Is the sky falling? In The Atlantic (June, 2008) Gregg Easterbrook says that “it’s inevitable”. At a public event in Orange County last February that I organized, Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart described the populations of potential asteroid “bullets” in space, including the Main asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt, and their threat to civilization. Some scientists like Richard Gott of Princeton have suggested that space colonization would provide a “life insurance policy” for humanity in the event of another large impactor.

Easterbrook also highlights newly discovered ocean floor craters that confirm what those of the continents suggested. Take a look at the pockmarked Moon sometime. That’s what the Earth used to look like 4 billion years ago before rain, oceans, and plate tectonics gained the upper hand and erased most of the craters due to hypervelocity asteroid and comet impacts.

However, the real question is what’s the likelihood we’ll be hit in your lifetime? Nobody knows of course, but it’s probably more than you think. The well-known 1908 Tunguska meteor, that produced an atomic bomb-like airburst over Siberia, could just as easily have leveled London or Moscow if it had hit there. We were lucky. Tunguska shows that even relatively small impactors (30 meters across) can be locally devastating, and they occur more frequently than big ones — perhaps a 10% chance per century of a locally dangerous asteroid or meteor impact.

What’s interesting is that NASA doesn’t have an asteroid/comet mitigation program, and although the U.S. Air Force seems interested, action on their part is unlikely due to international concerns. The message from Rusty in Orange County was that few people are aware of the real asteroid-impact threat. Indeed, the fact that The Atlantic chose to publish this article at all is remarkable. It suggests that The Atlantic editorial staff senses there is increased public interest in this topic, although there is no official action and little public outcry about it, yet. Although it could be a coincidence, this is the limited, but growing level of interest we would expect as public sensitivity to things cosmic increases as we ramp up to the next Maslow Window, due in only 5 -7 years.

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