Pray
for an Asteroid
Dmitri
Orlov
19
Febraury, 2013
On
the morning of February 15, 2013, a 500-ton meteor entered the
atmosphere somewhere near the Ural mountains, in the vicinity of
Chelyabinsk, Russia, an industrial city of over a million. The
intensity of the blast was estimated at around 500 kilotons of TNT
equivalent, or 30 nuclear bombs of the type the Americans dropped on
Nagasaki, Japan. The shock waves from the sonic boom it created blew
out numerous windows. Around a thousand people were wounded, mostly
with lacerations from flying glass; 40 of them remain hospitalized.
The damage is being estimated at over one billion rubles ($33 million
USD). Over 24,000 workers and volunteers, coordinated by Russia's
Emergency Ministry, went to work on the clean-up. Their specific
emphasis was on keeping buildings from freezing (the temperature in
Chelyabinsk is around -20ºC). By February 17 much of the damage had
been repaired. Schools, hospitals and other pubic buildings had their
windows replaced and were reopened. The government is supplying
replacement windows to residential buildings.
There
was, by all appearances, no panic of any sort. Quite the opposite:
the Internet instantly filled up with pictures, videos and tweets of
the light show and the percussion that followed. Then came the jokes:
one was that Chelyabinsk residents detonated something and claimed it
was an asteroid to get the government to provide them with
replacement windows. A major television channel was successfully
spoofed into accepting as real a video of what was supposedly the
impact crater. Supposed bits of the meteor (which were only recovered
on February 17) instantly appeared for sale. Some of the observers
seemed positively giddy, describing how the shockwave made them jump,
discussing how the object in question must have been traveling at
supersonic speeds, then going on to estimate distances based on the
lag time between the flash and the shock wave. In all, the reaction
and the response could perhaps be best characterized by what is
currently a very popular word in Russia: “adequate.”
By
a complete coincidence, on that same day the Earth was buzzed by a
much bigger body: an asteroid, nicknamed 2012 DA14. Coming from a
different direction, it came closer to Earth than the ring of
geostationary weather and communications satellites that hover in
fixed positions over the equator 35,786 km above the planet, and
could have caused far more extensive damage—similar to that caused
by the one that exploded over Tunguska, Russia, in 1908, which is the
largest meteor event in recorded history. (If it seems like Russia
gets more than its fair share of cosmic debris, that's because it's
big: try to hit the Earth from space, and you are likely to hit the
ocean, but, failing that, you are quite likely to hit Russia.) But
the coincidences don't end there: there was also a meteor seen over
Ufa, Russia, on the 12th, and another one over Japan on the the 14th.
There was another flash in the sky that rattled windows reported on
the 12th near Cienfuegos, Cuba, and another on the 15th near San
Francisco. Are we being bombarded from outer space? Is someone out
there throwing rocks at us, from different directions? Let there be
no rest for the conspiracy theorists!
Asteroids
are exciting, because they are part of a small class of singular
events capable of dramatically altering the course of history. There
is nuclear war, followed by nuclear winter—but we like to think
that we have nuclear war somewhat under control, simply because
nuclear weapons make for good defense (deterrence) but bad offense,
because nuclear confrontations offer no winning strategies for
anyone. Then there are the massive volcanic eruptions, like the ones
that triggered the Little Ice Age, which began quite suddenly between
AD 1275 and 1300. We don't control these at all, of course, but we
sometimes get some advance warning, and the events themselves can be
arbitrarily nasty without being mysterious. Then there are pandemics
like the Bubonic Plague which wiped out a third of Europe's
population; their unpredictability provides some amount of
excitement, plus epidemiologists tell us that their likelihood keeps
rising, giving them an aura of inevitability. Less inevitable but
also very nasty are solar storms that fry all of our electronics and
take down the electric grid, while a supernova within the Earth's
galactic neighborhood would be even nastier, potentially sterilizing
the entire planet.
So
much for unpredictable, history-altering, cataclysmic events. But
there are a couple more—ones we can predict with complete accuracy
and confidence. Let's start with the smaller one: there are 437
operational nuclear reactors in the world. These sometimes produce
electricity (and steam for industrial and residential uses) but they
always require electricity to run the cooling pumps, or they overheat
and explode, like Fukushima Daiichi in Japan did. If they cannot get
electricity from the grid, then they have to make their own, using
diesel generators on site. And if these generators run out of diesel,
then the reactors and the spent fuel pools all melt down and generate
a radioactive plume that poisons the surrounding area for
generations. The problem is that there probably isn't enough diesel
to keep them supplied over the decades it would take to shift all of
the nuclear waste into dry cask storage and bury the casks in tunnels
in geologically stable rock that will at some remote date enter a
subduction zone and melt safely into the Earth's mantle. Since we
really don't want there to be 437 Fukushima Daiichi's, it would make
sense for us to get cracking on the problem of eliminating these
reactors from the face of the earth; but are we doing that? Of course
not! We are extending the lifetimes of the existing reactors, and
even building a few new ones.
And
now we come to the really important cataclysmic event that at this
point seems all but unavoidable: the effect of chemical changes to
the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Scientists have
reached a consensus that anything beyond a 2ºC rise in average
global temperature will put the Earth's climate in an unknown state,
but probably one that is not conducive to our continued existence.
Beyond that point, various tipping points are reached, causing
positive feedback loops that can quickly take the climate very far
from the homeostatic equilibrium we have enjoyed thoughout our
history as a species: glaciers melt inundating coastal cities where
much of the population lives; droughts parch farmland causing
famines; extreme weather events cause ever greater damage to our
infrastructure. A temperature rise in excess of 2ºC all but assures
a planet that our children will not be able to live on. It will be a
planet that we will not be around to not recognize. Now, it turns out
that to avoid exceeding the 2ºC budget, we have to stop burning
fossil fuels—all of them, and not at some point in the future, but
right now. And not gradually taper down our use or attempt to shift
to renewables over time, but cold turkey. All oil refineries, all gas
distribution networks, all coal-fired power plants have to be shut
down immediately; but are we doing that? Of course not! We are doing
all we can to ramp up production of fossil fuels, to restore economic
growth. As I write this, Bill McKibben and numerous protesters are
gathered at the White House protesting the plans for the XL pipeline.
I applaud the effort, but that's one pipeline out of how many?
It
seems that we can't help ourselves at all, can we? But we can still
hope. It seems like asteroids can potentially fix things for us. I
would venture to guess that a series of good-sized asteroid impact
craters around the world's financial and industrial centers would
pretty much cancel the rest of the fossil fuel-burning extravaganza,
saving the planet for our children (the few who will survive the
transition to life without fossil fuels). This may seem to you like a
raw deal, but then what's the alternative? Peaceful protest? Or would
you like to try some more civil disobedience? There isn't any time
for any of that left, you know; 2ºC is already baked in, and we are
now working on something that goes beyond unpleasant and is starting
to border on lethal.
But
does hoping for a global fix to our fossil fuel predicament to rain
down on us from heaven amount to hoping against hope? It is rational
to hope for things that have a finite, non-negligible likelihood, but
the likelihood of such a “solution” from outer space is
unknowable. Rather, what we should do is pray. Now, it is well known
that even avowed atheists resort to prayer under certain
circumstances: mostly when they think they are going to die. Not all
people are capable of such a realization, preferring to remain
delusional, but I would like to think that you, dear reader, are
sufficiently far-sighted and diligent in researching catastrophic
climate change to realize that that is indeed the case: if the fossil
fuel-burning machine isn't shut down now, you are facing extinction
within just a few generations. It doesn't seem to matter how you pray
or what deity or deities you pray to. What matters is that, through
prayer, you take the locus of control over your destiny somewhere far
outside your puny, helpless person and place it somewhere
else—perhaps in the strange benevolence of nature that allows us to
survive in spite of our best efforts. In so doing, you may find inner
peace, and sometimes even the strength to survive.
And
so, let us pray. Let us pray that a fix will show up before it is too
late for us and for life on Earth as we know it. Clearly, we can't
bring ourselves to do what's needed, which is to stop ourselves in
our tracks no matter the immediate consequences. Let us therefore
pray that there is a force somewhere in the universe, beyond our
control, that can do that for us. And let us pray that we will be
able to recognize it when it shows up, and that we will have the
presence of mind to not fight it. If we can't win the battle for
survival, then let's try going down in defeat.
If
you are wondering what keeps this blog going, it is you. If you
haven't done so yet, please pre-order your copy of The Five Stages of
Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit.
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