Bada Bang, Bada Boom!
You know, it's kind of weird. There is a certain type of event that you have read about, thought about, a thousand times. You've wondered how it would be. And then, out of the blue, these things turn real, and you can't help getting that feeling that this is all just too surreal.
The pictures that have been reaching us from Russia over this day fall right into that category. Meteorite impacts have been the subject of many movies, books, and more cheap Discovery Channel Documentaries than you can shake a stick at. All seemed to have a certain idea of how it would play out.
Until today
While most of us here in Ireland were still peacefully slumbering, an unknown visitor arrived at Earth. We do not know where it came from, it had no name, we don't even know exactly what it was. What we do know now is that its visit to our planet was the endgame for this unknown cosmic traveler.
Approaching from the east, out of the rising sun, the cosmic interloper made contact with the tenuous upper layers of our planets atmosphere. Thin and tenuous they may have been, but for an object travelling at 30 kilometers per second, even this was enough.
Eons of undisturbed reverie came to an end in a few flaming seconds. Slowed down by the outer reaches of the atmosphere, the object began a ever steeper descent into oblivion. The tremendous heat and light produced by the object lit up the sleeping, frozen landscape below. Then, about 30 kilometers above the surface of our homeworld, the stresses of the atmospheric entry spelled doom for the object. In a fireball much brighter than the rising sun, the object vaporized itself, hurling but a small number of fragments into the surrounding landscape. The shockwave of the explosion, envoy of the destruction of this object, ripped over the land for hundreds of miles.
Scenarios like this have taken place countless times over the history of our planet. Only this time, there were witnesses.
By now, these two videos will have been shown hundreds of times by TV stations all over the world. On their own, these are not really unusual. Fireballs like these have been seen multiple times over the last decades. The video below was taken in 2009 in Sweden, and show a meteor descending over the Baltic Sea.
However, the object that descended over Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg was different. It came close enough and was large enough to make its demise known to the world.
The power of the shock waves is truly frightening. One can only imagine what would have happened if this object had hit a major city instead of disintegrating in the upper atmosphere. But even so, the damage is quite impressive. Official government sources now put the number of people injured by this event at over 1200, while a total of 3000 buildings spread over six cities were damaged, some of them severely.
Indeed, the videos above give us an idea just how powerful, how awe-inspiring, how frightening that event must have been, even from our jaded perspective at the beginning of the 21st century.
It also shows us how insignificant we really are. No one who has seen these images, no one who remembers the Earth size fireballs on Jupiter during the 1996 Shoemaker-Levy-9, can honestly claim that this ball of rock we inhabit provides any kind of security. And while Russian prime minister Dimitri Medvedev suggested an early warning and defense system, I believe we must go one step further. We must take steps to build up a permanent presence on other worlds, not just a few scientists, but entire self sustaining populations, able to ensure the survival of our species in the event we encounter an as yet unknown object that proves impossible to deflect.
After all, as it has proven today, the universe will not look out for us, so we must do it ourselves.
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