News

It sounds like science fiction, but it was almost a real headline yesterday. An asteroid two hundred miles wide came 40,000 miles close to earth. Before you think that’s not very close, it’s one/seventh of the way to the moon, and only about twice as far out as most telecommunication satellites. An Australian astronomy group spotted the asteroid only three days before it whizzed by us. Estimates are if it had hit us the force would have been that of a large nuclear blast. Pretty scary, and worse, I’m not sure what we could have done to prevent it, even if we, Earth, had decided to do something to move our space visitor along. Here we are wondering how much we can afford to pay for things like bank bailouts, health care, and so forth, but nowhere in that insanely large amount of money (speaking of the bank bailouts now) is any money allocated for asteroid protection for the planet. Maybe we should look into that as we continue to promises millions and sometimes billions to other countries for them to rebuild, or expand themselves. I’m not saying the United States shouldn’t help Palestine and lot’s of other countries, I won’t get into the politics of it all, but when the tax payers are being asked to bailout millionaire bankers, and the auto industry, what I’d like to know is where are all these dollars for loans to other countries coming from? Are we the tax payers going to pay for other countries to have better infrastructure when New Orleans still hasn’t had it’s woefully inadequate dike and dam system revamped?  Yeah, they repaired the gapes, but the reason the hurricane was so devastating is that the entire system needs to be updated. Instead, we’re bailing out banks, car companies, and other countries. I’m not saying we don’t need to help everyone. I’m just wandering where is the money coming from? It’s almost as if our government is pretending that we have enough money to do all this, but do we? And if we do, then why are tax payers being asked to foot the bill for it? How big a debt are we going to be looking at when we’re finished, and if we’re just going to use money as if there is no end in sight to the amounts, why not start work on that asteroid protection system? Or will the asteroids be like the banks and the auto makers, and we’ll only throw money at the problem after the damage is done?