The Observer view: when an asteroid is hurtling to Earth, do you head for the pub or the church?
Following the possible trajectory of 2024 YR4 – AKA the scariest asteroid ever detected – is not for the nervous of disposition. Is it going to hit us, or not? Every day, a different answer.
Last Tuesday, Nasa calculated it had a 3.1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032, and so some people set to worrying. Twenty-four hours later, however, the agency provided an update. New observations, made since the passing of the full moon, show it now has a 1.5% chance of impact. Time to exhale? Not necessarily.
The asteroid is estimated to be 40-90 metres wide, about the same size as a large building. If it does hit, and doesn't splash down into the sea, it could decimate a city. Scientists calculate that its impact could be similar to that of the Tunguska asteroid, which flattened an area more than double the size of New York in Siberian forest in 1908. If it landed in central London, windows 20 miles away in Slough would be broken – an event that would exceed the wildest dreams even of John Betjeman, who once wrote a rather mean poem about the town.
How to feel about this lump of rock hurtling towards us at 38,000mph? To pinch from The Simpsons Movie, is it the pub or the church for you? (Faced with catastrophe, the patrons of Moe's Tavern run from bar to church, while the congregation of the latter sprints in the opposite direction, desperate for a stiff drink.) Most of us will keep calm and carry on, whatever the percentages. Seven years is a long time: you'll be a size 10 by then – that, or getting divorced.
The key thing about Armageddon is that it's always in the future, as the followers of myriad cults have found to their cost down the years. Let us trust the experts – remember them? – to sort it out. A few years ago, Nasa significantly changed the orbit of an asteroid. The Dart spacecraft slammed into a 150-metre asteroid moon at speed, changing its orbital period by more than 30 minutes – a result that could be replicated, if planning began now.
A few, should the predictions get worse, may go full survivalist, filling their bunkers with tinned carrots. But their number will be small. The news cycle is hardly relaxing at the moment, the old order as frangible as digestive biscuits. A person has the capacity for only so much terror, and now may not be the time to start worrying what will happen to Birmingham if YR4 turns out to be West Midlands-bound.
The year 1998 came with its share of global calamities, but the notion of a world war seemed far away compared with today, which may be one reason why two big films about asteroids then played to packed cinemas.
In Deep Impact, a comet on a collision course with Earth hits, causing a tsunami that destroys the US east coast, a mission by the Messiah spacecraft having failed to alter its path. In Armageddon, a rogue asteroid is broken into fragments by a nuclear bomb that is somehow inserted into it by, among others, an oil driller played by Bruce Willis – though it's not all good news: Shanghai is obliterated by another meteor strike along the way. No prizes for guessing which film did better at the box office.
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