Bracing for impact

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/08/2019 (2288 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As most of us are well aware, June 30 was International Asteroid Day — a day that creeps up and has us all in a mad scramble trying to prepare.Well, not really.

Asteroid Day has only been around since 2014; it marks the anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid impact in 1908 that flattened a huge swath of land in Siberia. Following another incident — one in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, where in February 2013 an asteroid lit up the sky — the international stargazing community decided to create an annual conference to assess the threat of asteroids.

The asteroid in the Chelyabinsk incident, by the way, broke up in Earth’s dense atmosphere. It was only about 20 metres wide and had the equivalent energy of 33 Hiroshima atomic bombs, shattering windows and injuring hundreds of people. Can you imagine what would happen if it had hit the surface of the Earth?

This is the question Gordon Dillow, journalist, columnist and war correspondent (who also served in the U.S. military), explores in Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth. Dillow, a self-declared recent amateur enthusiast of the celestial bodies, sets out to convince us all that “the asteroid threat is real… it is science fact, not fiction. And it needs to be taken seriously.”

Don’t believe Dillow? Even Brian May, guitarist of the band Queen and British astrophysicist, has declared: “The more we learn about asteroid impacts, the clearer it becomes the human race has been living on borrowed time.”

In a John Wayne-esque, mid-20th-century drawl, Dillow impresses upon the reader, through humour, respect for the scientific community and his own passion, that it’s not a question of if an asteroid will collide with the Earth, but when. We know this intuitively by looking up at the moon, our pock-filled neighbour that has been brutalized for billions of years, and because we have evidence that it has happened to Earth on several occasions. Dillow uses the analogy of two blind bees in New Orleans’ Superdome buzzing around: they may not collide tomorrow, but eventually they will.

Minor impacts happen all the time; little bits of space rock zoom into our atmosphere and burn up quickly. These are shooting stars in common parlance, and many a fleeting childhood wish is attached to them.

But what Dillow is deeply concerned about — as are the larger scientific community, NASA and the U.S. government — is the possibility of an asteroid similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, or the one that smacked down in Arizona 50,000 years ago, crashing into Earth.

The former destroyed virtually all life on Earth, and the latter levelled huge swaths of land and created a massive crater with the force of 20 million tons of TNT. (Psst… summer road trip idea.)

Governments have rallied to grapple with the potential life-ending crisis since we witnessed an asteroid collide with Jupiter in 1994, thanks to the work of Gene Shoemaker and the dedicated asteroid hunters worldwide, whose quest it is to track near-Earth objects (or NEOs).

Dillow’s admiration of these space watchers seeps through the pages; he sees them as the defenders of Earth, seeking out the infinite chunks of rock and ice that have yet to be accounted for in the main asteroid belt, as well as the Kuiper belt in the outer solar system. Finding these chunks isn’t easy; they reflect the sun poorly, making it a challenge to identify them in the heavens.

For Dillow, preparing for the inevitable is paramount; the time for giggling at the prospects is over. According to him, “It’s not a question of if. It’s only a question of when. And at this point, we can only hope that the world will be ready.”

Fire in the Sky is a brilliant book for the curious learner to develop a passion for space, the cosmos, the universe and the finiteness of the human experience on Earth.

Matt Henderson is assistant superintendent of the Seven Oaks School Division.