Don't Click The Bait!!
Nov. 9th, 2021 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waitingmanIf you saw a news headline like this - 'Huge Potentially Hazardous Asteroid Hurtling Towards Earth' you'd click on the story, wouldn't you? After all, it's on a news website, not imgur, or The Onion, or its Australian equivalents The Chaser, or the Betoota Advocate... So yes, you click on the story to find out about our impending doom & whether we can send something, or someone, up to the asteroid to destroy it, or shift it off-course. Don't send Bruce Willis, he failed the first time!!
Anyway, as you would know, or remember in hindsight, after reading the article, there's quite a difference between what astronomers call 'close' & how the rest of us interpret that word - the asteroid is going to pass us "about 2.4 million miles away from Earth – around ten times the distance between our planet and the Moon."
Galactically-speaking, that's pretty close - but when you consider the asteroid is 'only' the size of the Eiffel Tower, there's not really much on the way of an existential threat there - even if it will, eventually, come significantly closer when it "passes just 750,000 miles (1,207,0000km) away from us"... in February, 2060
I'll be 92 years old & will probably fall for the clickbait headline again, when it's beamed directly into my brain's receptor chip
Anyway, as you would know, or remember in hindsight, after reading the article, there's quite a difference between what astronomers call 'close' & how the rest of us interpret that word - the asteroid is going to pass us "about 2.4 million miles away from Earth – around ten times the distance between our planet and the Moon."
Galactically-speaking, that's pretty close - but when you consider the asteroid is 'only' the size of the Eiffel Tower, there's not really much on the way of an existential threat there - even if it will, eventually, come significantly closer when it "passes just 750,000 miles (1,207,0000km) away from us"... in February, 2060
I'll be 92 years old & will probably fall for the clickbait headline again, when it's beamed directly into my brain's receptor chip
