Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody by Robert Brockway Page B

of dramatic flair that squashing a trillion bugs just does not possess.) Because we associate ELEs with such disasters in the long-distant past, the tendency is to think that catastrophic asteroid strikes are strictly relegated to ancient history when, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Meteors hit the Earth like your dad hits the bottle every time you disappoint him, which is to say very often, and very, very hard.
    For example, see March 22, 2008, when a one-thousand-foot diameter asteroid passed within four hundred thousand miles of Earth—missing us by only six hours. To us, numbers like four hundred thousand seem vast, but in terms of space travel that’s basically like being in Earth’s pocket, and while missing something by six hours may seem like a lot to you, in astronomical terms that’s practically already inside of you: easing just the tip of its disaster member in to see how you like it before the full-fledged catastrophic shafting begins.
    But even if it hadn’t missed us, Earth’s atmosphere typically protects us from a good deal of the debris that space is constantly trying to murder everybody with, and when a meteor enters the atmosphere it usually results in little more than a pleasant shooting star. Wishes are made, boys become real, and everybody learns a little lesson about love, right? Well, those dramatic shooting stars typically come from objects no bigger than a grain of sand, and if a grain of sand can light up the night sky—while simultaneously giving life to the hopes and dreams of optimistic children throughout the world—you can probably imagine what might happen when something a thousand feet across comes barreling through the atmosphere. (Hint: It ain’t granting wishes. Unless you’re wishing for a painful and fiery death.)
The Best Wish to Make upon a Falling Star
“I wish that was not a meteor about to kill everybody I love.”
    If that asteroid does enter Earth’s atmosphere, a variety of things can go down, depending on its specific construction. The heavier bodies, like iron-laden rocks, are the ones most likely to actually impact the planet. That impact would throw up insane amounts of debris, release levels of destruction akin to several nuclear bombs, and leave a permanent terrain-changing impact crater for thousands of years. The more loosely constructed dust and ice asteroids, however, can’t always take the increased pressure from Earth’s atmosphere, and usually explode before impacting. That kind of sounds like the preferred scenario between the two: If it doesn’t hit, that’s like we’re getting off light, right? Not really. An object detonating in the air can actually do quite a bit more damage than a physical impact. The asteroid that missed us by a blink of an eye, for example, was a loosely constructed object; if it had entered our atmosphere, it would have detonated with a strength estimated at seven to eight hundred megatons. That’s about fifteen times the strength of the largest nuclear blast ever recorded! With that in mind, it’s probably safe to say that if a medium- to large-sized asteroid ever does make it through the atmosphere, we’re all pretty well fucked, because our best-case scenario in that situation is for the meteor to hit us so hard that it changes the very Earth itself. It gets a little hard to be optimistic when that kind of destruction is the most you can hope for. But if you think you can still see a bright side in all of this, be careful; it could just be a blinding flash from the largest explosion in history.
    Unfortunately, if an asteroid is on a direct collision course with Earth, that very fact makes it less likely we’ll be able to see it until it’s far too late. Typically, we track asteroids by virtue of their movement parallel to us. But when they’re coming right for us, we can’t see them moving. They just look like beautiful, harmless specks of light. But even more worrisome are the asteroids