Killer comets, killer asteroids: Make my day, planet-killers

Nudge it, nuke it, tug it with a gravity tractor, or slow it down with some concentrated sunlight. Make my day, planet-killers.

Those are your choices if a planet-killing comet or asteroid is en route to rather imminently collide with Planet Earth. Asteroid PZ39 shot by the Earth from a distance of more than 3.58 million miles (5.77 million kilometres) earlier this month. It flew towards us at speeds of more than 35,500 mph (57,240 km/h), approaching  just after 11 a.m. GMT two weeks ago on Saturday, Feb 15.

A near-miss? “A little over 9x the distance of the earth to the moon,” Ron Graham helpfully explained. “A near miss is, in fact, an impact,” Kevin Hopton added

Both asteroids and comets are bad to have coming toward you, but comets are worse apparently simply because they can be travelling up to three times faster than Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) relative to Earth at the time of impact. The energy released by a cosmic collision increases as the square of the incoming object’s speed, so a comet could pack nine times more destructive power than an asteroid of the same mass. But both are considered to be a potentially hazardous object (PHO).

“It would be a much bigger explosion, a much bigger crater, much more damage,” (https://www.space.com/26264-asteroids-comets-earth-impact-risks.html) impact expert Mark Boslough, of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said in June 2104.

If Boslough says it is so, that’s good enough for me. After all he is the author of this now famous account, dated Dec. 25, 1998, which I wrote approvingly of in a post on Nov. 9, 2014 headlined “‘Edward Baker:’ Thompson, Manitoba’s microwaved telephone company night watchman 1998 urban legend owes its fame to real-life American scientist and a Denver newsman” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/edward-baker-thompson-manitoba-s-microwaved-telephone-company-night-watchman-1998-urban-legend-owes-its-fame-to-real-life-american-scientist-and-a-denver-newsman/)

Wrote Boslough back in 1998:

“Telephone relay company night watchman Edward Baker, 31, was killed early Christmas morning by excessive microwave radiation exposure. He was apparently attempting to keep warm next to a telecommunications feedhorn.

“Baker had been suspended on a safety violation once last year, according to Northern Manitoba Signal Relay spokesperson Tanya Cooke. She noted that Baker’s earlier infraction was for defeating a safety shutoff switch and entering a restricted maintenance catwalk in order to stand in front of the microwave dish. He had told coworkers that it was the only way he could stay warm during his twelve-hour shift at the station, where winter temperatures often dip to forty below zero.

“Microwaves can heat water molecules within human tissue in the same way that they heat food in microwave ovens. For his Christmas shift, Baker reportedly brought a twelve pack of beer and a plastic lawn chair, which he positioned directly in line with the strongest microwave beam. Baker had not been told about a tenfold boost in microwave power planned that night to handle the anticipated increase in holiday long-distance calling traffic.

“Baker’s body was discovered by the daytime watchman, John Burns, who was greeted by an odor he mistook for a Christmas roast he thought Baker must have prepared as a surprise. Burns also reported to NMSR company officials that Baker’s unfinished beers had exploded.”

The clues, of course, to the fabricated nature of the story are contained in the names of the participants: the victim, “Baker”; his discoverer, “Burns”; and the spokeswoman, “Cooke.”

Boslough attached his microwaved worker offering to a then-current list of Darwin Award stories for 1998, declared his entry to be that year’s winner, sent it out to a few friends and sat back and watched the inevitable unfold, as veteran Denver Post editor and columnist Dick Kreck was taken in by the hoax, publishing it as the authentic 1998 Darwin Award winner. It seems, at some level, we all want to believe.

Certainly, Kreck, who retired from the paper in June 2007, was no rookie. Born in San Francisco in 1941, Kreck grew up in Glendale, California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Francisco State College, he worked as a reporter and copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. He joined The Denver Post in 1968 and held various jobs, writing a city column for 18 years and covering television and radio. His books include Colorado’s Scenic Railroads; Denver in Flames; Murder at the Brown Palace; Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer ; and Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.

Boslough wrote to Kreck in 1999:

“Dear Mr. Kreck:

“Thank you so much for reprinting my Darwin Award hoax in the Denver Post.

“Like you, I am a skeptic and have always very suspicious of these stories. However, I am also a scientist so I decided to do a little experiment. I made up the most outrageous and twisted death-by-stupidity tale I could imagine. I made sure that all the characters in the story had names (Mr. Baker, Mr. Burns, Ms. Cooke) that would give my joke away to any wary reader. I set the story in a location that allowed the company “Northern Manitoba Signal Relay” to have the same acronym as New Mexicans for Science and Reason, our local version of Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Skeptics.

“I took a list of Darwin Awards that somebody sent me and attached my own creation, which I also declared to be this year’s winner. I turned it loose by e-mailing it to a few out-of-state friends on New Year’s Day. Seeing it this week in the Post is a bit like getting a response to a note in a bottle eight months after throwing it into the ocean. It is also a good lesson in why we should all be skeptical of what we see on the Internet … not to mention what we read in the newspaper!

“By the way, NMSR president Dave Thomas – a recent guest speaker at Rocky Mountain Skeptics – is the only person who discovered the hoax and correctly attributed it to me. He had searched for “NMSR” under Deja News and recognized my brand of humor when his search turned up my story.

“Best regards,

“Mark Boslough”

There are, of course, lot of people besides Boslough whose job it is to think about such things on both a theoretical and practical basis. I’m not one of them.

Rafi Letzter, a staff writer for New York-based Live Science wrote earlier this month:

“If a giant object looks like it’s going to slam into Earth, humanity has a few options: Hammer it with a spacecraft hard enough to knock it off course, blast it with nuclear weapons, tug on it with a gravity tractor, or even slow it down using concentrated sunlight ” (https://www.livescience.com/how-to-stop-asteroid-from-hitting-earth.html)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have come up with an 18-page guide titled “Optimization and decision-making framework for multi-staged asteroid deflection campaigns under epistemic uncertainties” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576519313700?via%3Dihub), also published earlier this month, in the journal Acta Astronautica, to help, in Letzter’s words, “future asteroid deflectors.”

For those taking the longish catastrophic view, rather than the shortish catastrophic view, here’s something to consider:

“If an approaching asteroid were detected early enough,” the  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) says, “it could be possible to divert its path using the gravity of a spacecraft (https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/mitigate/gravity-tractor). “Instead of sending an impactor to ram into an approaching object, a gravity tractor device would fly alongside the asteroid for a long period of time (years to decades) and slowly pull it out of Earth’s path.

Gravity tractors would be most likely to work on any shape or composition of approaching asteroid, even if it were just a pile of rubble. However, gravity tractors might not be effective for the largest asteroids of over 500 meters in diameter which might be the greatest threat to Earth. Gravity tractors offer the greatest control and could perhaps even divert an approaching asteroid to other locations in space where people could theoretically use them for research or commercial purposes. However, these techniques have never been tried and would require decades for building, launching, and carrying out a mitigation mission.”

On March 26, 1997, police in Rancho Santa Fe, California discovered the bodies of 39 members of Heaven’s Gate, an American UFO religious millenarian celibate cult based in San Diego, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles. The 39 cult members who died almost 23 years ago took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce and washed it all down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. Authorities found the dead lying neatly in their own bunk beds, faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth. Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of actress Nichelle Nichols,  best known for her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek television series.

They had participated in the mass suicide in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp, as it approached Earth. They believed an alien spaceship hiding in the tail of a speeding comet was coming to collect their souls.

Earth-threatening asteroids might well be movie or book genres of their own. On the movie side, there are such classics as American science fiction disaster film classic Armageddon from 1998, depicting Bruce Willis et al. saving the Earth. The movie has Harry Stamper (Willis) and his oil rig crew (who are mostly losers who have done time in jail) being hired by NASA as astronauts. Their goal is to drill into an asteroid the size of Texas and deploy a bomb to break it into pieces, before the asteroid hits the Earth.

One of my favourite cover versions of the many that have been done over the years of the song Leaving on a Jet Plane is by Winnipeg’s Chantal Kreviazuk from Armageddon, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and featuring a heartfelt, if somewhat off-key, opening rendition to the song by Ben Affleck from the movie, leading to the delightful mission control quip: “So, Truman, this is who you found to save the planet.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbt2G71uT1M&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1KgfVHJxTwyayZ-pLStZ2H0RSeinmKhRqhPPGxR3L2HcIFj6j8vXbdj5s).

On the book side, I’m partial to Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven. I read the novel an early paperback edition shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on and old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back on weekend trip. A great page-tuner for a cold late autumn bus ride.

This is also around the time Pournelle, an American polymath: scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, as well as noted science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers (https://io9.gizmodo.com/rip-jerry-pournelle-a-tireless-ambassador-for-the-futu-1803143871) became perhaps the first writer from any genre to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher.  Jerry Pournelle, early adopter, died in September 2017 at the age of 84.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Life in the Circumpolar North: Winter living with a sense of joie de vivre and koselig

Monday, Monday. Winter is set to arrive here in Northern Manitoba on winter solstice, Monday, Dec. 21 at 10:49 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) – which is just eight minutes shy of seven hours after sunset at 3:57 p.m. that day.

The term solstice comes from the Latin word solstitium, meaning “the sun stands still.” This is because on this day, the sun reaches its southern-most position as seen from the Earth. The sun seems to stand still at the Tropic of Capricorn and then reverses its direction. It’s also known as the day the Sun turns around, and in the Northern Hemisphere, astronomers and scientists use the winter solstice Dec. 21 to mark the start of winter season, which ends with the spring equinox Saturday, March 19 at 11:31 p.m. Central Daylight Time (CDT).

Here in Thompson at 55.7433° N latitude, no matter what the official dates for the winter solstice and spring equinox may be, we know quite literally in our bones that we have really long, cold winters and on average there are about 140 frost-free days each year. New arrivals to Thompson and environs are sometimes surprised their first year here to learn Feb. 2 (Groundhog Day), the day when those furry prognosticators – Punxsutawney Phil in Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, Shubenacadie Sam in Nova Scotia and Wiarton Willie in Ontario – predict either four or six more weeks of winter, depending on whether they see their shadows when they emerge from their burrows, really doesn’t have any resonance beyond wishful thinking here. Winter ending in early or late March in Thompson? Six more weeks of winter only from Feb. 2? Yes, bring it on.

As Thompson oldtimers sometimes tell newcomers: “You might want to consider making friends with winter since it lasts about eight months of the year here.” A slight – but not great – exaggeration. Having spent most of the 21st century living to date in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and Thompson in Manitoba, which Macleans magazine, using  Environment Canada, dated, ranked respectively as being number one and number two on their list of “The 10 coldest cities in Canada,” I have some notion of what it means to live in the North.

The North can be defined several ways. Quite often it is quite simply referred to as just that – the North. There is also the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, consisting of 94 major islands and 36,469 minor islands, which aside from Greenland that is almost entirely ice covered, forms the world’s largest High Arctic land area. There is also the Circumpolar North.

The idea of a Circumpolar North was something that caught my imagination in 2001 after I moved from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories. While the Arctic Circle, which I’ve crossed en route to places in the Mackenzie Delta, including the historically-Gwich’in founded community of Tetlit’Zheh (Fort McPherson) at 67.4353° N, Inuvik at 68.3617° and Tuktoyaktuk at 69.4428° N, is rather clearly defined as a circle of latitude that runs 66°33′45.9 N north of the equator, marking the southernmost latitude where the sun can stay continuously below or above the horizon for 24 hours – phenomena known as the Midnight Sun in summer and Polar Night in the depths of a deep and dark December, the Circumpolar North is partly a land of the imagination and a state of being, not quite so precisely defined by geographic lines of latitude, although it generally includes in Canada all that is North of 60, including the islands of the High Arctic, and the remainder of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories, plus those parts of northeastern Quebec and central Labrador settled by the Innu.

In the United States, the Circumpolar North is defined to include Alaska, except for the Southeast Alaska Panhandle. The Circumpolar North also is made up of Denmark, including Greenland, and the Faroe Islands; Iceland; Norway, including the archipelago of Svalbard; Sweden; Finland; the European Arctic south to the Arctic Circle; and the Russian Federation south to 63°N in European Russia and to 57° N in Asia, including all of the Kamchatka peninsula and Sakhalin Island.

Copenhagen at 55.6761° N is incredibly close latitudinally to Thompson, Manitoba at 55.7433° N, but neither are quite part of the Circumpolar North geographically. But imaginatively, one might make the argument. In winter, Northern Manitoba is vast land of isolation, ice roads, early sunsets and late sunrises. Copenhagen is not so different with short days during the winter with sunrise coming around 9:30 a.m. and sunset about 4:30 p.m.

One December day in 2001, living within sight of the western shore of Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife, I got a sense of how imaginatively the lives of the peoples of the Circumpolar North are weaved together, between glances out my balcony window before 3 p.m. darkness fell and watching Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the delightful 1997 Danish thriller starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Harris, based on the 1992 novel Frøken Smillas fornemmelse by Danish author Peter Høeg, with both the book and the film telling the story of a transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson, who investigates the mysterious death of a small Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Clues send her not just around Copenhagen, including the Hotel d’Angleterre, but also to Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden in Lapland, and Ilulissat in western Greenland.

And while American poet T.S. Eliot told us that “April is the cruelest month” when he wrote The Waste Land, he seems to have been silent on the issue of November, which the Meteorological Service of Canada at Environment Canada in Winnipeg assures is still usually the snowiest month of the year with one average 35.4 centimetres of snow. At least on average. Usually.

When it comes to permafrost, there was no evidence of the existence of it here in Thompson until work started on the townsite in 1957. Then there was plenty of evidence, as permafrost was encountered at many locations in “scattered islands underlying somewhat less than 50 per cent of the townsite,” as noted by Robert M. Hardy, originally from Winnipeg, and co-founder of R.M. Hardy and Associates Ltd. in Edmonton, the only engineering firm in Alberta to offer geotechnical services at the time, and K.S. Goodman, manager of K.S. Goodman, Materials Testing Laboratories Ltd. in Calgary, in their paper “Permafrost Occurrence and Associated Problems at Thompson, Manitoba.”

Hardy and Goodman’s paper was presented at the National Research Council of Canada’s Associate Committee on Soil and Snow Mechanics Proceedings of the First Canadian Conference on Permafrost in Ottawa on April 17-18, 1962.

We are roughly 240 kilometres south of the line, which approximates the southern limit of continuous permafrost, as shown in the Climatological Atlas of Canada, and about 80 kilometres north of the southern limit of permafrost. But global warming may be causing the southern limit of permafrost to shift further north, meaning less permafrost here in Thompson, making some additional homebuilding on Wekusko Street, Arctic Drive and Char Bay, considered inadvisable 20 years ago, finally feasible within the last six or seven years.

How about the “average weather” for Thompson? Over the course of a year, the temperature typically varies from -29°C to 23°C and is rarely below -39°C or above 28°C. Remember, we’re talking averages now, not temperatures for a specific winter.

The “warm season” (again, a relative term) lasts from May 24 to Sept. 11 with an average daily high temperature above 15°C. The hottest day of the year is on average July 20, with an average high of 23°C and low of 10°C. The coldest day of the year on average is Jan. 15, with an average low of -29°C and high of -19°C

James Diebel, an American, and Jacob Norda, a Swede, who both live in the San Francisco Bay area, can be thanked for these fascinating Thompson weather facts available through their WeatherSpark website at: http://weatherspark.com/averages/28377/Thompson-Manitoba-Canada. Diebel, born and raised in Wisconsin, who has a bachelor’s degree in engineering mechanics and astronautics, and mathematics from University of Wisconsin, and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University, and Norda, born and raised in Sweden, who holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Linköping Institute of Technology, teamed up and started Vector Magic, now known as Cedar Lake Ventures, Inc., in December 2007. The weather facts are based on historical records from 1988 to 2012.

How best to live in the Circumpolar North or the North, however, one wishes to define it? With a sense of joie de vivre – joy of living, I think.

Oulu in Finland, which at 65.0167° N is about 1,600 kilometres farther north than Thompson and located just 200 kilometres below the Arctic Circle, is the sixth largest city in Finland with 141,000 residents, and played host to the first-ever two-day international Winter Cycling Congress in 2013. The second congress was in Winnipeg in February 2014.

I remember back in February 2011 reading about Bruce Krentz’s bet with Harold Smith, a former City of Thompson councillor and executive director for Manitoba Housing and Community Development’s northern housing operations, who challenged him to use active transportation commensurate with getting to his new job as health promotion co-ordinator with the Burntwood Regional Health Authority (now the Northern Regional Health Authority). “He said, ‘Really, you should walk the walk,’” Krentz said at the time. “I sort of made the commitment that I would bike all year.” Smith said he didn’t expect Krentz to use a bike as his method of transportation. “To be honest, when I threw down that challenge I was really thinking about him walking, not cycling,” said Smith, who noted in 2011 he wasn’t surprised that Krentz had stuck with the plan. “Bruce has a history of sticking with things, especially the crazier ones.”

That’s interesting, I thought. Sounds like Bruce. And Harold. Frankly, it didn’t hold any appeal to me personally, although I had been doing a good deal of fair weather riding from mid-April through early November since my arrival in Thompson in 2007.

Circumstances, however, can change and so last year when my circumstances changed, I changed my mind about winter biking in Thompson. Which is why you might spot me wearing my trademark-like red helmet, white front and rear red MEC lights flashing, courtesy of Jeanette, as I at first carefully nudge my way over the short city-owned public footpath connecting the 200-block of Juniper Drive to the back of Southwood Shopping Plaza on Thompson Drive South, before reaching the paved two-lane multi-use boulevard pathway for pedestrians and cyclists that delivers me to work at the Thompson campus library of the University College of the North (UCN).

The Norwegians, Circumpolar North residents that they are, have something to teach us, too.

Laura Vanderkam, in a Nov. 6 Fast Company online magazine piece headlined “The Norwegian Secret To Enjoying A Long Winter: Residents of Norway view their long dark winters as something to celebrate. How it’s possible to be cheerful for the next four months,” outlined the Norwegian notion of koselig, “that means a sense of coziness. It’s like the best parts of Christmas, without all the stress. People light candles, light fires, drink warm beverages, and sit under fuzzy blankets. There’s a community aspect to it too; it’s not just an excuse to sit on the couch watching Netflix.”  You can link to the article here at: http://www.fastcompany.com/3052970/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/the-norwegian-secret-to-enjoying-a-long-winter

Lorelou Desjardins, who pens the Norwegian Frog in the Fjord blog, says, in fact, koselig is more even then being cosy. “Most English speakers translate it by ‘cosy’ but that term doesn’t even begin to cover everything that ‘koselig’ can express,” Desjardins writes at: http://afroginthefjord.com/2014/02/02/how-to-make-things-koselig/

“This concept is difficult to translate to those who do not live here, but basically anything can (and should) be koselig: a house, a conversation, a dinner, a person. It defines something/someone /an atmosphere that makes you feel a sense of warmth very deep inside in a way that all things should be: simple and comforting.”

Kari Leibowitz, a PhD student at Stanford University, spent August 2014 to last June on a Fulbright scholarship in Tromsø in northern Norway – a place “so far north that from late November to late January, the sun never climbs above the horizon,” Vanderkam notes in her Fast Company article.

Leibowitz studied the residents’ overall mental health, because rates of seasonal depression were lower than one might expect.

“At first, she was asking ‘Why aren’t people here more depressed?’ and if there were lessons that could be taken elsewhere. But once she was there, ‘I sort of realized that that was the wrong question to be asking,’ she says. When she asked people ‘Why don’t you have seasonal depression?’ the answer was “Why would we?'”

Vanderkam says that Leibowitz found that it “turns out that in northern Norway, ‘people view winter as something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured,’ and that makes all the difference.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22