Last Thursday, Bill Morrissey stepped out of his home in Bettendorf into the frigid midnight air to take his trash out to the curb. But halfway there, he stopped in his tracks, stunned, as a ball of fire streaked across the night sky. The event was recorded on his security camera, showing the meteor burn a trail to the horizon and quietly disappear. The American Meteor Society received 130 reports of the incident from Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Wisconsin and Iowa. This was a major celestial event across six states and only 130 people noticed and were impressed enough to report it.
Five thousand years ago, a meteor like that would have been big news. There would have been high council meetings with tribal leaders and shamans interpreting the significance and planning a course of action, maybe even recording the event with illustrations carved in stone as a warning to future generations. But we modern humans stay huddled in our warm houses, watching our TV’s and computers and when we do venture out into the open air, we rarely even look up.
It’s not like we’ve outgrown the reason to fear meteors and other large flaming objects crashing to Earth. Take Asteroid 7482. It’s 3,280 feet in diameter and recently came pretty darned close (astronomically speaking) to colliding with our home planet and vaporizing a major city or two. And for all our dazzling technology, there was nothing we could have done about it.
On Christmas Day, NASA launched the $10 billion James Webb space telescope. It’s basically a time machine, peering back 13 billion years or so to the beginning of the universe. Because light travels at only 671 million miles an hour, the Webb will just now be seeing astronomical spectacles that occurred a very long time ago. You can imagine aliens living on exoplanets, watching us on Earth, entertained by the clever way we hunt wooly mammoths.
Stonehenge, England’s monolithic observatory is basically a 5,000-year-old version of the Webb space telescope. It let people on Earth know what was going on in the stars and had the added benefit of telling them what time of year it was so they would know when to plant crops. It couldn’t tell Stone Age communities if there was life on other planets but I doubt if it would have mattered much to them. If the Webb telescope ever does discover life on distant planets, or worlds habitable for human life, that knowledge will be largely academic. Currently the nearest possibly habitable planet is Kepler 452b, 1,400 light-years from Earth. That means if astronauts hopped into one of our speediest spacecrafts, traveling at 36,000 miles-an-hour, they would arrive in about 26 million years. And by then, Kepler 452b might not be so appealing—or Earth either, for that matter.
The Webb telescope will do its best, but it can’t keep an eye on the entire sky. So, in case it happens to be looking the other way when a big asteroid is heading for Earth or there is an alien invasion, let’s hope Bill Morrissey is taking out the trash that day and lets us all know.