You’ve heard of the asteroid 2024 YR4, yeah? Sounds like a financial report but if its 1 per cent chance of belting the Earth comes to reality it will probably create more than a few fiscal anomalies.
Chances it’ll hit were running 3 per cent but they’re now back to 1 per cent, you’ll be pleased to know. And we are talking 2032, a while off yet. You might get wiped out by a truck crossing the road in the meantime – not to mention a couple other asteroids around as well.
Fair to say my head’s in the clouds a bit lately. Cosmic contenders for attention everywhere, it seems.
Last Friday night’s solar system planetary alignment was something to see. If you could see it. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, lined up like ducks in a row. Most of them visible to the naked eye. If you had binoculars, you could even see Uranus, Neptune.
Arriving on the back of a similar alignment just weeks before, it was a celestial celebration you won’t see again until 2040. If 2024 YR4 doesn’t blow you to smithereens beforehand, that is.
Curious thing about the cosmos is how it can help you put earthly things in perspective.
Your significance isn’t huge in a universe some 93 billion light years across with two trillion galaxies and 200 billion trillion stars.
There are as many stars in the universe as grains of sand on Earth. That’s 200 sextillion, not quite a googolplex but you might see it from there.
2024 YR4 is infinitesimally smaller, just 50 metres across, but it could easily take out a city and who knows what kind of dinosaur-destroying dust storm it could kick up around the globe?
Blot out the sun for a year or two maybe? Like Indonesia’s Mount Tambora eruption did between 1815 and 1818.
Maybe cause another volcanic winter like 536AD, when the Northern Hemisphere had its worst climate cooling of the last 2000 years, after several simultaneous eruptions. That could probably offset some of the sunspot activity fallout of recent years.
That’s if we get there. First, there’s a 320-metre wide asteroid called Apophis that will come haring between Earth and the Moon with a one-in-60 chance of obliterating us – or one-in-10,000, or 35,000, depending which expert you prefer.
It’s scheduled for 13 April 2029. That’s Friday the 13th if you want to note it in your prepper’s almanac, along with the fact Apophis was named for a snake-like Egyptian god of darkness and chaos. Just saying.
Maybe Elon Musk, aka Lex Luthor, could save us if his arch-enemy NASA can’t get its DART system – that’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test – up to scratch at slamming rockets into any cantankerous asteroids heading Earthwards.
I’m not holding my breath, though. That’s one bloke with his head seriously in the clouds.
Somewhere well up in the outer solar system firmament, or is that fundament? Let’s just call it the binocular-sphere.
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 4 March 2025.
