On Google's news page today, right above a story with the headline
"Sightings of Meteor 'Fireball' in S. California sky", I found this story:
Now, what was I thinking about before this nonsense intruded on my beautiful mind? Oh yes, I was meditating about Jeebus' cosmically benevolent nature and his tremendous love for us, his precious Children. Mmmmmm. Jeebus.
NASA has revealed new research on the Chelyabinsk meteorite that exploded over Russia in February, and the findings aren't good: not only does it look like the astronomic models about the number of similar-sized things reaching Earth are wrong, but also the damage they can do is much greater than expected.The article ends with this:
"Over the past few decades we've seen an impact rate about seven times greater than the current state of the telescopic surveys would indicate."
The Chelyabinsk meteorite had given new urgency to a campaign to bring more capabilities to addressing the issue of asteroid impacts ("It's a great advertisement," Johnson joked) and provided an incentive to improve our chances of spotting threats in the future. Whether governments are willing to put up the relatively small amounts of money needed to take things further is another matter however.Because really, why bother? We don't have time to concentrate on a possible global extermination event caused by asteroid impacts -- or climate change, for that matter. And there's a very good reason why we don't have time for thinking, and such-like. It's because we are busy doing the Lord's work of inserting Jeebus into our sacred American Constitution. So, for heaven's sake, enough with this asteroid piffle!
Now, what was I thinking about before this nonsense intruded on my beautiful mind? Oh yes, I was meditating about Jeebus' cosmically benevolent nature and his tremendous love for us, his precious Children. Mmmmmm. Jeebus.
