As you may be aware, there’s a big fricken asteroid coming our way. It’s about half the size of a football field, and it’s going to miss Earth by about 17,100 miles. (Or so NASA assures us).
“No Earth impact is possible,” said Donald Yeomans, an astronomer with the US space agency.
Smile and wave. If it did hit us, and it landed on the dirt somewhere, it would make a hole about the size of meteor crater in Arizona. BOOM! Which wouldn’t be a horrible problem. It might even block some sunlight for a while and cool us down a bit, who knows?
What I’d like to know is – where are the solid gold asteroids? What’s with all the nickel and iron? Yeah, sure, iron is formed during the last cycle of a supernova, and therefore it’s much more plentiful than gold which is formed during the supernova explosion itself, but there must be some big ass chunks of gold out there somewhere.
If the asteroid were solid gold, would the governments of Earth be more interested in probing it? Maybe even want to try and stop it or mine it somehow? Think of all that gold! If that asteroid were solid gold, it would be more gold than we have access to now on the entire planet!
But then, we’d probably fight over it wouldn’t we? I mean, if a giant gold asteroid crashed into say… Kansas or something, imagine all the people rushing out there looking for chunks of it. It would be a war zone. People would be staking claims. The government would cordon off the area and call out the national guard to force back the crowds of desperate treasure seekers.
Anyway, I suspect that for a long time, the only gold we’re going to be getting out of asteroids is investment money obtained by companies saying they’re going to mine gold out of asteroids. That’s what I’d call a “long-term” investment.
Filed under: society, Stupid Shit, Weird Tagged: | Gold Asteroid
Good point. If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we order a gold asteroid? Or better yet, a chocolate one?
Chocolate ‘roids. Sounds like a breakfast cereal. Or something a proctologist might see on a daily basis. Which, in retrospect, might be why choco-roids aren’t a good name for a breakfast cereal. Marketing teams take note.
With 70% of the earth’s surface covered by water, it would be just our luck to have that solid gold asteroid land in the ocean somewhere and sink to unreachable depths in international waters. That would give rise to all sorts of interesting scenarios …
I feel a Goldfinger remake plot coming on.
I enjoyed your take on the possibility of a sold gold asteroid descending and the gold rush and crime wave that would follow if it hit land. When I considered the notion of an ocean landing I immediately thought of off-shore drilling and my head hurt as the result would likely be the same.
We humans are an avaricious scheming species and whatever the scenario might be it would be sure to stimulate bad behavior fueled by greed. No doubt the companies holding mining stakes would be employing legions of PR experts to assure the public at large that we benefit from the … wait for it … mining jobs provided by the corporate kings and their political hand maidens.
And divers trying to sneak out gold disguised as lead weight belts. Ah, how the creativity of modern gold seekers would be tested! The cool thing about gold, as I’m sure you know, its that it is immune to corrosion. It doesn’t oxidize or rust. If it were cheap, we’d use it for all sorts of things that aren’t feasible now. But, yes, digging it out of the seabed would cause all sorts of interesting scenarios, and any ecological ramifications would likely get swept under the rug whenever possible.
I hope it hits that kid from Germany.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/5511619/14-year-old-hit-by-30000-mph-space-meteorite.html
It would be like winning the lottery twice!
Ok , the asteroid was a little off but Russia was friggin close