20 kiloton message

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

2/18/2013

Daily Tribune

The recent meteor explosion over the Urals in Russia was equivalent to 20 Hiroshima bombs. It was extremely fortunate that not a single fatality was suffered in the incident, even though 1,200 were injured and treated for mainly low level injuries from shards of shattered window panes miles away from the blast. A crater six meters wide by a meteor estimated to be 7,000 tons and 15 meters in size was reported. Videos of the resulting smoke trail captured the moment the meteor flashed and blinded the cameras momentarily. Not more than 24 hours later, another reported meteor explosion was recorded over the Cuban central province of Cienfuegos, an area aptly named for such an event (a hundred fires). That suspected meteor blast shook houses in a wide area too.

I found these events fascinating, as I have been a science aficionado all my life. There were periods in my youth when I was so immersed in all the sci-fi and tru-sci magazines, paperbacks and hard bound books that I had a number of astronomical telescopes. I subsequently had one for my two elder children just as they were entering their "tweens," just as I had another one for my twins 13 years later. I have seen the rings of Saturn on my telescopes, same with, of course, the craters of the moon. I still regularly step out of my room after midnight to peer up the sky from our little balcony to watch Orion transit across our little share of the cosmos.
Images flashed across my mind as I contemplated the cosmic event that we have just witnessed — the first in modern history recorded with such vividness by so many from numerous different angles.

Pictures of the 1908 Tunguska event also flashed in black and white, being the only pictures taken 19 years after the incident, a testament to how distant and treacherous the blast area was from civilization. I had read about Tunguska over and over again and was awed with dread at how large the devastation that meteor over Siberia had caused, with over 2,000 square kilometers and 80 million trees flattened in an outward pattern from the epicenter of the midair impact.
To put it in Philippine perspective and given that Metro Manila is only around 600 square kilometers, the Tunguska blast would have leveled an area reaching parts of Southern Tagalog and Central Luzon. Since I am a "prepper" (someone constantly preparing for an eventual gigantic disaster — on the level of Fukushima, for example), these stats are of extreme interest to me.

The images of such disasters are made more vivid in my mind in light of the Russia meteor event, one that is considered of historic significance by astrophysicists and scientists in general for their study. There must be a message in these.

Over a Saturday kapihan with some media friends, in the midst of discussions of the latest political and electoral squabbles, and the local meteor mouth Miriam Santiago's tirade about "Pinky" and the investigations into Port Irene smuggling, I could not help but quip about how petty all these politicians and issues are in light of the cosmological event we had just witnessed. One political and media veteran quipped, "But I can't do anything about the meteors while I can about these pols," and then chuckled. I reminded them that meteor events like the one we have seen can cause some of the greatest disasters imaginable to man, and it's no longer a matter of "if" but of "when" we will face such inevitability.

Fortunately, there are more advanced consciousness, cultures and systems in today's world that are not only aware of the dangers but believe man and his science can prepare and at least try to prevent such apocalyptic disasters — even from asteroids, meteors and comets crashing into Earth — from happening, such as the one believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs in the great extinction.

From Russian news agency RIA Novosti in 2008: "If we, people living on Earth, are unlucky, then Apophis, a 390-meter asteroid flying toward the Earth, 'will smack right into us in 2036,' according to Andrei Filkenshtein, a Russian astronomer from St. Petersburg… The Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos), together with the Defense Ministry and Academy of Sciences, has launched an anti-asteroid program. The first step will see a special radar mounted on a 70-meter telescope in Ussuriisk."
On the other side of the globe, NASA was reported by Flight aviation magazine in 2007 to have "designed a nuclear-warhead-carrying spacecraft, to be launched by the US agency's proposed Ares V cargo launch vehicle, to deflect an asteroid that could threaten all life on Earth."

There is today a call for international cooperation on anti-asteroid "terror" unity, but Filipino national "leaders" are still engaged in Neanderthal, club-wielding politics and grunting matches. Hopeless and pathetic? You be the judge.

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