Just Another Day in the Universe

What on Earth (literally) is going on here? Meteors hitting Russia? Asteroids flying by closer than our communications satellites? Were the Mayans right after all?

Turns out, Earth has seen this movie before. Our lifetimes are so short, and our historical attention spans so limited, that we may think something is “happening,” but it’s all part of a very big routine, occurring on a low frequency that’s at the edge of our ability to process it.

Meteors have hit Russia before, and cosmically speaking, not all that long ago. Something very large hit northern Siberia in 1908, laying waste to vast stretches surrounding the point of impact. It was truly devastating, but it affected a relatively unpopulated area, so few were around to record it – plus, it was before the era of modern communications.

Something very big created Meteor Crater in Arizona long ago. It’s a nice tourist attraction now. Lucky you weren’t camping nearby, right? Another enormous crater, this one the remains of a volcano, is a huge tourist attraction in Oregon: Crater Lake. It used to be Mount Mazama, which erupted thousands of years ago, covering much of the Northwest in feet of ash.

In our recent past, there was a 9-point earthquake in Japan. But what about the historic quakes that have happened in unlikely places? The New Madrid quakes in the early 19^th century featured two bigger than 8 points in Missouri. There have been significant damaging earthquakes in places like Charleston, South Carolina (1886) and Boston (1755).

Don’t forget the enormous 1859 solar flare that caused telegraph wires to burn. If the same thing happened today, what would happen to the North American electrical grid?

I’m sorry that this post isn’t going to help you sleep better at night. It’s not about defending ourselves against these cataclysms – that’s a little above my pay grade, other than to tell you to have the usual emergency supplies on hand.

But these events occur periodically, maybe just to remind us that on a cosmic scale, s*** happens, and that we don’t have as much control over events as we like to think we do. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.