With all due respect to the “green” movements that are consuming our country and providing a valuable and honorable duty in getting people and companies to clean up our act, but what good will it all be if we cannot stop space rocks from entering our atmosphere? Gregg Easterbrook’s eye-opening article can be found here and before you can say, “What is this Armageddon-like stuff anyway?” just consider this:
“Breakthrough ideas have a way of seeming obvious in retrospect, and about a decade ago, a Columbia University geophysicist named Dallas Abbott had a breakthrough idea. She had been pondering the craters left by comets and asteroids that smashed into Earth. Geologists had counted them and concluded that space strikes are rare events and had occurred mainly during the era of primordial mists. But, Abbott realized, this deduction was based on the number of craters found on land—and because 70 percent of Earth’s surface is water, wouldn’t most space objects hit the sea? So she began searching for underwater craters caused by impacts rather than by other forces, such as volcanoes. What she has found is spine-chilling: evidence that several enormous asteroids or comets have slammed into our planet quite recently, in geologic terms. If Abbott is right, then you may be here today, reading this magazine, only because by sheer chance those objects struck the ocean rather than land. ”
You could glean from this a certain sci-fi or scare tactic aesthetic by the tone of the last sentence, and you would be forgiven for thinking that. The article is actually very well-written and something that people should probably give more thought to, especially considering that prevention of space rock damage is plausible.