THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS

[defrog]

With a 500-km meteor and a Pink Floyd instrumental.

[Via YesButNoButYes]

Good morning!

I’m impressed by things like this – probably because I am a child of the Cold War, so I think in terms of apocalypses. I’m a fun date, me.

But it’s good to know that there are things out there in the universe that can wipe out civilization in just under 24 hours. It’s also the best argument there is for getting a Mars colonization program together.

All week on TV here they’ve been doing profiles on the astronauts of Shenzhou VII, which blasts off this weekend for China’s third manned space mission. Watching all this running in parralel to the daily tragicomedy of “today’s list of dairy products laced with plastic additives that will kill you” updates, it’s easy to say, “Oh great, they can send a man into space but they can’t milk a f***ing cow safely without endangering everyone.”

Maybe. It’s a common argument that we should ignore space and concentrate on straightening out the mess we’ve made of the Earth. But a 500-km meteor would pretty much solve the milk problem overnight. It’d solve all of our problems, actually. Extinction will do that. So it’d be nice to have somewhere else to go.

I’d go on, but Warren Ellis makes a far better argument than me. (Except for the bit about the dogs, I mean.)

Space is the place,

This is dF