Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147)

by William E. Burrows

  Homer (if it was Homer) was among the first, at least in the West, to glorify those traits in the Iliad and then in the Odyssey, in which Odysseus is triumphant over his powerful and implacable enemy, Polyphemus the Cyclops (the one-eyed son of Poseidon, god of the sea), because of his bravery and tenacity. Odysseus speaks of the transcendent virtue of literally as well as figuratively staying the course (or hanging in, as we have come to call it):

  Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, Even so I will endure…. For already have I suffered full much, And much have I toiled in perils of waves and war. Let this be added to the tale of those.2

  Given time (and returning home to domestic tranquility), the veteran of the war with the Trojans might have organized a coalition among all the city-states that would have protected them from the Cyclops and ultimately killed it with a system that could have been called SEAGUARD. Homer would have appreciated what Arthur C. Clarke wrote in a distinctly similar vein, so it bears repeating:

  Six hundred thousand people died, and the total damage was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to history, to science—to the whole human race, for the rest of time—was beyond all computation. It was as if a great war had been fought and lost in a single morning…. After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a determination and a unity that no earlier age could have shown. Such a disaster, it was realized, might not occur again for a thousand year—but it might occur tomorrow. And the next time, the consequences could be even worse. Very well: there would be no next time…So began Project SPACEGUARD.3

  That is ennobling. It is what makes Darwin not just scientifically important but, on a subtle level, inspiring. Survival of the fittest creatures is accomplished not by chance but through superiority; by a determination to overcome mortal challenges and either coexist within the environment or, if sheer existence is threatened, to dominate, vanquish, or destroy the challenger. The long history of warfare offers innumerable examples of the fate of those who lacked the will or capability to assure their survival and freedom. They were at the mercy of the enemy when war came, and the price they paid was subjugation, ruination, and often death.

  Clarke and other science fiction writers have transgressed war between nations—mere political entities; the new city-states—and shown that the whole planet is at war with nature, with its environment, and has been since its creation. In that grand scheme of things, military conflicts between “sovereign” states are trivial since, where nature is concerned, they are in fact not sovereign at all. Ultimately, they exist at the whim of the outer world, of the universe, that surrounds them. They are simultaneously nurtured by nature and at war with it, and the weapons that are arrayed against them extend from infectious microbes to some creatures on land and sea, to the weather, to the bowels of the planet itself, and to the large projectiles from space that constitute the hail of bullets. The large rocks and comets are the most interesting because, unlike diseases, they come from somewhere else—other worlds—so they are exotic, and there is no possibility of inoculation (at least not yet, if that metaphor is valid). And they are by far the most dangerous, even when all-out nuclear war is taken into account, since only one of them could end everything.

  Clarke, who was highly knowledgeable about science and the environment in which Earth exists, understood that. So did Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein who, with Clarke, were the scientifically informed triumvirate of what is now called the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Clarke's The Exploration of Space, The Exploration of the Moon, The Making of a Moon, and The Promise of Space, among many other nonfiction works, initiated untold millions into the space fold and its infinite dimensions.

  So did a science fiction masterpiece called 2001: A Space Odyssey, a novel that grew out of a short story called “The Sentinel.” Film producer Stanley Kubrick picked up the novel and, along with Clarke, turned it into a film of the same name. The story is about a mission to Jupiter in which there are encounters with mysterious black monoliths that seem to be affecting human evolution. But there is a dramatic subplot about one of man's robotic creations, ostensibly his computerized mechanical servant, HAL 9000, that rebels and tries to assert its superiority by attempting to kill two astronauts while they are outside the spaceship on a mission beyond Jupiter. It succeeds in killing one of them, but the other makes it back inside with the other astronaut's corpse and methodically disconnects HAL's wiring while it gently pleads for its life to no avail. It was an effective dramatization of the old theme of humankind's robotic creations rebelling, thinking for themselves, and turning on their masters, which was started by Mary Shelley when she published Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus in 1818. The film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose screenplay was written by Kubrick and Clarke, had mixed reviews but developed a cult following when it came out in 1968. Perhaps this was partly because, by sheer coincidence, it was followed by three astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission who became the first humans to see the far side of the Moon and an earthrise beyond the lunar horizon. They sent home television pictures of it for all the world to experience. The short story “The Sentinel,” the full-length novel derived from it, and the subsequent classic film stand as examples that show what imaginative and resourceful humans can do to survive their own technology and an intensely hostile environment.

  That environment was described in harrowing detail by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in Lucifer's Hammer, which was published in 1977 and, thus, among the first works of fiction to try to anticipate how the survivors on a planet that is nearly annihilated handle the cataclysm and adapt to what it causes: a new ice age. In Lucifer's Hammer, a comet is spotted by a wealthy amateur astronomer named Tim Hamner and turned into a potential media event when it is determined that the boiling ice will pass close to Earth. After its discovery, a California senator named Arthur Jellison gets an Apollo-Soyuz mission to study “The Hammer,” as it is christened by the news media.

  But then the comet breaks up, dumbfounding professional astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who were unable to track it, and it hits Earth like buckshot. Large chunks strike parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Those that hit land set off volcanoes and start earthquakes around the world, including one along the San Andreas Fault that severely damages California. To make matters worse, the ones that hit the oceans cause tsunamis, inundating coastal cities, including Los Angeles, and millions perish. Hundreds of millions of hapless men, women, and children are exterminated around the world like vermin. Plagues break out and the climate changes, causing weeks of rain, which leads to flooding that wipes out crops and that, in turn, forces otherwise decent folks to scavenge, steal, use weapons for self-protection, eat rats and human corpses, and ultimately resort to cannibalism. Fearing that the new ice age is going to send desperate Russians south for warmth and food, China launches a preemptive nuclear attack on Russians cities, but the Caucasians stick together in the face of another Yellow Peril. Russia and the United States retaliate, effectively destroying China.

  Meanwhile, Senator Jellison and other landowners create fiefdoms within his “Stronghold” in which ordinary workers are forced into subsistence farming like serfs while an evangelist named Henry Armitage teaches that The Hammer's arrival signals the joyful End Times. That is a theme that will recur in both apocalyptic fiction and fact. Jellison takes advantage of the crisis to become the Stronghold's strongman. He seizes control of the remnants of the US Army and, with bikers and other gang members, starts the New Brotherhood Army, which is headquartered in the Stronghold and maintains order through military discipline. Jellison has made himself the lord and master of his world. In that situation, the status of the police is diminished, and since he now makes the law, lawyers are unnecessary. But Hamner and his wife, Eileen, are determined to endure the carnage. And they do, showing that the survival instinct can triumph over even a cosmic catastrophe like being hit with the devil's gigantic hammer.r />
  Reviewing Lucifer's Hammer for Library Journal, Judith T. Yamamoto said that it was full of “good, solid science, a gigantic but well developed and coordinated cast of characters, and about a megaton of suspenseful excitement.” She remarked that the pro-technology pitch might turn off some readers, but “all in all it's a good book, if not a great one.”4

  Many readers agreed. “This is 5-star sci-fi all the way! If all you read is the first 100 pages, however, you probably won't agree with that. You see, the first part of the book is a bit slow in getting moving, but that's because the authors introduce a whole string of characters [who] interact with one another as the story unfolds. And once the action starts, it doesn't stop. In fact, it makes you want to store some food, some water, some other things…and get ready for what COULD happen,” one wrote to Amazon.

  As I started reading this book, I thought to myself, this book has many similarities with the movie Deep Impact. Was I ever wrong with that assumption! This book goes way beyond Deep Impact. It goes beyond it in that this book is not so much about events surrounding a comet-earth collision as it is about the aftermath, and how people do or do not cope with that kind of calamity. Imagine this…world-wide cataclysmic events wipe out the major governments on the planet—national, state, and local governments collapse, and people are left to fend for themselves. What will they do for food, shelter, personal safety, information, etc.? It's a whole new ballgame out there! The kinds of challenges described in the book bring out the best in some people, the worst in others, and trapped in the middle of everything that's happening are the characters you'll come to know quite well.5

  “The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high,” a reviewer in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, who seems to have savored the calamity, reported appreciatively. “Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival—a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known.”6

  Clarke brought his own hammer to science fiction, though he chose to protect Earth from terrible destruction by pushing the approaching devastator off course rather than forcing the planet to endure it and survive, as Niven and Pournelle had (he had read Lucifer's Hammer). That, of course, is precisely what NASA, the US Air Force, the world's other space agencies, and the international space community, very much including the B612 Foundation, want to do.

  And he did it in The Hammer of God, which was published in 1993, nine years before the B612 Foundation came to be, and was only the second work of fiction to be published in Time magazine. Like Niven and Pournelle, he used the hammer analogy in that book and in Rendezvous with Rama, the latter of which is about a huge alien spacecraft heading toward Earth that is at first mistaken for very big rock. Clarke opened with what is effectively a brief prologue about what happened at Tunguska and then turned it into fiction. “Moving at fifty kilometers a second, a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy, destroying in a few flaming moments the labor of centuries. The cities of Padua and Verona were wiped from the face of the Earth; and the last glories of Venice sank forever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic came thundering landward after the hammer blow from space.”7 Hammers are for pounding things, after all, from nails to planets.

  The seed that sprouted into The Hammer of God seems to have been planted by Zanoguera and Penfield's discovery of the crater at Chicxulub, followed by the Alvarezes’ work there. Clarke knew father and son and wrote this “puff” (as he put it) for the jacket of Luis Alvarez's autobiography:

  And now he's engaged on his most spectacular piece of scientific detection, as he unravels the biggest whodunit of all time—the extinction of the dinosaurs. He and his son Walter are sure they've found the murder weapon in the Crime of the Eons….

  Since Luis's death, the evidence for at least one major meteor (or small asteroid) impact has accumulated, and several possible sites have been identified—the current favorite being a buried crater, 180 kilometers across, at Chicxulub, on the Yucatan Peninsula.

  Some geologists are still fighting stubbornly for a purely terrestrial explanation of the dinosaur extinction (e.g., volcanoes), and it may well turn out that there is truth in both hypotheses. But the Meteor Mafia appears to be winning, if only because its scenario is much the most dramatic.8

  With Clarke's words in mind, it's not hard to see the connections between the Alvarezes’ work and The Hammer of God. The novel takes place in 2110, when a spaceship called Goliath is sent out to meet an asteroid named Kali that is discovered by an amateur astronomer on Mars to be heading in the direction of Earth. The astronomer, Dr. Angus Millar, is bored because there are no exotic diseases on Mars as there are on Earth. (In fiction, amateur astronomers apparently discover more threatening objects in space than professionals do—“When Worlds Collide” being a notable exception—perhaps because that adds an element to the story with which average readers, who may be intimidated by professional astronomers, can readily identify.) Recalling how excited he had been as a boy in 2061, when he saw Halley's Comet return, he builds an instrumented telescope and notices the approaching big rock, a potential Earth-annihilator:

  It was an asteroid, just beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Dr. Millar set the computer to calculate its approximate orbit, and was surprised to find that Myrna—as he decided to call it—came quite close to Earth. That made it slightly more interesting.

  He was never able to get the name recognized. Before the IAU could approve it, additional observations had given a much more accurate orbit.

  And then only one name was possible: Kali, the goddess of destruction.

  Kali is the name of the Hindu goddess of empowerment, which is to say, of life and death. And The IAU is the International Astronomical Union, a real organization headquartered in Paris, France.

  Clarke was certain to add to his credibility by adroitly basing his fiction on certifiable fact, which would impress both those who knew the science and those who did not but appreciated it, however abstractly. This simple but powerful message made the point up front:

  All the events set in the past happened at the times and places stated: all those set in the future are possible. And one is certain. Sooner or later, we will meet Kali.

  Indeed. There is absolute agreement among professional astronomers and virtually everyone in the international space community that, asteroid and comet traffic in the neighborhood being what it is, it is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when.

  And, like Niven and Pournelle, Clarke effectively used religion as an evil counterpoint to the attempt to save Earth from the Apocalypse. The believers in God are diabolical fanatics who call themselves “The Reborn” and who try to sabotage the mission because they want Kali to destroy Earth. They want the Apocalypse because they will be able to shed their bodies, their physical existence, so their Lord will grant their spirits eternal life in heaven. They are therefore convinced that trying to head off Kali and save the planet is not good but blatantly sinful. For those who want to be reborn, Kali is God's messenger and their savior, so trying to prevent the collision is considered sacrilegious and reprehensible. As usual, Clarke did his homework. This is from 2 Peter 3:10–13 in the King James Bible: “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

  As all fiction writers know, the old hackneyed expression still applies: there can be no good without evil and no gripping story without conflict. Imagine US marshal Will Kane turning in his badge and riding that buggy out of town for a honeymoon with his Quaker pacifist bride in High Noon, with Frank Miller and his brothers still heading for town to gun Kane down.
The beleaguered lawman is in a very tense situation, since he is substantially outnumbered and outgunned and must fight his enemy or risk being killed.

  So must Earthlings as Goliath's skipper, Captain Robert Singh (not uncoincidentally, another Indian) reflects on the religious zealots. “Now that he was forced to think about the previously unthinkable, it was not so astonishing after all. Almost every decade, right through human history, self-proclaimed prophets had predicted that the world would come to an end on some given date. What was astonishing—and made one despair for the sanity of the species—was that they usually collected thousands of adherents, who sold all their no-longer-needed possessions, and waited at some appointed place to be taken up to heaven. Though many of the ‘Millennialists’ had been imposters, most had sincerely believed their own predictions. And if they had possessed the power, could it be doubted that, if God had failed to cooperate, they would have arranged a self-fulfilling prophecy?”9

  Clarke would have been aware of the fact that there was another book called The Hammer of God that, ironically, had been written by one of the religionists he scorned and made villainous in his own book. It was authored by a Swedish Lutheran bishop named Bo Giertz and was published in 1960 as a defense of the Gospel, which is to say unwavering orthodox Christian faith against the inroads of the dreaded liberals and their freethinking, which he considered deplorable. He argued for the absolute power of God's word over spiritual deadness and rationalism, which he thought was a handicap because it is contrary to the sheer joy and salvation that come with faith. It is actually faith, not rationality, that is liberating. Giertz's The Hammer of God took its title from Jeremiah 23:29, “Is not my word like a fire? Says the Lord. And like a hammer that breaks the rock into pieces?”10 Giertz would be all but deified by The Reborn.