Real threat not within or without, but galactic

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© St. Petersburg Times
published March 29, 2002

While the Homeland Security types were busy coming up with a color chart for conditions of concern a while back, we were actually facing a for-real threat that nobody noticed -- until it had passed.

An asteroid, 165 feet across, missed hitting the earth by 288,000 miles -- the astronomical equivalent of the width of a cat's whisker -- and nobody saw it coming.

I'm not sure what color an asteroid big enough to take out Orlando (and it was) rates on the cause-for-concern color chart (mauve? ecru? avocado?) because the chart was still in its rough formative stages. Nobody, it seemed, knew which of the color-coded levels of panic was appropriate to have INS stop issuing visa renewals for dead terrorists who had already committed mass murder.

I'm not saying we should stop looking to our fellow human beings as sources of danger. The evidence to the contrary on that one is just too voluminous.

But the scientific explanation for why we missed it sounded like the Devil Rays' locker room after a game. The sun, apparently, was in our eyes.

That's why we didn't know about the asteroid threat until four days after it passed Earth. It was coming from the direction of the sun and nobody saw it.

You have to realize that the moon is only, on the average, 30,000 miles closer to Earth than the asteroid's orbit brought it. That's close.

Tons of space debris fall on the planet every day, most of it burning up in the atmosphere, but a chunk 165 feet across would have enough oomph left at the end to cause some real damage. A similar-size asteroid in 1908 flattened a 20-mile wide patch of Siberian forest, and something bigger, maybe a comet, is held by many to have created the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs.

"Big enough to demolish a city the size of Orlando" was how the Associated Press described the size of the latest space visitor.

Actually, I know quite a few tree-hugger types who could live with the destruction of Orlando, and Pat Robertson -- angry that the city refuses to publicly burn homosexuals -- has been promising something like that for years.

I'm sure he would have, in the name of the Almighty and heterosexuals everywhere, gladly taken credit if the thing had hit Orlando. If you think about it, you could pick your favorite patch of land -- Baghdad, Jerusalem, Belfast, Tel Aviv or New Delhi -- and someone somewhere would be just aching for the chance to explain how a piece of rock had become the tool of divine intervention in support of some nitwit's favorite political bugaboo.

The whole thing gave me the eschatological willies.

Here we are taking nail clippers away from grandmothers on airplanes and opening our mail with rubber gloves, and, out of nowhere, a completely unexpected source could bring about exactly the kind of devastation that we are trying desperately to prevent.

Since the time I began writing this very column, the U.S. Department of State has issued a warning about Americans facing heightened threat levels in four Italian cities over the Easter weekend, adding, of course, that it can't say what's going to happen or who is going to do it.

The message from our government seems to be "don't go anywhere or do anything, but please spend as much money as possible while you're at it because the economy needs your help."

I just can't get over the almost certain knowledge that I would be the guy who listened to that and all the other warnings and decided to go to nice, safe Disney World -- on the day that the asteroid hit Orlando.

Fatalists believe you can't change the progress of the occurrence of events and that all things are predestined.

Government believes that you can change the future, although how or when to do it are areas in which its spokesmen remain a little hazy.

I wonder how many dinosaurs were suspiciously looking over their shoulders and their fellow dinosaurs the day the Big One punched their tickets permanently -- and if they had a color code warning system to help them.

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