Let’s start with the good news: according to the Wall Street Journal, scientists have not identified a single asteroid that will collide with our planet within the next century. Now to the bad news: hundreds of thousands of near-Earth asteroids have not been identified.
As an example of this problem, a relatively small, sixty-foot-wide asteroid exploded in the atmosphere near a city in Russia six years ago, creating a blast wave that injured more than a thousand people. No one had seen it coming.
Assuming scientists could spot an asteroid coming our way, they are not sure they could deflect it. NASA intends to launch a test in two years to try deflecting a nonthreatening asteroid called Didymos. But we are not close to even a modest planetary defense capability today.
A couple has twins that aren’t theirs
The unpredictability of life is a fact of life highlighted in the news every day.
For instance, Los Angeles Angels catcher Jonathan Lucroy was taken off the field on a stretcher Sunday night after a collision with a Houston Astros player at home plate. He was diagnosed yesterday with a concussion and a broken nose.
The one-year-old daughter of an Indiana police officer died Sunday night after falling from a cruise ship docked in Puerto Rico. She was being held by her grandfather when she slipped out of his arms and plunged eleven floors to the concrete dock below.
And a New York couple is suing a fertility clinic, claiming that it impregnated them with the wrong embryos. The Asian-American parents gave birth in March, expecting female twins, but delivered two male boys, neither of whom was of Asian descent. They then had to give the boys up to their biological parents.
A countercultural paradox
Yesterday I discussed the importance of making every moment count. In Greek terms, we are seeking kairos (the quality of life) in our chronos (the quantity…
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