It's a dangerous place out there!

With the news revealed today that the cosmos may be ' inherently unstable'  and that we seldom have more than two days notice of new and quite large asteroids potential collision with Earth, you could be forgiven for thinking 'We are all doomed.'

Which of course we are, ultimately but I think the consensus is that it could be a few billion years before we need to start worrying about the universe folding in on itself . Of greater concern though is our relative inability to detect comparatively large objects which may be on a collision course with Earth and remain undetectable until just a few hours before they impact. We know about the big ones, we can see them and have been tracking them for many years; it's those which are big enough to hurt us but still too small to be detectable which we should be concerned about. If one of those hits us in the wrong place, then yes we could be looking at an Extinction event.

THE LAST MASS EXTINCTION EVENT - about 66 million years ago: Probably...

It could be all over in just a few short days and right now we are powerless to do anything about it. Or are we? I am not one for conspiracy theories. I have no doubt that man did set foot on the moon in 1969 and that Elvis is dead and he has been since 1977. But surely our great leaders, appreciating the significance of such a risk to our planet must have put something in place to protect us? Surely they saw Armageddon and Deep Impact?

Up there somewhere there must be both Russian and US missile arrays pointing away from the planet and out to the cosmos. Perhaps China and Europe have systems too. Surely, their scientists have told them how great the potential is for another extinction event and have they behind closed doors reached global consensus for a worldwide anti-meteor defence policy? Of course they would not want the world to know would they? That they had spent billions on a planetary defensive system, dwarfing the costs spent on global defence just to ensure that we all survive?

Or may be they have done nothing... Ok I am not advocating dropping the welfare budgets so they can build a huge defence system for something which probably won't happen in the next ten thousand years, but surely they must be doing something to aid the detection of these rogue chucks of rock. History tells us we need to be aware of them and we have the technology, we must be able to detect all but the small harmless ones.

In the last week we have seen one such example of a completely undetected asteroid causing havoc and injury in Russia and at the same time the passing of a huge predicted asteroid just 17,000 miles away from us. I think you can safely say that this is a very much a current issue. It must be if it trends on Twitter...

If any government officials are reading... Perhaps now may be the time to concentrate a little more on this problem...