 |
TODAY Monday 20 October 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
newsroom
|
TODAY Monday 20 October 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Duck!
The first few sentences of Neil de Grasse Tyson's article in last month's Natural History made me sit a little straighter:
"The chances that your tombstone will read 'Killed by Asteroid' are about the same as for 'Killed in an Airplane Crash'... The impact record shows that by the end of 10 million years, when the sum of all airplane crashes has killed a billion people (assuming a death-by-airplane rate of 100 per year), an asteroid large enough to kill the same number of people will have hit Earth. The difference is that while airplanes are continually killing people a few at a time, our asteroid might not kill anybody for millions of years. But when it does hit, it will take out a billion people: some instantaneously and the rest in the wake of global climatic upheaval."
Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. He reports on a recently-formed consensus in planetary science: that asteroids and comets have played -- and will play -- a larger role in natural history than hitherto believed. That the extinction of the dinosaurs can be blamed on the impact from a giant space traveler is now the prevailing mainstream hypothesis, though once it had been scorned as fantastical, even anti-Darwinian. Many scientists now believe that the physical precondition for all Earth life-forms -- water -- came riding a comet four billion years ago. A substantial number of our chemical elements seem to be immigrants from Mars and the Moon.
Though Earth was peppered more during its infancy than it is now, we're still being hit all the time. A house-sized rock arrives about every day, burning up in the atmosphere. Once a month an asteroid three meters in diameter makes it through. Once a year we're hit by a six-meter asteroid. Once a century, 30 meters; once a millennium 100 meters. And, says Tyson, the current scientific guess is that once every million years we're due to get whacked by an object 2,000 meters in diameter, with an impact energy equivalent to 50 million Hiroshima explosions. 50 million A-bombs. And every 100 million years, we eat the biggest of big enchiladas, like the Chicxulub impact of 65 million years ago, which took out the giant lizards and 90% of all the other species (but leaving behind our sneaky little mammal ancestors).
Such a mega-catastrophe does damage in two ways. The immediate impact, shock-waves and fires can destroy almost everything alive in an area about as large as the United States. Species in the rest of the world would die off because of an inability to adapt quickly enough to the rapid changes in habitat that would result from the variations in climate caused by smoke and small particles rising into the atmosphere.
And so? There are a number of reactions, of course. The self-described liberal rationalists at The Economist magazine thinks that the major nuclear powers should immediately cooperate on a vastly expensive near-orbit space capability to detect and deflect incoming Armageddons. With nuclear bombs, perhaps, though even the experts aren't sure. Most everyone else just shrugs. Information overload; fatalism; God-grant-me-the-wisdom-to-know-what-I-cannot-change; whatever.
Personally, I'm susceptible to some loss of morale on the enviro politics front. Take global warming. If the climate is going to change anyway, no matter what we do, and change big-time, it's a little more difficult to throw rocks at an oil company exec who brushes off a global temperature rise as a "natural phenomenon." The guy is right, long-haul-wise, though he's the got the scientific objectivity of a mako shark. There is no such thing as "sustainability" in God's world (which is why we have God). Everything dies, sun, stars, moon. You.
I would never say so in public, but it seems to me that for many people the reason to try to retard anthrogenic sources of climate change (and other forms of extinction-making) is because we're anthros who don't want to do genesis. We can accommodate ourselves, more or less, to the natural losses incurred by feeding and sheltering our kind. It's just that -- you'll excuse the expression -- it feels "not right" somehow for humans to be affecting the weather on a permanent basis. Are we reluctant because we don't want to pass on to our descendants less than what we inherited from our ancestors? Because we place value on other forms of life? Or because we feel impious in usurping a divine function? What's "divine"? What's "permanent"?
Time for work. I explain to myself that somehow or other I do this work because: a) I need the money; and b) I've somehow come to a personal esthetic that what matters most is beauty and that beauty thrives most in places where things are preserved for as long as they can endure before dying a "natural" death. Wild places, for sure, but also buildings and "built environments." I'm for saving everything, secure in the knowledge that nothing, and no one, is saved.
TODAY ON THE SITE:
Liberty Tree faithful from all points of the compass are heading to Washington for the introduction of The Green Apples, the awards to the nation's best environmental educators co-sponsored by Liberty Tree and Second Nature. The announcement will be accompanied by a panel discussing desirable changes in 21st Century environmental policies. If you're in or near DC tomorrow -- Tuesday 21 October, 9am - 10am -- drop in on Room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.
Recent "Today" columns:
10/17: The Energy Non-Crisis
10/16: Drillbit Diplomacy
10/15: We Love You, Hiroshi Okuda
10/14: Good Deals at Showroom and Pump
10/10: Clinton Waffles!
10/09: Can Therapy Help the Songbirds?
10/08: Girls and Puberty
10/07: Japan The Genial Host
10/06: You Don't Need A Weatherman...
10/03: Cochise County, Arizona
To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.