Avoiding an interstellar incident

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2018 (3019 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I am extremely pleased to announce that I am currently still alive.

At least I’m pretty sure I am.

Technically speaking, it’s hard to be sure because, thanks to insanely early deadlines caused by the holiday weekend, I am writing these words on Thursday afternoon.

That means it is entirely possible that by the time you are reading this column I will have been squashed into something resembling a human pancake by a plummeting piece of Tiangong-1, China’s first space station.

Unless you have been hiding in a cave — and that is probably a pretty good place to be at the moment — you will know the bus-sized, 9.4-ton orbital laboratory was expected to make a fiery, uncontrolled plunge through our upper atmosphere on Easter Sunday, give or take a day and a half.

Which means, scientifically speaking, it is possible the experimental space station could still land on top of someone’s head today, so I would strongly urge everyone to (1) perspire heavily and wring their hands; and (2) wear a helmet if you decide to venture outdoors.

Fortunately, experts say there is nothing to fear from the uncontrolled crash of the Chinese orbiter, which is expected to scatter flaming debris along a path about 2,000 kilometres long and 70 kilometres wide.

“The odds of being hit are very small,” Marco Langbroek, a consultant with the Space Security Center of the Royal Dutch Air Force and Leiden Observatory, told the website Space.com.

Q: How do we know when it’s time to start worrying?

A: You should start worrying as soon as some expert tells you there is nothing to worry about.

Would you like to know what really worries me, other than the prospect of being fatally beaned by an errant chunk of Chinese metal falling from the stars?

I will tell you. What really worries me is that I would not see it coming, unless, of course, I was wandering around staring up at the sky trying to have my photo taken by some random spy satellite, in which case, I would see it coming.

Imagine how terrible it would be if you were out jogging in blissful ignorance while listening to music on your headphones when the space station landed on your head.

I do not know about you, but I would not want to shuffle off this mortal coil while I was listening to some (bad word) awful song, such as Don’t Worry, Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin or Achy Breaky Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus.

If you think I am exaggerating the risk of dying with a terrible tune ringing in your ears — possibly 1976’s Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band — you should know that years ago I read about some hapless jogger in California who died on the beach when a helicopter crashed on top of him.

He was apparently listening to his headphones and I have always wondered what song was playing when, um, the lights went out, so to speak.

While we are on the topic, I should also say that I remain pleased that I was not crushed to death in 1979 when the first American space station, the nine-story, 100-ton Skylab, famously fell to Earth, disintegrating into a celestial shower of flaming metal that spread debris in the remote Australian town of Esperance.

I remember some of the cool Skylab parties back in the day, but what I didn’t know is that the town of Esperance issued a $400 fine to the United States for littering, a penalty that was finally paid in 2009 by a bemused California radio station.

I sincerely wish a chunk of Skylab had fallen on my house in Vancouver, because the San Francisco Examiner newspaper had offered a $10,000 reward to the first person to deliver a piece of Skylab debris to its offices within 72 hours of the crash.

“It didn’t count on news of the bounty travelling all the way to Australia,” History.com recalls. “There, 17-year-old Stan Thornton of tiny Esperance awoke to the commotion when Skylab broke apart in the atmosphere and pelted his house with space station fragments. Thinking quickly, he grabbed a few charred bits of material from his yard, hopped on a plane without so much as a passport or suitcase and made it to the Examiner’s office before the deadline. The newspaper good-naturedly paid out the award.”

Out of journalistic fairness, I should stress it would be wrong to give the impression that getting hit by a chunk of falling space station is our only concern.

No, it is important to remember that we could also be squashed flatter than a (bad word) grape by a wayward asteroid or comet.

So, there you are, lying on the beach, when suddenly and without warning, a huge space rock comes careening towards you. Sure, you’d be lying on your back, so you’d probably see it coming, but it would sound like this: “Hey, isn’t that a … SPLAT!!!”

Think I’m kidding? Well, Mr. Pocket Protector Scientist Guy, in 2017, the Earth was almost smacked upside the head by an asteroid the size of a large whale, and (excuse me while I activate the caps lock feature on my keyboard) NO ONE SAW IT COMING!

According to Newshub.com, Asteroid 2017 VLD whizzed by between here and the moon and it could have struck with the power of up to 220 kilotons of TNT, or about 15 times stronger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

“NASA astronomers only spotted the asteroid on Nov. 10 — the day after it passed us,” Newshub.com helpfully points out.

So, forgive me if, when experts tell us not to worry, I say to hell with the experts. I’m starting to think they wouldn’t recognize an interplanetary threat even if it was dropped on their head. Speaking of which, has anyone seen my helmet?

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca