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| The meaning of meteors | The meaning of meteors |
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| There was a time when people only watched the skies to see the calm or stormy movement of clouds, or the revolutions of the celestial spheres, or the clockwork solar system that eventually replaced them. At the end of the Age of Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson may not have been as sceptical about meteors – "easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven" – as legend tells us, but he certainly found the whole idea unlikely. Even as late as 1943, Michael Innes could write a deliberately absurd detective story, The Weight of the Evidence, in which the murder weapon was a meteorite, dropped on an elderly academic from a tower. | There was a time when people only watched the skies to see the calm or stormy movement of clouds, or the revolutions of the celestial spheres, or the clockwork solar system that eventually replaced them. At the end of the Age of Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson may not have been as sceptical about meteors – "easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven" – as legend tells us, but he certainly found the whole idea unlikely. Even as late as 1943, Michael Innes could write a deliberately absurd detective story, The Weight of the Evidence, in which the murder weapon was a meteorite, dropped on an elderly academic from a tower. |
| But now we are aware that our planet sits in far from empty space, with heavenly billiard balls perpetually about to carom off it. Luis Alvarez determined, from layers of dust and a big hole in Mexico, that one of the things that finished off the dinosaurs was something dropping from the sky. It has been almost more consoling for some people to think of the 1908 Tunguska event, when something smashed a hole in Siberia felling millions of trees, as a failed alien visit than the random collision it was – in a cheesier interpretation the aliens smashed their craft into the falling object to save us. And now, within the next 24 hours, a major meteor event blowing things up in Russia coincides with a near pass from a loose asteroid. Like the prospect of being hanged, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. | But now we are aware that our planet sits in far from empty space, with heavenly billiard balls perpetually about to carom off it. Luis Alvarez determined, from layers of dust and a big hole in Mexico, that one of the things that finished off the dinosaurs was something dropping from the sky. It has been almost more consoling for some people to think of the 1908 Tunguska event, when something smashed a hole in Siberia felling millions of trees, as a failed alien visit than the random collision it was – in a cheesier interpretation the aliens smashed their craft into the falling object to save us. And now, within the next 24 hours, a major meteor event blowing things up in Russia coincides with a near pass from a loose asteroid. Like the prospect of being hanged, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. |
| Like all random events and misfortunes, we want these things to mean something. The Russian fringe politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, rushed to the microphones to claim that the shower of stones that broke windows with their sonic boom, injuring 400 people, was a dastardly test of a new American weapon. Advocates of a renewed space programme have instantly told us that the asteroid pass proves that we need to be in space so that anything that comes closer can be, somehow, shoved out of Earth's way. More generally, all over Twitter, people are calling on passing rocks to land on, for example, the Sun offices (over publication of photographs of the late Reeva Steenkamp) as once they would have called for the thunderbolts of Zeus, the wrath of Jehovah or Betjeman's friendly bombs. | Like all random events and misfortunes, we want these things to mean something. The Russian fringe politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, rushed to the microphones to claim that the shower of stones that broke windows with their sonic boom, injuring 400 people, was a dastardly test of a new American weapon. Advocates of a renewed space programme have instantly told us that the asteroid pass proves that we need to be in space so that anything that comes closer can be, somehow, shoved out of Earth's way. More generally, all over Twitter, people are calling on passing rocks to land on, for example, the Sun offices (over publication of photographs of the late Reeva Steenkamp) as once they would have called for the thunderbolts of Zeus, the wrath of Jehovah or Betjeman's friendly bombs. |
| The trouble with wanting random events to acquire significance by afflicting unpleasant, otherwise untouchable powerful figures is that everyone does it. The religious right, Christian and Islamic, are fond of regarding tsunamis and hurricanes as instruments of wrath – Pat Robertson came up with a particularly unpleasant version of this when he attributed Haiti's problems to divine punishment for an alleged satanic pact made by that country's successful slave revolution. Nor is this confined to the religious right; rightwing sci-fi writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, in their 1977 novel of a comet's impending collision with Earth, have a character who survives the impact say that the good thing about the calamity was that women's lib was over. Heavenly vengeance is really an idea that has no place on the left. | The trouble with wanting random events to acquire significance by afflicting unpleasant, otherwise untouchable powerful figures is that everyone does it. The religious right, Christian and Islamic, are fond of regarding tsunamis and hurricanes as instruments of wrath – Pat Robertson came up with a particularly unpleasant version of this when he attributed Haiti's problems to divine punishment for an alleged satanic pact made by that country's successful slave revolution. Nor is this confined to the religious right; rightwing sci-fi writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, in their 1977 novel of a comet's impending collision with Earth, have a character who survives the impact say that the good thing about the calamity was that women's lib was over. Heavenly vengeance is really an idea that has no place on the left. |
| Perhaps it's better to use asteroids and meteors as a way of thinking about the fragility of existence. If the world were to end tonight, would David Cameron really want to have spent his last day being a politician who throws the disabled out of their flats rather than punish crooked bankers? Not because of the prospect of hellfire, but because it's a naff way to spend precious hours that could have been spent with chocolate and string quartets. Perhaps though, the point about bad people is that they really enjoy being bad. As Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd says: "The lives of the wicked should be made brief. For the rest of us, death would be a relief." On a sunny day, the prospect of universal annihilation adds zest to a brisk walk in the park. | Perhaps it's better to use asteroids and meteors as a way of thinking about the fragility of existence. If the world were to end tonight, would David Cameron really want to have spent his last day being a politician who throws the disabled out of their flats rather than punish crooked bankers? Not because of the prospect of hellfire, but because it's a naff way to spend precious hours that could have been spent with chocolate and string quartets. Perhaps though, the point about bad people is that they really enjoy being bad. As Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd says: "The lives of the wicked should be made brief. For the rest of us, death would be a relief." On a sunny day, the prospect of universal annihilation adds zest to a brisk walk in the park. |
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