Can we deflect an asteroid with junk mail?

A very creative MIT grad student has won an award in the Move An Asteroid 2012 Competition with his proposal to hit the asteroid with paintballs. 

At first, this sounded like a report from a pseudo-scientific humorous newspaper, but it's a real competition and the plan is stunningly sensible. The idea is to paint the asteroid white, changing how the rays from the sun affect it - changing it's trajectory - so it doesn't hit us. (Yes, they are doing this for a reason - there is an asteroid headed our way, it will be close to Earth in 2029 and again in 2036.)

I've just been battling piles of paper. There is always more paper. More junk mail. More things you printed in error, and have to shred. More requests from charities, so you have to shred the mail because it has your address on it. More junk mail. And every once in a while a very important piece of paper. 

It's that one very important piece of paper that is the main problem. You can't just get rid of all of the mail at quick swoop. You have to see if that important piece is inside the mountain of junk.

It's quite demoralizing, because you know you've lost at least one important piece of mail in the past and you don't want to do it again. So you pile the paper up to do something with it later. And then you start another pile because the first one is in danger of toppling. 

But this goes on for way too long. 

Finally, you have to spend a day covered in paper, sorting it, and searching for that all important piece.

So why can't we hit the asteroid with paper? Send it mountains of mail. It's mostly white, so that could deflect the sun like the paintball plan, and it's bloody depressing to boot. It should be depressing enough to be a cosmic downer. We can demoralize the asteroid into stopping and giving up by covering it with paper.

I think it's a good plan.

Do we need to duck this time?

So was everyone expecting the world to end at the turn of the millennium?

Another satellite that was sent into orbit in the 1990s is about to land back on our planet. "Land" being a rather bland way of saying "hit very quickly while burning up and shattering into many pieces." And no one knows where it will land. 

Did no one in the 1990s think of what happens to objects in orbit after they've been up there for a while? They come back down. It's this gravity thing, you see... not really a new phenomenon, if people got the satellite up into orbit, they had a good understanding of the concept then, so they knew it would come back down eventually. Did they not care about the eventual crashing back on the planet?

Of course, this one is only the size of a car... the last one from the U.S. was the size of a bus. So much better. Really?

This latest satellite comes from Germany. The European Space Agency has a Space Debris Office. (That's a trashy job, ha, ha.) They say there is a 1 in 2,000 chance of hitting one of us monkeys with this satellite - the last satellite only had a 1 in 3,200 chance of hitting a monkey. 

A smaller, but better targeted piece of space debris.

This satellite has the added bonus of a mirror which the Space Debris Office says may not burn up before hitting the planet, meaning some serious shards may come flying off the debris when it hits.

Of course, the planet is mostly covered by water, so the satellite has a better chance of hitting fish than us monkeys. 

Any space aliens out there watching us must be wondering if we're just on a fishing trip with some really weird ways of catching fish.

Update: It landed in the Indian Ocean (probably) (hopefully). So it hit the body of water next to the largest population of humans possible. This could be the work of a super villain!

Where did that satellite land?

The satellite known as UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) is now back on the planet Earth. Somewhere.

It landed sometime last night. Probably.

It was calculated to hit somewhere between 57 degrees South and 57 degrees North. So pretty much anywhere on the planet Earth that isn't a magnetic pole. But that was just a guess. Well, the planet Earth part was pretty certain, the rest, not so much. And, oh yeah, most of the planet is covered in water, so it's probably in an ocean somewhere.

So don't we have thousands of these satellites circling the planet Earth now, giving great GPS tracking information down to the centimeter in accuracy? Aren't there many tracking systems for planes, tracking everything flying in the sky? Isn't Google Earth using satellites to take pictures of most of the planet most of the time? Surely someone must know where the satellite landed!

Or does someone want to fuel conspiracy theories?

If we never know... we can always imagine a good conspiracy to theorize about.

Maybe NASA did have control over the satellite and wanted to hit somewhere specific. Nah, too much effort. Maybe aliens grabbed it, and it didn't actually make it to the planet. Nah, we have lots of space junk up there, they don't need to grab something that was burning up already (there were photos of that). Or maybe fiction writers just needed a fresh idea to build on... yeah, that's why it has to remain a mystery, to cure writer's block.

Does a water tornado mean sushi rain?

Waterspouts or water tornados are a truly awesome thing to see. With the huge number of land based tornados in the US this year, it doesn't seem to be so odd that there are water ones around Australia as well.

But what about the fish?

Do fish get caught up by these water tornados? Well, yes, it seems they do! See this news article from the UK Daily Mail on the subject.

So what would you do if a whole lot of fish started falling on your head? They're probably dead from their flight... but they are fresh. Is it sushi time or not?

And what about the fish's take on this... just swimming around, minding their own fishy business, and whoosh, they're airborne! Flying fish. They probably think those silly fish that started walking millions of years ago were nutters, but now they're flying in the air.

There are fish that leap out of the water by themselves and attack people in boats in the US. Intentional flight, not just a gust of swirly wind.

Does this mean the fish are trying to take the next step on the evolutionary ladder? Is Nature trying to help? Should we sit them down and have a talk about this... is it really a good idea?

Which law would I rather have fail, gravity or Murphy?

I was having a lovely weekend, I was. Everything seemed to be going so well for me finally, and then Monday came.

I got a magnetic door stop in the mail - something that I had ordered weeks ago - and when I got it out of the package I realized I couldn't install it. It needs to be floor mounted, and we have carpet (yes, I know that's not a great thing to have by the front door, but we haven't had it changed yet in our new home) so we need to mount the doorstop on the wall, which won't work. Now I have to send it back and get a different one. (It will just make it easier to get my wheelchair out of my front door if the door is kept open by the magnet.)

I think I am suffering the after affects of a good walloping by Murphy's Law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. It just took a break, so the smack was extra hard.

So I got to thinking, if it was possible to mute one of the universe's laws for just a brief moment, would I rather have the law of gravity fail, or Murphy's law fail?

To keep the universe together you need gravity, so a momentary glitch in gravity might be a really bad thing. But if it was short and just localized, it could be a moment of fun. If you had warning of when it was going to fail, you could jump at just the right time and be flying! And then when it came back, well, it was fun when you started. A moment as a bird for a long stay in the hospital could be worth the trade off. It seems skiers who end up in wheelchairs after really bad falls think it's worth the trade off.

To keep your expectations in life down to a "reality" level, you need Murphy's law. If you didn't expect something to go wrong, you wouldn't be planning for it, so you wouldn't have a back-up plan. But wouldn't it be nice to have a brief moment when you know nothing will go wrong? A moment when your plan "A" will work like a charm? A moment when you can just relax and not worry about anything?

Well, it won't happen, you can't fly, and you always need a plan "B". But if you know about these things, you can get on with your life and deal with anything that the universe throws at you really. Being flexible is part of living.

I think I'd like Murphy's law to fail more than the law of gravity, because if I was flying... Murphy's law would send an airplane to smack into me.