Asteroids

Except for the last three words ‘Pass the Salt’ the following extracts are entirely from the amazing book, ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ by the brilliant Bill Bryson.

‘Suppose that there was a button you could push and you could light up all the Earth-crossing asteroids larger than 10 metres across, there would be over a hundred million of these objects in the sky.’ In short, you would see not a couple of thousand twinkling stars, but millions upon millions upon millions of nearer, randomly moving objects – ‘all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth. It would be deeply unnerving.’

Well, be unnerved, because it is there. We just can’t see it.

Although it’s only a guess based on the cratering rates on the moon, some two thousand asteroids big enough to imperil civilized existence regularly cross our orbit. A meteor the size of a house could destroy a city and the number of these relative tiddlers in Earth-crossing orbits is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions, and they are nearly impossible to track.

The first one wasn’t spotted until 1991, and that was when it had already gone by. Named 1991BA, it was noticed as it sailed past us at a distance of 170 000 kilometres – in cosmic terms the equivalent of a bullet passing through one’s sleeve without touching the arm. Two years later, another, somewhat larger asteroid missed us by 145 000 kilometres – the closest pass yet recorded and it too was not seen until it had passed and would have arrived without warning.

An object a hundred metres across couldn’t be picked up by any Earth-based  telescope until it was within just a few days of us, and that is only if a telescope happened to be trained on it. This is unlikely because the number of people in the world actively searching for asteroids is not much more than the staff of a typical McDonalds restaurant. The first time an unnoticed asteroid would become visible to the naked eye would be when it warmed up when hitting the atmosphere, just about a second before it hit the Earth. You’re talking about something moving many times faster than the fastest bullet.

Here’s a plausible scenario of what it may/will be like if we have an impact of a big asteroid.
a)  An asteroid travelling at cosmic speeds entering the Earth’s atmosphere would compress the air causing it to rise to some 60 000 Kelvin or ten times the surface temperature of the sun. At this instant of arrival, everything in the meteor’s path – people, houses, factories cars would crinkle like cellophane in a flame.

b) On impact, the meteorite would vaporize instantly and the blast would blow out 1 000 cubic kilometres of rock, earth and superheated gases. Every living thing that hadn’t been killed by the heat with a range of 250 kilometres would now be killed by the blast.

c) The initial shock wave would travel outwards at the speed of light sweeping everything before it. Within minutes in a surrounding area the size of Northern Europe every standing thing would be flattened or on fire. People up to 1 500 kilometres away would be knocked off their feet and showered with a blizzard of projectiles.

d) The associated damage would be brisk and global. The impact would set off a chain of devastating earthquakes, volcanoes, tsanumis. Within an hour, a cloud of darkness would cover the Earth, burning rock pelting down everywhere setting much of the planet ablaze.

e) It has been estimated that at least one and a half billion people would die by the end of the first day.

And in all likelihood, remember, this would come without warning, out of a clear sky.

– Pass the salt!

Asteroids

January 12, 2014

The Anastasia Question

The Anastasia question is a concept I have been thinking about for many years.
Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Russian Tsar, you’ll remember, was executed with her family by the Bolshevik secret police in 1918. Persistent speculation arose, after her death, as to whether she might have survived leading to several women falsely claiming to be Anastasia, of whom Anna Anderson is the best known. Conclusive proof finally confirmed that she was not Anastasia when DNA testing in 1994 on available pieces of Anderson’s tissue and hair showed no relation to the DNA of the imperial family.

This is my question, it’s my game if you like!
What is the one question or fact about yourself that would convince the most incredulous scrutineers that you are in fact who you claim to be. Now you wouldn’t believe how stringent my rules are for this profound secret. In my testing of this ‘Rosebud’ I think of myself as a secret agent being trained over many months to penetrate the network of a fiendishly suspicious and sceptical enemy. Their questioning of who I am is based on them holding every piece of detail of my life and knowing that professional fraudsters can be trained to be completely convincing replicates. This question easily transcends DNA testing. It is absolute. There was and never can be any seepage of this fact between you and the questioner. The Anastasia game of mental solitaire is actually the search for the fact, the question never gets asked! In short, it is what question is the very key to your soul?

Let me give you an example of a near miss for me, lest you think well that’s easily done – just think of something that happened in your childhood.

We have in our kitchen a ramshackle excuse for a crockery set that we everyday try to home on a three-tier small wall shelf system. The cereal bowls, dinner and side plates are all different sizes and colours. The sort of miscellaneous collection you get when you break a piece or two from a set, renew but don’t throw away the existing members. It’s difficult to place each member onto the shelves because there are certain O.C.D. rules to observe. You can’t, for instance,  put a bigger plate onto a smaller one or have our favourite mugs, the thin rimmed ones, on the top shelf where you would have to momentarily exert wasteful energy and go on ‘tippy-toes’ to retrieve! Anyway, it works for us and like doing a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, I enjoy the swapping and repositioning of the pieces to get them so they fit. The singularly important point in this ‘invisible’ mundane action that nobody else would discern, let alone record, is that the same word always pops into my thoughts when I am in the process of doing it and that is ‘Cravat’. This is interesting solely for me in that there is only one person, (I think!) in the whole universe who would know what the significance of me saying that word in that situation and that is my brother Richard even though we have not uttered this word together for what must be nearly 50 years.

Does this qualify for an Anastasia question? Well since the advent of the internet which makes it clear to us all how individual how unique we are so not, no not necessarily. Thinking in computer-speak, the password security strength of Cravat is compromised by the assumption that nobody else remembers playing Cravat, a card game for two players in which you strive to re-position cards in an array in the minimum number of moves, to which your opponent challenges you with a cry of ‘Cravat’ if he sees a way of doing it with fewer.
– It’s good mind but nowhere near 100% impervious and spy proof.

Happy searching!!

The Anastasia Question

All is Fair in Love and War

Wars are nearly always for economic reasons and have always provided opportunities before, during and after conflict for commerce, the most recent war in Iraq being no exception.

Not only is it widely recognised that the case for military action against Iraq was based on a pack of lies but also that British and American companies supplied Saddam Hussein arms and gas in the first place.
The 1990 – 2003 financial and trade embargo applied against Iraq by the U.N. had huge humanitarian impacts on the country. What may come as a surprise to some people is that the biggest sanctions busters were in fact American companies allegedly with the full knowledge of their government.
During the actual war itself, billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth went missing. Oil was shipped out of the country and sold. Federal contracts to supply the military were huge, the biggest $39.5bn being awarded to Halliburton, which was formerly run by Dick Cheney, vice-president to George W. Bush. In fact, the US hired more private companies in Iraq than in any previous war, and at times there were more contractors than military personnel on the ground.

The following quote from a former US Marine general shows that in the modern era it has always been so:

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Cuba and Haiti a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American Republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.” (General Smedley Butler, from a speech in 1933.)

Mrs Walker wants to go to Venice this half-term, she says she wants to visit the islands. She needs someone to read her guide book from cover to cover to and seeing all of you are looking at your shoes and making yourselves purposely busy, it looks like it’s down to me again. I don’t read much at all but Mrs Walker does voraciously and I sleep with her. As a consequence of our planned sojourn, she is currently reading about the history of Venice during the Crusades.

Venice has always depended entirely on trade for its survival for obvious reasons. It enjoys a prime stategic position and has had a reputation for being ‘one-eyed’ in its dealing with the empires throughout history. One particular period that illustrates this well is at the end of the 1100s when it was being badly hurt by the embargo brought by the papal ban on trading with the islamic world after the capture of Jerusalem in the 12th century by Saladin. The merchants of Pisa and Genoa had continued to trade so Venice pleaded to Rome for the ban to be lifted to which Pope Innocent gave carefully worded concessions which excluded transaction in any war materials. ‘[We] prohibit you, under strict threat of anathema, to supply the Saracens by selling, giving or bartering, iron, hemp, sharp implements, inflammable materials, arms, galleys, sailing ships, or timbers’

So with trade continuing with the ‘enemy’, Venice also won the tender to supply the Christian military, being the ideal staging port for the 4th Crusade. They built horse transports to carry 4 500 horses and 9 000 squires. 4 500 knights and 20 000 foot soldiers were embarked on the port’s ships. The thoroughness of the Venetian workmen also provided provisions for this navy, both men and horses for nine months.The bill for this was 94 000 marks and they threw in 50 armed galleys, free of charge, as long as this alliance lasted,with the condition that the Venetians receive half of all conquests that the force make by way of territory or money, land or sea.
This committed the Venetians to the largest contract in medieval history.

Now, you tell me what has changed in the last 1 000 years!

All is Fair in Love and War