Category Archives: Astronomy and cosmology and space stuff

Meterorite

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A thirty plus ton meteorite dug up in Argentina. A larger one had been dug up nearby some time ago. The area is spattered with numerous other craters. Here’s the scary part—apparently both the two ginormous meteorites and the other craters were from the same meteor shower that freaked the locals out of their ever loving minds between 4200 and 4700 years ago, or in the parlance of the press, about the time of the Great Pyramids. (Everything is either older than or the same age as the Pyramids in the news.) Allow yourself a moment to consider the modern possibilities of such a meteor shower. Yes, one could hit Trump. But it could hit the San Fernando Valley too.

Just for comparison, they dug up an 66 ton meteorite in Namibia a century ago that smacked into the Kalahari 80,000 years ago. Again, a mind fuck for the locals, whoever they were then. One wonders, if it were seen, how they conceptualized it. How they discussed it. If they painted it on cave walls in ochre, as they seemed to have been doing not far off not long afterward. If they were even there at all.

But I digress.

The Namibian meteorite (since called the Hoba) is a rough square about nine by nine feet and three feet high. Halve that mass for each of the two Argentine. On the other hand, the megameterorite—an asteroid, perhaps a comet—that whomped into the Gulf of Mexico and zapped all the dinosaurs but birds into the cornfield was from seven to fifty miles in diameter. At that high end you could have wrapped the entire San Fernando Valley around it, with a little squeezing here and stretching there, like some weird Arthur C. Clarke novel, just as a thought experiment. Or you could forget you read that sentence. You could put that Hoba meteorite in my living room and still have room for the Christmas tree.

Considering the perfect math of objects orbiting the sun, some of the millions of asteroids in the solar system, some as big or bigger as the dinosaur whomper, are bound to touch, smack or whomp the earth again, many, many times.

I prefer not to think about it.

UFOs

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(2015)

Whatever happened to UFOs?  A sad victim of ubiquitous cell phone cameras. I mean there should have been thousands of images and video–with audio and pop ups–by now. But there aren’t. Just cheesy Roswell videos and ancient aliens and the occasional creepy inexplicable account like John McPhee’s that still makes us wonder, even if just a little bit.

Perhaps UFO’s have fallen victim to this, the internet, the digital universe. We stare into screens now looking for mysteries and visitations and fantasies and myths to swallow whole, like Athena, fearful of dull, inexorable, science. We stare so hard that even if there were lights flitting about above us we wouldn’t see them. We wouldn’t even believe them unless they appeared on Facebook with a zillion likes. Reality is virtual now, and even analog fantasies are not to believed unless digitized.

Cheshire Cat

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It’s amazing how you can see Venus and Mars regularly in the big bad city anymore. Just standing out on our sundeck after dark and there’s Venus in one direction, Mars the other, and then you get the brief empty nothingness feeling and realize just how significant you are, really. Just nothing. Everyone around you, just nothing. The whole freaking history of man, nothing. Nothing at all. All of evolution, all that genetic history, all that life and variation will be burned to nothing by a dying sun and then there will be void. Endless void. Eternal, infinite void. A cold dead universe, finally, expanding and expanding and expanding…..

So you stare at the moon instead and think of the Cheshire Cat.

Cheshire Cat

Cheshire Cat

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