Just a few days ago, many of us marked the 100th anniversary of the ‘Tunguska event’, an exploding comet or asteroid which caused massive destruction in Siberia.
In a recent article on SpaceRef.com, there now appears to be some additional proof to the theory that another asteroid hit (or exploded just above) the earth (in Canada) 12,900 years ago and may have caused, among other things, the extinction of an early human habitation of North America, the Clovis civilization.
Ken Tankersly, the scientist who lead the research team (and who, ironically enough, had started this research to disprove this theory) was quoted as saying; “The ultimate importance of this kind of work is showing that we can’t control everything,” he says. “Our planet has been hit by asteroids many times throughout its history, and when that happens, it does produce climate change.”
Yeah, and population extinctions, too. But cosmic collisions of this sort are something we CAN control, if only we show the forward-looking viewpoint necessary to adequately fund a) a ‘SpaceWatch’ (an elegant term coined by, I believe, the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke) to find these cosmic killers and b) a Space Elevator with which to be able to rapidly launch whatever we may need to divert/destroy them.
This is an excellent article and also mentions a number of upcoming TV shows about asteroids which appear worth watching.
Update – another article on SpaceRef.com reports on the winners of the “Move an Asteroid” 2008 competition.
On Sunday, July 6th, Dr.’s Bryan Laubscher and Martin Lades will be joint guests on Dr. David Livingston’s The Space Show. From the show notes:
In the 
This is cool. The Discovery Channel has put together a select 
A couple of months ago, we heard the “Mobile Home Astrophysicist’s” 
At KansasCity.com, author Jonathan Bender wrote an 
Brian Turner of the 
I enjoyed attending this year’s 
I wondered why my traffic had spiked in the last couple of days – a 
If you visit the 
On the Queen’s Space Engineering Team 
If you go to the 
I ran across an interesting 
Here’s mine: There are eleven, individually-wrapped slices of Kraft American cheese in one inch. We want them individually wrapped, of course, for sanitary purposes and to make repairs to the “Cheesevator” easier. A kilometer contains 39,370.0787 inches (have to be exact, of course). One hundred thousand kilometers, then, would contain 3,937,007,870 inches. At 11 slices to the inch, this means that a Cheesevator would contain 43,307,086,570 slices of individually wrapped Kraft American cheese. Each slice of this cheese contains 70 calories and 5 grams of fat giving us a grand total of over three trillion calories (3,031,496,059,900 to be exact) and over two hundred billion grams of fat (216,535,432,850 grams to be exact).
THE original 
Dr. Brad Edwards, the ‘father’ of the modern-day conception of the Space Elevator, has written a very interesting article in the latest issue of the TRUMPF newsletter (available 
As has been 
We have a new competitor into this year’s Climber/Power-Beaming event, 
“As for discussing space travel, Dr. Kaku pointed out the problem of the high cost of space access. He was asked if we needed breakthrough advanced propulsion to give us low cost space access, could we do it through the space elevator which he talks about in his book, or could space tourism or space solar power be an economic driver leading to a significantly higher launch rate which would enable commercially attractive launch prices.”