Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Tired-Of-Living Tues.

Sick & tired of this "existence" deal, as THERE IS NO FUCKING POINT TO ANY OF IT. It may be that I sense impending doom anyway, as most species on this already-ruined planet are overdue for extinction.
“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” said Dr Joseph Nuth, a researcher with Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Nuth noted that large and potentially dangerous asteroids and comets are extremely rare, compared to the small objects that occasionally explode in Earth’s sky or strike its surface. “But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”

Comets follow distant paths from Earth but sometimes get knocked into the neighborhood. Nuth said that the Earth had “a close encounter” in 1996, when an aberrant comet flew into Jupiter, and then again in 2014, when a comet passed “within cosmic spitting distance of Mars”. That second comet was only discovered 22 months before its brush with a planet: not nearly enough time to launch a deflection mission, had it been on a course for Earth.
Sweet relief on its way!
Per The Guardian, "Photograph: Mopic /Alamy/Alamy"

3 comments:

Weird Dave said...

Sorry, keep dreaming.

The chance of a super-volcano is greater than a rouge comet and they still don't happen often enough.

Besides, the best chance is still that old standby, nuclear apocalypse (even better now that Trump is nuclear armed).

Weird Dave said...

Although, we may get lucky...

M. Bouffant said...

Existential Editor:
Pretty sure Yellowstone is overdue as well. Too bad geological & cosmic ages are beyond us.