“Pathetic Earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror.” – Ming the Merciless
We who watched that movie know what Ming was referring to, but he might just as well have been calling attention to the multitude of space rocks out there—Near Earth Objects; comets and asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit and pose a potential impact risk.
Envision the Earth plunging through space and passing a sign that warns, “Watch for falling rocks.”
In fact, we’ve been getting very good with our technology and techniques for finding and tracking NEOs, not only the ones that occasionally explode in an aerial fireball or even gouge out a crater on the ground, but also those near misses that go grazing by, only to plunge back into the darkness until they once again circle back to us, maybe closer than before.
There have been a number of these in the news lately, seemingly with greater and greater frequency. The sizeable asteroid 2012 DA14 crossed within our ring of geosynchronous satellites last February—and on the same date, the Chelyabinsk meteorite exploded over the skies of Russia, and another fireball lit up Bay Area skies that same night! Truly, it seemed like the sky was falling. It was an astronomical coincidence, but caused quite a stir.