The Color of Heather

I found this essay I wrote last year for Astronomy. I got a 99% on it because i inevitably spelled something wrong.

Between the sun super nova, the ozone layer dispersing, the moon leaving and everyone blowing themselves up in a nuclear war, a rouge asteroid will slam into the earth cause major devastation and most likely the end of all life as we know it. In order to protect ourselves from this total annihilation, some precautions must be put into place. Some ideas to save us from this asteroid would be to either do as Armageddon did, and blow it to smithereens or leave it to Jupiter.

The original idea to blow the asteroid was to send up an kamikaze shuttle and either fill it with nuclear warheads or hope to god that the impact will force the asteroid to change it’s direction. Because there is no gravity in space, even the smallest, but forceful, bump with send something flying in a different direction, stated in Newton’s Law number three, “For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.” The only, true thing we must worry about with this is the remote control, or who are going to sacrifice themselves, and with the reaction of the shuttle coming back and colliding with earth. The latter should not be much of an issue if we plan it right.

Armageddon’s way of doing it, was sending up a team to drill into the flying-stone-of-absolute-doom and set off a whole bunch of explosions and causing the asteroid to avoid us. The error in this is that there is none in Zeus’s way that this asteroid will split perfectly and miss us, and causing none of the debris to smack into the earth and causing many, very big meteor showers that will polka-dot the surface until we’re in a climate so bad that we can not survive, assuming we were not eaten by any aliens that may have resided in or on these falling rocks, or that we were smashed to bits.

We could also do nothing and leave it to Jupiter. Jupiter, whose namesake comes from the Roman god, synonymous to Zeus, has a freaking fetish with trying to tear Mars—aka Ares, got of war—and Earth to complete bits. Due to this strange, horrible fetish, Jupiter will most likely use its super planet gravity to protect us from being bombarded by the previously labeled ‘flying-stone-of-absolute-doom’ just to commit a massacre, and kill us all later.

We are temporarily saved in each and every case, provided that the actual system works, and does not backfire causing us to reap our own doom. Not to be a pessimist, but we still have the ozone layer, sun, moon and inevitable nuclear war to dread.