In 1991, an impossible to track asteroid passed 106,000 miles from the Earth, "the cosmic equivalent of a bullet passing through your collar." Such near misses happen weekly according to astronomers. Shouldn't we be more concerned about those threats than global warming? Why is one supposed problem so vastly over-marketed by the media and the other one ignored? My guess is that some scientist's funding comes into play somewhere.Let's see. If an asteroid passes within 106,000 miles every week, then you would expect to get hit by one of those asteroids every 13 and a half years. [Because (106000 miles/4000 miles)^2 * (1 week) = 702 weeks.] That's probably about right, because the 1991 asteroid was only five to ten meters in diameter. If it had hit the Earth, that asteroid would have detonated and burned up in the upper atmosphere, unless it was made of iron (3% chance) in which case a couple of hundred fragments might have hit the ground. I figure if you bombarded the Earth with 10-meter iron asteroids, with each asteroid creating two hundred one-meter-wide craters, then on average you would kill about one person with every 430 asteroids. [Because (4*pi*(4000*8/5*1000)^2 area of earth)/(6 * 10^9 population of earth)/200 = 430.] In any case, it's not clear to me that the media has downplayed the threat of meteor collision. There are, of course, astronomers who would like more funding to look for near-Earth objects, nuclear weapon designers who would like funding to study blowing them up, et cetera. You might be interested in this RAND document on the subject. |