I am multitasking today… I am doing laundry, doing “mud work” in the kitchen (i.e. drywall patching), validating a play list on MediaPlayer I made to make sure I like every song on it for real, eating Coco-Wheats for lunch, and watching a show called Mega Disasters: Asteroid Apocolypse.
I saw something on the show that made me stop dead on all of that and have to write this blog entry…
According to the show, you are more likely to die from an asteroid impact than a tornado or a tsunami… They have the odds booked at
1 in 20,000 Asteroid Impact
1 in 50,000 Tornado
1 in 50,000 Tsunami
Now I know we have a lot of meteorites hitting the earth but I never realized, if it is true, the odds were that skewed. Sure someone in New Jersey got to meet a four billion year old rock[1] the other day (http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-10/116806173346970.xml&coll=1) but I hear far more about tornadoes hitting people than rocks from space hitting people…
I guess it could be true but it is tough to believe in numbers just tossed up on the screen… Certainly for you folks living in Oklahoma and northern Texas I expect I would still in invest in tornado safe rooms over asteroid insurance… And if you live in Florida… Hey it is like 45 degrees in Michigan in January… You need to get your ass to higher ground or grow some gills… Global warming aka climate change is very real.
Speaking of gills, just think if we evolved into having gills again… Think of all of the real estate opportunities.
Oh to seg again… I watched a show the other day that had a bunch of rocket scientists and PhD’s said that if a really large asteroid really did hit the earth, a planet killer type size object… Those who saw it wouldn’t even have time to register what they were seeing. The thing would be violet hot (that is hotter than white or blue hot) from the velocity it had when it hit our atmosphere and hit the planet in just a like a second. Those who did witness it before it hit would be dead from the heat before it hit the ground. I am not sure if that is true either and really don’t care to find out but it sounded pretty darn cool.
joe
[1] Errrrr, if you are really religious and only believe “everything” has only existed for thousands of years, I guess the rock just looked really old for its age, not enough moisturizer or too much makeup or something. I’m sure it wasn’t _really_ 4 billion years old… I mean how could it be? 😉
