NOVA: “Meteor Strike” (WGBH, PBS, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched two more programs on PBS, including a NOVA episode on asteroids and the threat of them crashing into earth. It turned out to be a “golden oldie,” first aired March 27, 2013, and the original title didn’t even contain the “A”-word; it was “Meteor Strike.” I must admit I get a creepy feeling whenever NOVA’s opening credits come on and we’re told this show is funded by the “David H. Koch Fund for the Advancement of Science,” because the (blessedly) deceased David Koch was famous, along with his brother Charles, for running political action committees and donating millions of dollars of their own and other people’s money to Republican candidates who, among other things, pledged to make sure the government doesn’t do anything to combat human-caused climate change. In essence their PAC’s were the David H. Koch Fund Against the Advancement of Science. It’s also not surprising, given who was paying the bills, that the NOVA “Meteor Strike” program spent 40 minutes or so warning us of the dangers of asteroid collisions with Earth and then suggested at the end that we should figure out how to get to the asteroids and mine them for their mineral riches – remember that the Koch family made their money in fossil-fuel extraction and so they’ve had a personal, as well as an ideological, reason to oppose any changeover to renewable energy sources.

Given David Koch’s Libertarian leanings – he was a founding member of the Libertarian Party and literally bought their vice-presidential nomination in 1972 before realizing that under the U.S. political system working in alternative parties is a useless enterprise and he’d be better off buying influence in the Republican Party than starting a new one – it’s not surprising that the solution this show hailed to the problem of how to spot asteroids in space before they come dangerously close to earth and while there’s still potentially time to destroy or divert them was a new privately funded satellite that would orbit the sun about where Venus does so its telescopes could “see” asteroids that are hidden from view through earth observatories because the sun blinds us to them. (The giveaway that this was an old program was the announcer saying that this craft was scheduled to be launched in 2018. I have no idea whether it actually was or not.) The main inspiration for this program was an event that occurred just before it was made: a meteor crash in Chelyabinsk, Siberia that happened in a sufficiently populated area people were able to film it with cell phones. They showed windows popping out of buildings, cars literally blown across streets, and other damage done by ferocious releases of energy, including trees uprooted from their trunks and blown about like they were toothpicks.

There had been an earlier crash, also in Siberia, in 1908, and while that one wasn’t filmed when it happened Russian crews sent movie cameras there about 20 years later and, among other things, photographed the stacks of uprooted trees that were still there. Apparently that one was even worse than the 2013 incident in Chelyabinsk because the Chelyabinsk asteroid came in on a sideways trajectory while the 1908 asteroid went straight down, like a bomb, and would have caused large numbers of human casualties if there’d been any people living in the area, which fortunately there weren’t. They also showed the meteor crater in Arizona and mentioned the growing scientific consensus that the reason the dinosaurs died out was that 65 million years ago the earth was struck by a runaway asteroid of such huge size it changed the climate almost instantly and created a mass extinction in which 90 percent of all species then living on the planet were wiped out by the sudden climate change – including the immense amount of smoke and particulates in the air that blotted out most of the sun’s energy and thereby made it virtually impossible for all but the smallest, simplest plants to grow. (I remember reading a New Yorker article several years ago that explained this theory, and the evidence for it, in great detail.) This NOVA episode suffered from the golly-gee-whillikers tone of all too many science programs, but at least it was interesting and the attempts of scientists to build model asteroids and fire projectiles at them, then film the results with ultra-slow-motion cameras were fascinating. They suggested that the best thing to do with a runaway asteroid hurtling towards Earth is not to try to blow it up – the pieces might still be large enough to cause major damage – but to use projectiles to divert it away from Earth and onto a different course so it remains a harmless object in space.