Apophis Asteroid
“Priorities people.” How many times have we all heard that? I have heard it more often than I can count from more people than I care to remember. We are so concerned about the petty squabbles here on Earth, that we do not pay enough attention to the dangers that lurk above.
What are these dangers you ask? Debris. Rocks. Chunks of ice. Remnants of the formation of our solar system. There are millions of them, whether they’re in the asteroid belt just beyond Mars, or in the Oort Cloud that lies millions of miles beyond Pluto. Science fiction you ask? I may be a science fiction author, but what I am bringing up is hardly fiction.
In June of 2004, an asteroid was discovered by Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Observatory. At first, it wasn’t that big of a deal. There are millions of them, this was just another one and not even close to the largest. This one was different though. Tracking its movements, the powers that be are now almost a hundred percent sure that the 820 foot rock is going to come close to Earth, closer than our own satellites orbit. The calculated date for the arrival is April 13, 2029, a date that is within most of our lifetimes. Even better, if it hits a spot called a “gravitational keyhole”, Earth’s gravity will change its orbit so that when it cycles around 7 years later (that’s 7 years to the day), there is a chance that it will slam into our planet. The rock’s name is 99942 Apophis, named after the Egyptian Serpent of Chaos.
The damage an 820 foot rock would do is staggering. It would wipe out a continent or create a tsunami the likes of which none of us have ever witnessed. It would hit with more power than anything in the United States arsenal. Though not a “global killer” as in the movie Armageddon, the destruction and devastation would still be vast. This isn’t something prophesied by an ancient people on stone tablets, this is something that we have seen and have tracked and it’s an issue that is going to arise within the next 30 years.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, we’re fighting in wars over fossil fuels when we have the technology to harness energy in other, cleaner ways. We battle over which religion is right, to the point of bloodshed. We spend billions of dollars bailing out big businesses that were in trouble because of poor management and greedy executives. I don’t know about you, but to me, these issues seem foolish when we have the possibility of a giant rock ripping apart a good chunk of the surface of our planet. And this is the one we know about.
The good news is that we have the technology to avert a disaster such as this. The question is, do we have the resolve to do what needs to be done and put the resources necessary into it. I’m not just talking about Apophis. We need to turn our eyes to the sky, together, as one world. There was a global catastrophe before, when an asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula and exterminated the majority of the life species on this planet 65 million years ago. It is inevitable that an impact will happen again. Maybe the chances are small that it will happen in the next 10, 100, even 1000 years, but can we afford the price of doing nothing but fighting with each other? Our solar system, as well as the entire universe, is so vast that we are barely even a blip on the screen. Much greater danger lies beyond our own atmosphere than beyond our borders.
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