One of these days, a seriously substantial piece of the cosmos is going to hit us. It’s not really a speculative event, other than the date and time. I mean a real and devastating asteroid impact or comet strike like that thought to have taken out the dinosaurs and a significant percentage of other Earthly life, too. As things stand now, we aren’t ready. As a species, we’re not even close to getting ready.
Without being prepared for this, we face actual extinction. I have a number of feelings about the matter. Trepidation over the future. Some fear of the horror and shock of the event. Pity and remorse for those that will suffer short, brutal lives after the impact. And anger. True anger that smolders about this – We KNOW it is going to happen. We are doing very, very little about mitigating the impacts, and if science and intelligentsia truly embrace natural selection, this massive blind spot in our species’ survival would make you think otherwise.
We need to do at least one of these things:
- Figure out how to deflect or destroy the big rocks and snowballs headed our way.
- Get some minimum sustainable percentage of our species spread about the Solar system.
Precious little is being done in either realm, and what is indeed being done is taking too long and bearing far too little fruit. All our efforts in every other human endeavor will mean nothing if much of it is turned to plasma, or torn apart and scattered. And even if the heritage survives, it means so very little if we no longer exist to improve upon it, or learn from it.
This is not to say that all is lost, it’s over, we’re toast. Those things are true only if we allow it. There are people and groups out there that do see the urgency and are working the problem. Outbound is going to initiate a new active mission phase: Hammerstrike Denial. We’re going to promote and enhance any group, any mission that credibly resists the consequences of the inevitable Hammerstrike.
Why the term “Hammerstrike”? There’s an excellent novel named Lucifer’s Hammer, written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in 1977, dealing dramatically and realistically with the events of a hypothetical cometary impact. The comet in discussion is dubbed “The Hammer”. The story is a very entertaining piece of science fiction, but more than that, it was written as a serious cautionary tale of just a relatively small impact event. I would recommend the book to anyone, both as a gripping tale and as an educational tool.
Humanity thinks itself the current dominant species on Earth, the most intelligent and technologically resourceful. Given the certainty of a Hammerstrike in the future, we need to start proving our reputation, and right now.