There's a football-sized piece of rock hurtling toward the planet Mars as I sit here and write this little paragraph. It's hard to imagine, but there are groups of people, scientists mind you, that are creaming their shorts in hope that it is going to strike the Red Planet. Yet, it sort of scares the crap out of me.
Here we are on this lush little blue marble, revolving around our little average star, pondering the bigger questions of existence when at any moment we could be snuffed out of existence by one of these rocks from space. It's really high time that it happened. If you put any faith at all in probability, chance, luck, or have any awareness of the vastness of the Universe you might think that any minute, one of the 916 KNOWN near Earth objects that NASA is monitoring might simply drift out of its orbit and smash into our idyllic little corner of the galaxy.
But wait, 916 KNOWN NEAR EARTH OBJECTS??? That's not even a grain of salt in comparison with all of the matter that is in the universe. There could be billions, and billions of these objects on a collision course with our planet at this moment that we haven't yet detected.
It's inevitable that it will happen.
If this rock, 2007 WD5, does hit Mars then it should serve as a warning and a wake-up call to us. It was only a few years ago, a nanosecond of cosmic time that the Shoemaker-Levy comet collided with Jupiter.
So, figure it out....Jupiter, Mars....and Earth is next.
916 KNOWN OBJECTS.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/
