Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147)

by William E. Burrows

  “Sooner or later, it was bound to happen,” Clarke wrote in the opening of Rendezvous with Rama, in a reference to the explosion over Tunguska (which either gave him the idea to write the book or reinforced it). It was another clever use of fact to fortify the fiction, which made the fiction more believable, as is the fictionalization of real competition between good and evil on the Western frontier (i.e., lawmen like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson against outlaws like Billy the Kid, the James brothers and the Daltons), wrestling alligators, charming snakes, landing at Normandy, trying to take Mount Suribachi from its hara-kiri-crazed defenders, and other dangerous and competitive endeavors. But the Hammer, of course, was the ultimate, consummate evil (and therefore, ironically, a force that could end evil as well as good).

  “On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and 4,000 kilometers—a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe,” Clarke wrote. “On February 12, 1947, another Russian city had a still narrower escape, when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less than four hundred kilometers from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivaling that of the newly invented uranium bomb.” A generation that had seen photographs of the grotesque results of what manmade nuclear impactors did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki got the message. “In those days there was nothing that men could do to protect themselves against the last random shots in the cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of the Moon.”11

  Again, Clarke's genius lay in combining fact and fiction, as he did when he mentioned SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and in basing his fiction on fact and clearly describing both, as he did in a chapter in The Hammer of God called “Excalibur,” which accurately describes the nuclear-pumped x-ray laser that was designed for President Ronald W. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ballistic-missile defense system, better known as Star Wars. (More about SDI in chapter 7.) Although he had a degree in mathematics and physics from King's College in London, which he received after he served as a radar specialist in the Royal Air Force in World War II, Clarke's extensive knowledge of the physical sciences, rocketry, and the whole realm of space was essentially self-taught. “My involvement with the subject of asteroid impacts is now beginning to resemble a DNA molecule: the strands of fact and fiction are becoming inextricably entwined,” he explained with impressive candor.12

  Since Clarke knew Luis Alvarez before the discovery at Chicxulub, followed that earth-shaking event closely, and kept up with the asteroid and comet situation, he would have known about the work in that area that was going on at universities and in the foundations and societies. He was also aware of the three-stage planetary-defense strategy against potentially hazardous space objects that NASA, the European Space Agency, Roskosmos, and just about everyone else believed and continues to believe will work. It is based on the B612 Foundation model, which Clarke used in The Hammer of God. The first stage is spotting Kali, taking its measurements, and determining that it is headed this way and is big enough to destroy a large part of the planet or perhaps all of it. Then Goliath is sent to nudge Kali off course and, if that does not work, to take it out, as the fastidious call it when obliterating something.

  So Kali has to be sized up in The Hammer of God, as the real strategy requires.

  The mass of Kali was known to within one percent, and the velocity it would have when meeting Earth was known to twelve decimal places. Any schoolboy could work out the resulting half em vee squared of energy—and convert it into megatons of explosive. The result was an unimaginable two million million tons—a figure that was still meaningless when expressed as a billion times the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. And the great unknown in the equation, upon which millions of lives might depend, was the point of impact. The closer Kali approached, the smaller the margin of error, but until a few days before encounter, ground zero could not be pinned down to within better than a thousand kilometers—an estimate that many thought was worse than useless.13

  Goliath's crew plants on Kali the most powerful bomb ever made. It doesn't explode as planned, but it does go off with enough force to cause the porous, moonlike rock to “fission like an amoeba.” Both halves miss Earth.

  And by way of showing that there is not just one death-dealing monster out there but many, Clarke introduced another one toward the end of the book.

  Kali 2 entered the atmosphere just before sunrise, a hundred kilometers above Hawaii. Instantly, the gigantic fireball brought a false dawn to the Pacific, awakening the wildlife on its myriad islands. But few humans; not many were asleep this night of nights, except those who had sought the oblivion of drugs.

  Over New Zealand the heat of the orbiting furnace ignited forests and melted the snow on mountaintops, triggering avalanches into the valleys beneath. By great good fortune, the main thermal impact was on the Antarctic—the one continent that could best absorb it. Even Kali could not strip away all the kilometers of polar ice, but the Great Thaw would change coastlines all around the world.

  No one who survived hearing it could ever describe the sound of Kali's passage….14

  And he used a suitably dramatic word for what Kali and other killer asteroids were capable of committing; a name that perfectly suited a world-ending cataclysmic act of violence: terracide.

  Clarke could not resist beginning the novel by having some fun with himself, some self-deprecation, which showed impressive self-assurance and respect:

  SPACEGUARD had been one of the last projects of the legendary NASA, back at the close of the Twentieth Century. Its initial objective had been modest enough: to make as complete a survey as possible of the asteroids and comets that crossed the orbit of Earth, and to determine if any were a potential threat. The project's name—taken from an obscure Twentieth Century science fiction novel—was somewhat misleading; critics were fond of pointing out that “Spacewatch” or “Spacewarn” would have been much more appropriate.15

  The name Spaceguard, which would be used for the Spaceguard Survey project ordered by Congress five years after The Hammer of God was published, and which has now been adopted by the whole planetary-defense establishment (like the Spaceguard Foundation, for example) was first mentioned in Rendezvous with Rama, the “obscure” novel to which Clarke referred. It takes an artist with substantial self-confidence to refer to his own work as obscure.

  Clarke was generally appreciated by the intellectual establishment not for being an outstanding writer but for very effectively combining fact and fiction in interesting, informative, and visionary works. “As much as any living writer, Clarke represents both the great imaginative strengths and the traditional literary limitations of classic science fiction,” Gary K. Wolfe, a professor of English and humanities at Roosevelt University, wrote in the New York Times. “One does not read his work for depth of character or intricacy of plot, and his style is often pedestrian—though marked by clarity and capable of rising toward a resonant cosmic poetry when the subject is grand enough. But his field of vision is immense, filled with wonder and yet anchored by reason and meticulous detail. At its best, his work echoes the same fundamental questions that so transformed the hominids in 2001 [the space-odyssey film], and that strike to the sources of both myth and science.”16

  “As an asteroid named ‘Kali’ hurtles toward earth on a collision course that spells the end of life on the planet, a lone spaceship armed with a weapon to alter the asteroid's path attempts to carry out its perilous mission—unaware that others are simultaneously working for earth's destruction,” Library Journal reported. “In the capable hands of science fiction veteran Clarke, a standard cosmic disaster plot becomes a lucid commentary on humanity's place in the cosmos. A good choice for science fiction collections.”17

  “Just to declare my interest up front, I'm a professional astronomer who observes comets and asteroids and has observed quite a few asteroids of the type that could impact the Earth,” wrote one expert who found the book scientifically lacking. “I've read a number of b
ooks that use well-aimed comets and asteroids to bring universal doom—it's a subject which has been well-exploited in the last few years. Some books, like Lucifer's Hammer…are far superior in detail, although set in the present, rather than Clarke's far future. Compared to some of the books that I have read, the Hammer of God was disappointingly light-weight. What I will acknowledge is the future setting which Arthur C. Clarke invents and which is far more interesting and realistic in many senses than the Earth-impact part of the plot.”18

  Lay readers did not see it quite that way. “I loved this book,” one of them wrote to Amazon. “Clarke takes a different approach in Hammer of God, switching from technological forecasting to sociological brainstorming, and hits one out of the ballpark. His predictions are hilarious. Christianity and Islam merge into a single religion [Chrislam]! On the surface his ideas seem absurd, but a quick glance at the front page of your daily newspaper suggests that Clarke's ideas may be closer to reality than one would like to think. The only thing about Hammer of God I didn't like was that it was too short! I know Earth will be saved, but Clarke creates such an interesting social panorama that I want to know more.”19

  Clarke expressed a more sanguine view of asteroids in The Exploration of Space, a short, nonfiction primer on space travel that was published in 1951. “Whether they will be of any interest to astronautics, only the future can tell. Although so many thousands of them exist, they cannot constitute a ‘menace to navigation,’ as has sometimes been suggested. The gulf between Mars and Jupiter is too enormous for a few thousand, or even a few million, asteroids to go very far towards filling it.”20 Not a menace to navigation, meaning space travel, perhaps, but surely a menace to Earth, which he certainly knew to be the case.

  Those who want to be entertained by the specter of the end of life, at least on this planet, and learn about it have fostered a small but somewhat profitable genre: Doomsday (or “Doom$day”) productions. They come to Meteor Crater in Arizona and are usually somewhat awed by what they see. They are actually looking at—witnessing—what a projectile, and not a very big one at that, can do to its target and, by implication, to the people on it.

  Since he was (pardon) grounded in the physics, Neil deGrasse Tyson was awed by his first trip to the crater because it turned theory into reality. “The juxtaposition of appearance with accurate knowledge can be the most humbling force on the human soul. On first sight, the crater is simply an enormous hole in the ground—fourteen football fields across and deep enough to bury a sixty-story building,” he recalled. “With the Grand Canyon a few hundred miles away, Arizona is no stranger to holes in the ground. But to carve the Grand Canyon, Earth required millions of years. To excavate Meteor Crater, the universe, using a sixty-thousand-ton asteroid traveling upward of twenty miles per second, required a fraction of a second. No offense to Grand Canyon lovers, but for my money, Meteor Crater is the most amazing natural landmark in the world. The polite (and scientifically accurate) word for asteroid impacts is ‘accretion.’ I happen to prefer ‘species-killing, ecosystem-destroying event.’”21

  Visitors soon learn that the site of the event is also called Barringer Crater. That name's origin goes back to 1902, when a successful Philadelphia mining engineer named Daniel M. Barringer heard about the crater, the meteor impact theory, and the chunks of iron that were said to be buried all around the site. He quickly became convinced that the crater and the area immediately surrounding it contained a mother lode of iron ore that was worth a fortune, so he formed the Standard Iron Company, bought the crater and the land around it, spent twenty-seven years looking for the metal at a cost of more than $800,000 ($10 million today) and ended up with neither iron nor money.22

  Barringer's descendants were, and remain, imaginative individuals who figured out that mining iron wasn't the only way to make a living off of the crater. They claim that it is “the first proven, best preserved meteorite crater on earth,” and sell tickets for admission to see it. Since many visitors want keepsakes to remind them of what could happen to them on the ultimate bad day, there are plenty of souvenirs. Authentic Meteor Crater dust can be taken home and displayed in the living room as a reminder of how fortunate its owners’ ancestors were to have survived that impact and all the others. There are also Meteor Crater magic eggs, impact caps, special shot glasses and playing cards, mouse pads, a videotape about collisions with things that go bump in the night (and day) and that caused the crater, and genuine, freeze-dried Alien Ice Cream (a snack that gives new meaning to a taste that is out of this world). The ice-cream wrapper shows a smiling visitor from very far away enjoying a refreshing frozen treat after its long journey. It looks like Caspar the Unfriendly Ghost.

  And there is a seventy-nine-page booklet, The Meteor Crater Story, which opens with a grabber:

  Fifty thousand years ago, a giant invader from outer space hurtled through our Earth's atmosphere at incredible velocity and collided with northern Arizona's rocky high plateau. The meteorite's explosive impact destroyed all living things within a radius of several miles, created the chasm we call Meteor Crater, and strewed rock and meteorite fragments across a wide area.

  Should an object of similar size and velocity strike New York City or any other densely populated area today, it could kill some ten million people.23

  Barringer's role in the history of the crater is explained, including as the founder, as the president, and as a major financial contributor to the Meteoritical Society, a group of scientists that began in 1933 to study “astrophysical science.” According to the booklet, Dr. F. C. Leonard delivered the opening address at the society's first meeting and predicted that meteoritics would one day enjoy “a definite and creditable standing among the sciences.”24

  “Could it happen again?” The Meteor Crater Story asks, fittingly, at the end. Sure. But, like most other respectable tracts on the subject, the booklet claims that it is a matter of degree. “True, it is not likely to happen. Neither is winning a multi-state lottery. But someone wins a $50 to $100 million jackpot every few weeks.”25 An appendix lists 148 impact sites around the world, which is like ending with a large exclamation mark.

  The entertainment world was also quick to realize that the proven potential of large rocks and comets to cause terrible damage is inherently dramatic and therefore financially profitable; that people will pay for the relief of seeing mass death and destruction from which they are mercifully spared as they paid to see monster movies like King Kong, Frankenstein, and The Thing and watch Bela Lugosi suck the blood out of other people and turn them into vampires as Count Dracula in that creepy haunted castle in Transylvania when he wasn't sleeping in his coffin. (Moral: always carry a crucifix in Transylvania.)

  The film When Worlds Collide came out in 1951 and was based on a novel written by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edwin Balmer that was published in 1933 (two years after Universal Pictures set Dracula loose). It is about a South African astronomer who discovers a star named Bellus that is on a collision course with Earth. He secretly sends copies of the radar imagery to a colleague in the United States—there would no doubt be a worldwide panic and anarchy if word got out that a civilization-ender was headed this way—who warns the United Nations delegates that their planet is only eight months away from a catastrophe. The astronomer pleads for the construction of a large spaceship that will take a lucky few to a planet called Zyra that is orbiting Bellus and that will therefore pass very close to Earth. Neither the world body nor the US government believes him, so he gets private funding from a wealthy, crippled, cantankerous industrialist and has the vessel built. Meanwhile, other scientists begin to agree that a cosmic collision is indeed imminent. Most of the spaceship's passengers are chosen by lottery, though a privileged few are selected by Dr. Cole Hendron, a distinguished and well-known scientist. (Sydney Boehm, who wrote the screenplay, had sense enough to avoid any reference to Noah.) As Doomsday approaches, the spaceship is stocked with food, medicine, animals, and as much of civilization's record as can b
e loaded on board. (It is not mentioned, but it is clear that the survival strategists do not want what happened to the Great Library at Alexandria to happen again.) The multitude of terrified people who lose the lottery riot and fight to get on board, but they are kept off by use of force, and the ship departs with its vitally important human specimens. Once in space, they see television pictures of the place they left being pulled into Bellus's relentless gravity, breaking apart, and finally exploding. The survivors, which formula required include two lovers, one a handsome, athletic male, and the other a beautiful female—for breeding purposes—land on Zyra in due course, find it habitable, and settle down on their new world.

  Deep Impact, which was almost undoubtedly conceived by someone who had read Walter Alvarez's account of the Chicxulub expedition, was made by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks and was released in 1998, the year of the NEO awakening and the congressional mandate to conduct the Spaceguard Survey. It grossed more than $349 million worldwide on an $80 million production budget, which put it in the financial winner's circle.

  The plot has to do with a very large comet that is discovered by a teenage astronomer in an astronomy club in Richmond, Virginia. His teacher alerts an astronomer named Marcus Wolf who tries to get word out but is killed in an automobile accident before he can do it. A year passes. Then a television news reporter investigating the resignation of the secretary of the treasury finds a mysterious reference by him to “Ellie,” who she thinks is his mistress. But a little more digging shows that Ellie stands for “E. L. E.,” which, in turn, is an acronym for “Extinction-Level Event.” Since the comet is eleven kilometers long, there will indeed be extinction if it reaches Earth. The story is aired.