Taking Our Chances

ANYONE WHO FLIES on a commercial passenger jet liner stands a one in two million chance of being killed in a crash, give or take a corpse or two, an acceptable risk for most folks. Everyone who lives on planet Earth lives with a one in two thousand chance of being killed by an asteroid or comet. The chances of all life on Earth being eliminated by a collision with a celestial object the size of a city are one thousand times greater than the odds of an airplane falling from the sky and crashing to Earth. We go to great lengths to ensure safe air travel, and the results are evident. We do little or nothing to protect the planet from mid space collision. The space through which the Earth moves at thousands of miles per second is littered with objects large enough to send, upon impact, to send up a suffocating cloud of dust for a long enough period of time to suffocate all life. It has happened before, at least once, to the detriment of dinosaurs. The Earth's atmosphere is a paper thin layer of gases, like a layer of paint on a basketball. Even as we speak humanity is committing suicide by tampering with this fragile layer of life, without relent. Only quite recently has any systematic program been organized to locate and monitor potentially lethal near Earth objects. They are extremely numerous, and, by cosmic standards, nearby. What better way to unite humanity in a common purpose than to take arms against a sea of troubles, by organizing an intensive international effort to locate, monitor, and, when necessary, deflect by computers, rockets, and lasers anything which dares approach too closely? To live with a constant one in two thousand threat of planetary destruction is unacceptable, if avoidable, and it is avoidable. Whoever and wherever you are, your chances of bein raped, robbed, murdered or mutilated are far less than that of being obliterated by a meteorite. We have work to do.