Mile-Wide Asteroid Might Hit Earth In 2019

By Steve Hynd

Worried about American imperialist adventures abroad, or the rising deficit, or erosion of American democracy? None might matter much longer.

An asteroid more than a mile wide is heading for earth, posing the greatest threat yet by an object approaching the planet, scientists have warned.

The asteroid � called 2002 NT7 � was spotted only three weeks ago, but could strike on 1 February 2019, the US space agency Nasa said. Itis the first asteroid to rank positive on Nasa's Palermo scale, which combines the urgency of the object's threat with its potential effect. All other known objects have had negative values.

Bennt Peiser of John Moores University in Liverpool said the 1.2 mile-wide object had become "the most threatening object" in the short history of asteroid detection.

Gerrit Verschuur, an astrophysicist and radio astronomer at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, said the impact would create a fireball so intense it would kill anyone who could see it, after which material thrown into the air would shower half the world with flaming debris. "It would be as if the sky itself had caught fire," he said.

The heat would set fire to forests and cities, after which dust would fill the atmosphere, obscuring the sun for a month. That in turn would kill plants and animals, so that only creatures that lived underground would have a strong chance of survival.

But there are still large uncertainties about the asteroid's orbit. Dr Andrew Coates of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in London said: "Most likely it will not hit us, but it's the highest-risk of any object that we know of at the moment." But Donald Yeomans of Nasa told the BBC that the margin of error in the predicted orbit might be "several tens of millions of kilometres".

So, no need to panic and start digging just yet...

...but then again, 2019 is about as far in the future as the invasion of Afghanistan is in the past. We haven't been able to solve the Afghan problem since 2002, and an endevour like working out how to deflect or stop a huge hunk of rock, millions of miles into space, then implementing that solution has got to be somewhere up there on a scale of difficulty.

So sure, keep worrying about those overseas occupations (however rebranded) and keep worrying about all the other terrestial things we have to worry about. But we really do need to find some resources and some time to worry about future bolts from the blue too - to say nothing of other major challenges like global climate change.

Trouble is, those resources are tied up in deficit spending and runaway military budgets, while the time will be carved up into the usual short-termist chunks between elections. And if by some cosmic chance that big hunk of rock heads our way...

Here we are, with the "serious people" worrying about the cost of weapons that suck hundreds of billions of budget dollars and the entire budget for finding and dealing with such asteroids is a measly$4 million a year.