Don’t look up

I feel like we’ve been having a lot of near misses from asteroids lately.

Everyone remembers the one that exploded over Russia a year ago, February.

But do you remember the fly-by of the asteroid 1998QE 2 three months later? With a diameter of 1.7 miles, it was larger than the asteroid that’s believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Fortunately it was three million miles away.

But then last Feb 18th – another one – 2000EM26, the size of three football fields, was only 2 million miles away:

“Had it been on a collision course with Earth, it could have been an extinction-level event.

And they just kept coming! On March 14: 2014 DX110, much smaller, but also, much closer, passing inside the orbit of the moon.

And finally, last Sunday, the football stadium sized 2014 HQ124 – nicknamed The Beast. As one reporter stated, “At a range of only a little over 700,000 miles and it’s the size of a football field. It’s quite big.”

Thank you for pointing that out.

You see what’s happened here? Our quest to solve the mysteries of the universe has revealed that we live in a shooting gallery where mindless rocks are being fired at us.

If The Beast had been on an ever-so-slightly different course, it would have blown out a crater three miles wide and destroyed everything for 60 miles around.

We live in a world where we could wake up one morning and New York City could be gone. Or Chicago. And there would be no one to retaliate against!

So knowing all this, I say, there can never be an excuse for having a bad day. Because, in a universe like this, just having a day is a victory.