As if there weren't enough to worry about...

For those of you who use Yahoo as a home page, you've probably been treated to a story front and center about Russia's budding plans to knock an astroid out of near miss orbit that might, just might, at some future date, hit the earth.  The story is here in case you didn't see it.

I got to wondering about all this, not withstanding the fact that I'll be a zillion years old (well approaching 100) if and when it zaps us but 1. why aren't people building shelters and moving into caves now and 2. how small is small.

Obviously it is far too soon to start buying caves and dehydrated ration packs but I'm also convinced that folks have a lot more on their minds than this and it is going to take a lot for someone without a job to even think about a "what if". 

When the Cuban Missle Crisis was in full swing in the early 60s, I plainly remember our high school preparing with food and water to go into the underground tunnel system...of course we had 3500 students in the school and the stench would have killed us before the first bomb hit...but I was walking up to the third floor for my German class mid-term and hoping that someone would hit the button so I wouldn't have to take the test.....a modern day deus ex machina...so the Russians are going to launch one of these to pluck the earth from catastrophe...maybe that is why this administration doesn't seem to sweat the small stuff.

Second, this rock is going to miss us by 18000 miles. Big miss. Well not at all. Tiny tiny tiny miss. A long time ago when radial keratotomy first came know, I was part of a team that worked on instrumentation for the operation (cutting into the cornea so to add more surface area thus relaxing it and helping overcome nearsightedness).  Anyway the cornea is not very thick and you really don't want to puncture it through and through..just cut down about 35%...a few thousands of an inch. ... so we invented a device that would measure how far a diamond blade would cut so the surgeon wouldn't have to worry about puncturing the cornea.  The margin for error that the FDA would allow was 1/1000 of an inch in the device.  Next time you see a banner advertisement that fills the page across, just think of 2 pixels of that ad or about .004% of it. that is the margin of error.

18000 miles is a very near miss.  I'm going to Waldbaums when it opens.