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| (White) Asteroid Belt (Public Domain) |
Gone are the days when the nudging of invasive objects was primarily accomplished with elbows.
These days, the stakes are far higher than those of a school-bus dispute.
These days, the objects are asteroids and the nudges are nuclear.
Ed Mazza of The
Huffington Post reports that NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration are working “on a planetary defense plan to deflect a potential doomsday asteroid so it doesn’t strike Earth.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson of New York’s Hayden Planetarium warns that there are “swarms” of these rocky threats “orbiting between Mars and Jupiter” (a little too close for comfort, apparently).
Why it wasn’t that long ago that Russia was greeted with a “500-kiloton airburst” from the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor. A century before that, Siberia had been hit by an asteroid “that wiped out some 800 square miles of forest.”
Then there’s the saga of David and Goliath. Many recall that little David destroyed huge Goliath with just one spot-on “asteroid.”
So why just “gently nudge the asteroid out of harm’s way” rather than blow it to smithereens? The law of karma seems to apply here: What goes around might very well come back around. And chunks of exploded asteroids can exact quite a bit of revenge on nuke-happy Earthlings…
Resources
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/nasa-nuke-asteroid-plan_n_7651004.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
Copyright July 4, 2015 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved
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