The cynical view of Westerner’s obsession with Ebola and death by asteroid is that it gives us relatively innocuous ghouls to worry about while completely curable diseases like measles and malaria kill tens of millions every year. The counter-argument is that no event threatens the survival of our species the way an asteroid strike does, so it’s worth some extra effort to prepare. Timothy Ferris wrote the definitive “Death from Above” in the New Yorker in 1997, which has been excerpted and reviewed.
The New York Times carries an AP story today that an asteroid the size of a football field had a near miss last week. You’ve got to love NASA representatives calmly discussing asteroids that could “destroy civilization as we know it” versus the miss last week that would only be the magnitude of a large nuclear weapon. Of the nuclear-bomb size asteroids, another scientist helpfully adds: “Civilization has to get used to them on some level.”
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