Six Asteroids Yesterday

Six asteroids passed by Earth yesterday. I didn't catch any of the LDs on any of them, but if any were going to be a cosmic close shave I'd have heard. It's not the distance this time so much as the numbers. My guys have been saying, and I've been passing it along in this blog, for the better part of a decade, that meteors, asteroids and comets were all going to increase exponentially, and here we are...right on time.

 

 We've entered a denser region of space, and there's just more stuff to rain down on us. A couple of years or so ago we set an historical record for the number of comets visible, with a small telescope, from Earth. It was five or six. That got my attention. 

 One of these asteroids was discovered in 2016, but the rest were discovered this year. The first four numbers of the asteroid's name is the year it was discovered. Many asteroids aren't discovered until they're just a few days away, and a few weren't discovered until after they passed Earth. The reason for this is because they're coming from behind the Sun, and no telescope can see them until they get past it.

 If this trend continues, then we ain't seen nothing yet. It's a simple matter of taking existing data and extrapolating, which is a very accurate way of making predictions. If you plot the number of meteors by year, over the last two decades, you'd see a line that slowly starts to go up but then sharply rises. Again it's exponential. If this peak continues, which it almost certainly will, we're in for a shitshow in the sky. Speaking of meteors, occasionally we have days where there are over 100 fireballs in a day. Two decades ago we might get that many in six months or longer.

 Why do you think that wealthy people are building all of these underground bunkers? The guys who build these things can't keep up with demand, and those things aren't cheap. They start at around $50K for basically a buried boxcar, and go into the millions. Once they go above ten mil or so, you're talking indoor pools, water purification, grow rooms, aquifers and even small nuclear generators. 

 Point is, yet again...they know what's coming, and you should too. Personally I'd rather face the shit above ground, and I'd hate to miss seeing it. If it makes you feel any better...if you should hear about a planet-dusting asteroid headed our way, and you have your choice of where you'll be when it hits- either the impact zone or halfway around the world, pick the impact zone. The last thing you ever see will be spectacular, and you won't linger, like those on the other side of the planet. Heads-up, y'all.