{"id":1039,"date":"2008-07-05T10:36:14","date_gmt":"2008-07-05T15:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1039"},"modified":"2008-07-05T10:50:27","modified_gmt":"2008-07-05T15:50:27","slug":"we-cant-control-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1039","title":{"rendered":"“We can’t control everything…”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just a few days ago, many of us marked<\/a> the 100th anniversary of the ‘Tunguska event’, an exploding comet or asteroid which\u00a0caused massive destruction in Siberia.<\/p>\n

In a recent article<\/a>\u00a0on SpaceRef.com, there now appears to be some\u00a0additional proof to the\u00a0theory 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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Yeah, and population extinctions, too.\u00a0 But cosmic collisions of this sort\u00a0are 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\u00a0and b) a Space Elevator with which to be able to rapidly launch whatever we may need to divert\/destroy them.<\/p>\n

This is an excellent article and also mentions a number of upcoming TV shows about asteroids which appear worth watching.<\/p>\n

Update – another article<\/a> on SpaceRef.com reports on the winners of the “Move an Asteroid” 2008 competition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just a few days ago, many of us marked the 100th anniversary of the ‘Tunguska event’, an exploding comet or asteroid which\u00a0caused massive destruction in Siberia. In a recent article\u00a0on SpaceRef.com, there now appears to be some\u00a0additional proof to the\u00a0theory that another asteroid hit (or exploded just above) the earth (in Canada) 12,900 years ago […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}