Save the Planet!! & (Dawkins note)

With all this talk about the planet, that's earth, being in danger, from global warming that is, I thought it's time to turn our attention to a genuine threat. Not that a meteorite impact will destroy the planet - the chunk of rock isn't likely to disintegrate into small asteroids, no - but it could make life here well nigh impossible as we know it for some time. Think about those dinosaurs, or the great Permian-Triassic event of the past.

Well, this crater out in Arizona was formed about 50,000 years ago by a meteorite that found its way to ground. I bet the dust kicked up by this baby cooled the planet a bit for some time. And this one was rather small!

Then there is this mysterious event from 1908 in Siberia, the Tunguska Event. This was a near-miss of a comet on a collision course with the earth. The "air burst" caused by its contact with the outer atmosphere as it just skimmed our eco-region was equivalent to about 20 megatons of TNT, pretty big blast.

So, in the last 50,000 years we have two known events of significant magnitude: that gives odds of an event each year of 1 in 25,000, right? Pretty long odds, and the odds for a direct hit are longer since the Siberian knock out was a close call. But on the other hand, if we are not betting on global extinction, just global havoc and continental disaster, the sort of thing a good meteorite hit on any continent other than Antarctica or central Australia might cause, the odds get better. Let's say they are 1:15,000 for any year. Well, the EPA gets upset about public health risks in the range of 1:1,000,000, i.e., toxic effects that could be fatal for one in one million people. We're talking about events that might happen in a year here, like the 100 year storm, but still, seems pretty scary to me.

Shouldn't we be setting up international agencies to scan the skies, develop alert networks, and do some advance planning for the demolition rocketry necessary should we be called on to try and nudge a projectile to a different path...like those movies, right? I'm more worried about that than a potenital sea level rise of two feet over the next one or two hundred years.


And on a Different Note:

Today, in the NYTimes, there was an article about how Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, is "raising hackles" in strange places, i.e., among people who basically agree with him. This excerpt is illustrative:

“The most disappointing feature of ‘The God Delusion,’ ” Mr. Orr wrote, “is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology” and “no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions.”

I agree with much in this article - I think Dawkins can seem a bit shrill and sort of a crank, though I don't think he is, but I cannot see why he bothered to write the book. On the other hand, fundamentally the fact is that if you are committed to a rational and scientific view of the world, there is no reason to believe in God. It's just totally unecessary and lacking in any explanatory value. And it's not required if you want to be ethical, humane, sensitive, loving, and all those other good things that have little to do with the scientific method. Any critic of Dawkins' book should keep this in mind.