Asteroid misses Earth...this time around.
The Asteroid and the “Mote of Dust"…
Dateline: Friday, February 15, 2013. On this date in planetary history, some 13.7 billion years after the Singularity, planet Earth was spared a collision with Asteroid 2012 DA14. It is altogether fitting that we make note of this event because this same asteroid will revisit planet Earth again and again. With each succeeding visit we do not know if Earth will be spared an impact that could destroy any major city such as New York, London, Paris, or Tokyo.
This asteroid weighs in at 150 metric tons. Hurtling at 20,000 feet per second, it packs the punch of about 2.4 million tons of TNT. That’s not big enough to kill us all, but it’s plenty big enough to remind us that we are only stewards of this planet that very likely ranks among the most beautiful in the universe. It is also a good time to recall the words and the wisdom of Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
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