On being unfriendly
There is a rock out there in space.
The Mercans in typical fashion decided to throw a refrigerator at it.
In my opinion, this isn’t a very friendly sort of act and rather crass. Hey! Look. A stranger. Let’s heave a brick at him. Maybe that rock was home to some species [albeit a rather small species] when suddenly, for no reason at all, a lump of metal comes flying out of space and smashes into them. That’s not very friendly?
There is a little potential problem with this unprovoked attack. The Mercans admitted that they didn’t really know what they were doing. They didn’t know if their act of vandalism was going to affect the rock, and that if it did, then they didn’t know by how much.
Now, the rock has been hurtling through space, minding its own business and had planned to miss Earth by a wide margin. However by disturbing the delicate equilibrium of the rock and its big brother maybe they have changed things for the worse? They admitted they had unexpected consequences from their little experiment – they have significantly changed Little Rock’s orbit around Big Rock, and this in turn must affect Big Rock’s trajectory. Or maybe the Mercans aren’t familiar with Newton’s laws? That wouldn’t surprise me.
So these two little space nomads could now be heading towards us? Frankly I wouldn’t blame them. If someone threw a refrigerator at me, I’d want to throw something back. I don’t want someone’s junk landing on top of me.
Frank Davis would have loved this.
In my mind I am seeing the Clangers combined with Wallace And Gromit’s Grand Day Out.
Cue slide whistles and swannee whistles.
Indeed. There is something farcical about chucking a lump of metal at a lump of rock just to see what happens. Kids’ programs could have a field day.
It sounds like something from the pen of Richard Adams.
There will be some peaceful planet in deep space that has enjoyed thousands of years of civilisation that will be hit by a lump of rock that should have missed them by half a galaxy before it was diverted by primitives.
I saw you were inspired! 😀
As a slight aside, it’s astonishing how much stuff is, has been launched to up in space, in orbits around our Earth.
And they track debris too. But it’s such a cloud that if any aliens were speeding by they could hardly fail to notice it.
https://ajmas.github.io/ThingsInSpace/
If you have a two button & scroll wheel mouse, you can both grab it with the left button mouse and twirl it around, up, down, around, and zoom in and out with the scroll wheel.
Every satellite is labeled… except for a few TBA to be announced. You can search.
Perhaps on StarLink ? I had no luck this time, but I did find them on the old site.
This is a spin-off from the old site which went off line, carried on it seems, remarked on here.
https://satellitespy.net/my-satellite-knowhow/stuff-in-space/
Holy shit! There is a hell of a lot of junk out there. I see the vast majority are just marked as ‘debris’ which says a lot about us?
I find spaceweather.com a useful source for information on things like solar storms and bits of space rock heading our way. Mind you, things like the Chelyabinsk bolide never register because they come in at such a speed and angle of incidence that earth bound radars and detection equipment only get five minutes notice that something big and unpleasant this way comes.
It’s always the ones you don’t see that’ll getcha.
That is not a site for the fainthearted! Personally I would not like to be stuck on a train track waiting for the next train to come. I would prefer to sit there and pretend it’s a disused line. Anyway, what the hell can anyone do in five minutes?