Nickyitis – An Epidemic of Humorous Proportions

Wowie. There’s general agreement that one of the major reasons the dinosaurs got the kibosh (along with most of the mammals, lizards, fish, plankton, etc, etc) round about 57 million years ago was the unfortunate intersection of our planet and a largish asteroid. In fact, this is the sort of thing that’s thought to have caused most all of the big extinction events (and the one that killed the dinosaurs wasn’t even close to being the worst of these). Take a look at that nice round hole in the Gulf of Mexico – that’s what happens when you do your excavating via meteor.

But that all happened SO long ago it’s just hard to worry about it. Of course, you can make a movie about it, a la Armageddon, but that’s just movie make believe.

However, when it happens within living memory – that causes me to do a bit of a second take. It’s funny that it’s not discussed more but there was a recent article on the mysterious boom that flattened over 800 square miles of Siberian forest in 1908. The smart money is on a comet as the culprit and you can read more about it here.

I don’t know about you, but this kind of thing really does make me pause and think. We’re not talking millions and millions of years ago but a mere century. That is most definitely recent history. Same general time frame as the Titanic and World War I. 

What would the results have been if it had struck smack dab in the middle of London? The answer – no more London. Today’s London has just about the exact same area as that devastated by the 1908 shock wave.

So, the only reason we didn’t have monstrous devastation is because, by pure chance, it exploded over a wilderness area instead of a metropolitan one. Luck, that’s all.

Could it happen again? Absolutely.

In the near term future? Yep.

The universe can be a scary place.

- And that’s today’s word from the bird