Dirty Snow
Meanwhile an asteroid, that some scientists had warned might actually hit us, missed us. (There are a couple of differences between an asteroid and a meteor. One, meteors are smaller because meteors have broken off of asteroids. Also, though, and the primary difference, is that if it enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s a meteor. If it hits, it’s a meteorite.
The one that missed was about 3 times as big as the one that hit. If it had hit the earth, it would have destroyed everything within a thousand kilometers or so. If that hit in a populated area, we’re talking millions of deaths. Maybe tens of millions. Maybe hundreds of millions.
It was a close miss, too. It passed within about 28,000 kilometers of the Earth. That sounds like a lot, but we’ve got satellites further out that that. It is, in celestial terms, way too fucking close for comfort.
They say it’s a few thousand years, on the average, between major meteor strikes, but two near misses in one day calls that stat into serious question.
If we plan to survive as a species, maybe it’s time we started paying attention to what’s all around us.
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