On a day like today I think it is important to retain a
sense of perspective. We must remember what it is the earth revolves around,
rather than who.
Because even though you cannot feel it, the earth is rotating beneath your feet; we are spinning
at four hundred and sixty metres a second. In turn, we also whirl about the sun,
and though each revolution takes a year, we are covering thirty kilometres a
second. The solar system itself swirls around the core of the Milky Way at two
hundred and twenty kilometres a second.
And that’s not it. Our entire galaxy, and tens of thousands
of others, are all rushing towards something out there in the darkness, at
seven hundred thousand kilometres a second.
They call whatever’s out there - waiting in the darkness -
the Great Attractor, because that’s all we know about it. That it attracts. One
day, we’ll learn some more about our new friend.
By crashing into it at seven hundred thousand kilometres a
second.
Of course, that’s if we get there.
Every fifty or so thousand years - a fact we know from the
way iron particles have aligned in the strata of volcanic rocks - the magnetic
field of the earth flips on its axis, and in doing so exposes the surface to the
scourge of the solar wind. To exotic flavours of radiation, epidemics of
cancers and inducing the sorts of voltages in metallic objects that will
utterly and irrevocably cook anything electronic, something our civilization is
wholly dependent on.
I say fifty thousand years. The last flip was longer ago
than that, and through the period of history where magnetic North has been a recordable
thing, it has been wandering through Canada. Southwards, and weakening.
But even if the magnetic field were at its strongest, a
solar flare ejected into our path would still flay the daytime hemisphere of
the planet clean. People have recorded the activity of the sun since the dawn
of history, and the sun too follows a cycle. A solar flare in the coming years is
not inevitable, but far from impossible.
Also out there in the heavens, is a rock with the catchy appellation
99942 Apophis. We need not worry too
much about this particular asteroid, as it isn’t going to hit us any time soon,
though a near miss is a certainty. But while Apophis, will merely come to say
hello, a collision with a near-earth asteroid is statistically inevitable, and while
current efforts to detect asteroid paths may very well successfully identify incoming
threats years or even decades before they occur, the logistics of deflecting
even one remain an impossibility, no matter what impression Bruce Willis might
have imparted. They will certainly not become more possible while we bicker
about house prices or the exoduses of our fellow humans.
Those are the predictable ones. Sometimes stars just go
supernova, ejecting inconceivably intense bursts of cosmic rays, rushing
through the universe at the speed of light, with nothing to herald their
approach. Washed in gamma radiation of the highest intensity, there are no
superpowers here, just death. The earth reduced to a lifeless cinder before a
soul ever notices.
We need not look to the stars for dangers. Yellowstone Park
in the US is famed for its hot springs and geysers. It’s because the park is a
volcano. One so huge you cannot even tell what you are looking at unless you
map it from space. And what those maps will tell you is that the entire
National Park is detectably bulging upwars as the caldera below fills with magma.
When the pressure gets too much, much of Wyoming will be
vaporised, and while few people would even notice that, they will notice as the
entire continent is cloaked in a rain of ash, and the rest of the planet sinks
into a nuclear winter. Reading the geology imprinted into rocks all over the
world will tell you that these eruptions have followed a six hundred thousand
year cycle. We’re overdue.
It seems to be a theme.
We’re overdue.
We’re overdue.
We’re overdue.
We are overdue for an extinction level event, and the only
doubt is to which one will get us first, because they will all happen
eventually. They have happened in the past and they will all happen again. One
day.
So, if on a day like today you see the news and despair of what
humanity is becoming, I think it’s important to retain a sense of perspective.
Do not worry, for when the apocalypse comes - and it is
when, not if - it’s not like anything of value will be lost.
