If you speak Indonesian, you’ll hear the news announcer telling you about a meteor that exploded in the sky above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, earlier this month. The clouds of smoke are the aftermath. I just saw an article about it in New Scientist:
[It released] about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That’s about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed.
However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth’s surface ….
The amount of energy released suggests the object was about 10 metres across, the researchers say. Such objects are thought to hit Earth about once per decade.
No telescope spotted the asteroid ahead of its impact.
I’m a big fan of increased spending to monitor the risk from spaceborne rocks. Until we colonize other planets — better, other solar systems — the human species remains at risk. We basically have all of our eggs in one basket. We call that basket “Earth.”
I view events like these as lessons in perspective.
I agree. We can pretty handily be destroyed by some cosmic event. But does that mean we should stop concerning ourselves with issues on Earth, like racism, intolerance, world hunger, etc? It shouldn’t make us give up.