Bill Ryan's Other Blog

As I was getting prepped up for this weekend’s contest, I was just doing some basic reviews of Science, Physics and Math.  The goal of the contest is centered around a green solution, so each of the above factors will likely have a big role in it.

I was looking at my Frequent flier miles from last year (I travel way too much and last year, I really travelled way too much).  When I flew to Sweden, I accumulated about 4500 miles each way.  I flew into Schiphol and from there, to Stockholm so it wasn’t a direct trip.  Needless to say, it was a long trip (12 hrs flight time) in some respects, but rather short compared to the other non-European flights I’ve had (Ok, South America usually isn’t that long either unless you really go FAR south).  I had 9,000 miles in my head when I read a story about another near miss.

The article says the asteroid was only 23 ft across which according to people who study such things, means it wouldn’t do much damage. While I’m not calling BS on anyone.. am I the only one who was told a story as a kid about how a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building could kill you?   The cognitive dissonance that accompanied such a thought led me to look it up and apparently the Penny death stuff is urban legend.  Whew! 

The ‘problem’ so to speak is that the Asteroid was undetected.  And that’s a problem b/c it wouldn’t have to be a whole lot bigger to bring the noise and open up a big can of Armageddon. I don’t know if Carl Maldin is still with us, but methinks Bruce Willis is a little too old to be of much help here (not dissing old folks or anything).

Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, aka perhaps the consistently awesome blogger around covers near misses regularly and well, seems to me there’s a lot of them (and I’m not just saying he’s awesome b/c he drives the world’s quintessential Alpha Male Inspired Automobile). And they are happening with more frequency. 

No one really complained when money was being squandered on pork barrel BS instead of reinforcing the New Orleans Levies.  It didn’t matter until it mattered.  People look at the benefits but ignore the opportunity costs.  I hope history isn’t repeating itself on a macro level. What I mean is, money spent to detect and counter Armageddon causing stuff from space is value added in so many ways. For one it could save us from extinction.  Even though I don’t watch TV as a rule, I did happen to catch that one Discovery channel show on the Asteroids and Hypercanes and well, something doesn’t have to wipe us out to really suck.  Money spent avoiding this will undoubtedly lead to technologies that have other applications and as we saw with the Space Program, this is a very good thing. So let’s say we took some of this stimulus money that we’re wasting on junk like this.

If we do get hit by a comet or big asteroid, it’ll be ugly in all likelihood (after all most of the Earth is water and a big rock hitting it could cause a lot of Steam and that’s just the beginning. I can’t think of too many more clear cut things that do fit in the “Role of govt”category – so if we’re going to burn all sorts of money on Stimulus stuff and grow the govt to a size that would make George W. Bush and David Frum blush, can we at least waste some of that money on something that’ll benefit us?