I meant to publish a specific article on 30 June 2008. Best-laid plans and all that. So I’ll try to make up for it now.
That date is important, in that Western culture attaches high significance to century markers. A hundred years previously, the “Tunguska Event” occurred.
Tunguska? If you’re a fan of the X-Files, you have probably been exposed to a highly fictionalized version of the story. An object a few tens of meters across — it could be a metallic asteroid or a piece of a traditional comet, but likely nothing else — exploded in the air above a remote area of Siberia. It is estimated that the yield of the explosion was between ten and 15 megatons, or about one thousand Hiroshima bombs. Yeah, big, but not uniquely big: the US and the USSR were each planning on deploying Hydrogen bombs on Real Live Human Cities several times as big.
So, it blew up in the atmosphere, whatever it was. This area of Siberia was (and is once again) heavily wooded, and the blast is estimated to have knocked over an estimated 80 million trees (which contemporary sources allege were innocent bystanders), radially outwards, for about sixteen miles in all directions.
OK, so that was 100 years ago. A fortuitous location for an impact, with relatively minor effects on civilization. Which takes us to the K/T boundary.
The K/T boundary is the separation between the Cretaceous (K is for a German word) and Tertiary periods. It is marked by unusual amounts of certain elements, such as iridium, in the geological record. Iridium stands out because it’s rare on Earth. Most of the planet’s allotment bound to iron while the planet was condensing and sank into the core, so big amounts in sedimentary layers tell us something important. This deposition was caused by another impact. If you think that we still don’t know what killed the dinosaurs, you are a victim of the time it takes for scientific data to trickle down into public school classrooms, which is about as long as it takes for money to trickle down from a tax cut for the wealthiest citizens to the proles (and, Columbus’s discovery that the world is round attesting, it has approximately the same probability). This impact killed the dinosaurs.
The K/T boundary event: bigger. Seriously bigger. Really, absolutely, seriously bigger. Instead of an object with width and breadth each equal to the length of a Mack truck, it was an object the size of Manhattan. Seriously. It crashed in an area near what is now the Yucatan Penninsula. And goodbye big, expensive animals; goodbye most plants; goodbye frakking phytoplankton; hello only to tiny annoying shrewlike pests content to dig holes and venture out into the big cruel world only to snack on dead things. The latter would be unimportant, historically, except they happen to be our grandparents.
The worldview that embraces such sudden changes is known as catastrophism. And because some scientists (ahem, Stephen Jay Gould, ahem) get absurdly entranced by one possibility and embrace it to the exclusion of all others, very many educated Americans think that the history of the world proceeds in fits and starts, going so far as to think the Cambrian explosion was actually special for a reason other than historical accident (I don’t want to go off on the tangent, so, Wikipedia’s entry on the Cambrian explosion, which I have not yet read.)
That the history of the world proceeds in fits and starts is unlikely. It’s unlikely for a number of reasons, that (again) I don’t want to get into, that I largely understand and creationists (whether or not they call themselves Intelligent Design — uh — ists?) don’t. Richard Dawkins thinks it is a capital-letter Bad Thing for scientists to entertain this hypothesis in public. He thinks this for the same reason he thinks The Brights movement is a good thing, which is that we should be artificially buttressing the apparent number of people that mostly agree with him.
It’s not honest, intellectually, but it’s not totally crazy. Amidst the blatant incomprehension and more blatant lies of the creationists, there comes the gem that is represented by the line “See, even evolutionists don’t agree about the ‘facts’ of evolution!!!” Yes, the multiple bangs are implied in their contentions thereof.
The logical response to this takes a bit more time than pretending that all evolutionists agree, but is a much more convincing argument. Basically, it goes “I may not be completely right about the details of evolution, but a talking snake in a tree is not even close.” Think about it. “God created the universe” is not the default position, and even if 100% of your claims about the truth of evolution (in actuality, the proportion of true claims among creationists is around negative 8.3%) are valid, that doesn’t help your case. Seriously. This is logically true. If you think that your “received Word” is, shall we say, gospel truth, and you must only find inconsistencies in other arguments to support your own, you’ve given the game away. You’ve begged the question in the real, useful meaning of the phrase. There are as many creation myths as there are historical tribes, and why should yours have special position when “turtles all the way down” doesn’t?
I didn’t start this as another harangue of religion. So let’s get back to the topic at hand.
When Shoemaker-Levy impacted Jupiter, it gave us pause. Pause, because that’s really frakking close to us as such things go, and it was unbelievably huge. Velociraptors — and I’ll entertain arguments of whether this is, on the whole, a good or bad thing — can’t and don’t much worry about impact scenarios. We do, as humans. We were steeled by this, and we raised hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with this possible threat, and spent it on really shitty movies. Like you do. Fun stuff.
So, next time a batter (Rays? Seriously, the Rays? The most common response I’ve heard is “There’s a team called the Rays?”) gets beaned by a ball, think about how much more it would hurt if the pitcher could throw at twenty thousand motherfrakking miles per hour, and a baseball weighed something like a battleship, because that’s what we’re talking about for Tunguska.
And not that the difference would matter much to a Rays batter, but what if it was the size of Manhattan? Seriously, someone might lose an eye.