What is the biggest threat facing America in 2010 (or really, in any given year) ?
Is it the "liberals" who come out on May 1 to celebrate the downtrodden worker (or Hispanic immigrant)? No, and it's not a nuclear confrontation with Korea or Iran, nor is it Al Qaeda or Islamic (or Christian militia) extremism. nor even the tea-baggers or a resurgent Dick Cheney. However - it is a decidedly "alien" threat, but not of the UFO-ilk. In Police jargon: "There's a little black spot on the Sun (make that Jupiter) today. . ." And it is a regular occurrence, apparently. Less than a year ago an amateur astronomer picked up images of an massive Asteroid impact on Jupiter. It was reminiscent of the more famous Shoemaker Levy impact 15 years earlier. http://media.photobucket.com/image/wesley%20jupiter%20asteroid/3488/Jupiter2 3rdJuly2009withfourdayol-1.jpg Either impact - if it had happened on earth instead of our neighbor - would have wiped out most advanced life and set "progress" (towards what?) back a few million years, even if a few human holdouts managed to survive in caves somewhere. http://news.discovery.com/space/new-and-old-observations-bolster-asteroid-wo rries.html Given the number of previous candidate "black spots" on Jupiter, as hinted in the article above - this kind of thing could be happening as often as yearly (earth-year) on that planet. How does that relate to the probability here? Forget your 65 million year scenario. We have probably been rather lucky since that one. In terms of comparative mass, Jupiter is ~318 time more massive. If there was relative proportionality, which there isn't due to our Sun shielding out most of the debris, then we would be in deep trouble. Tunguska could be more indicative of a time frame for a smaller impact, and it is pretty clear that there was a very large event about 12,000 years ago over North America. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-a-comet-hit-earth-12900 -years-ago . which, BTW, could have triggered a number of events still retained in human memes, such as the Noah's Ark meme, mentioned recently here. It would probably be a wise thing, to everyone but the tea-baggers, to put a few of those "stimulus dollars" into further research on this particular alien problem, given the downside risk and the real possibility of being able to do something about it - like steer these thing away from us, using our nuclear arsenal . don't you think? SIDE NOTE: the irony of the "cave survivors" of a large asteroid impact, should it occur soon - is that these few inheritors of human continuity might well be the group of extremists which is hiding Osama Bin Laden . Irony of ironies. Or, in the spirit of Ark-mythology, who would there be to contradict the new-dogma of 2121 - that this particular Survivor! scenario always the plan of Allah? Something to think about, post-May-day . .mayday, mayday, mayday! Jones
