The Asteroid That Came and is Still Here

So, my favorite asteroid 2007 TU24 has passed us by and nothing really happened. No firestorms erupted, no light show, no sudden shifts in the weather, no plasma power surges, and definitely no hard disks were wiped clean. But we all already knew that, didn't we?

Actually, the asteroid is still here. It can still be seen, not with a naked eye, of course, but you just might be able to see it if your eye was fully clothed*. It is pretty far away so it's following a languid arc through our sky and it's going to take it another couple of days to completely saunter out of our line of sight. So, if it were likely to cause the destruction and mayhem that many people had been so hyper about, we would have started seeing the effects a few days earlier.

But you got to admit: those of you who read my last post and did not know about the asteroid went ahead and googled it, right? I know for sure that at least one of you did. And it was scary, wasn't it? What if the asteroid had actually hit Earth? What if it did wipe out all the hard disks in the world? Can you imagine what that would do to our civilization? I think that maybe it won't be such a bad thing after all. Maybe an external threat common to the whole world might nudge us to drop our petty differences amongst each other and learn to live in peace and harmony. But the problem with us is that we get distracted too easily, and we tend to forget disasters too quickly. Our distraction comes from the trivialities of life, such as food, and we forget about what is more important in an instant. The riots following BB's assassination distracted us from Guljee's murder and crippled Karachi, but we have forgotten about both these events and are now carrying on with the same routine life that we had before. In this vein, one cannot help but wonder how we would take the news of such mind bogglingly large and impending doom lurking on our heads. Would the whole world unite for the first time in history to combat a common... hey my pizza is here! I haven't eaten all day. I am so hungry. So, what was I talking about?

*This is just a joke. Please don't force your eyes to wear a suit . Use a telescope instead. It's easier and you won't blind yourself trying to zip up a cornea.