Asteroid

Phil Burpee

Phil Burpee, Columnist

Get mad at your best friend today? Kick the dog? Flip the bird at somebody in traffic? Hang up on an Oxfam caller? Leave that hitch-hiker chewing on your dust? Wish you could take that back, but it’s too late ‘cuz it’s been said? Shied away from standing up to that bully? Didn’t ask that girl out because of the complications of romance, even though she makes your heart race? Ah, the stuff of regret. If only, if only, if only………well, I’ll fix it later, and that’s a promise. Tomorrow is another day and next time I will for sure do the right thing – next time, next time, next time……………well, guess what? The future is a fabrication of our over-active imaginations – it is a phantom, a mere mirage shimmering just above the horizon of our hopes, dreams and best intentions. ‘Next time’ is just so much snake-oil. Because, to all intents and purposes, the asteroid is about to hit. It is travelling at 40 or 50 thousand miles and hour, and even our best systems of space-scanning surveillance will still only give us, in all likelihood, hours, or at best days, to consider its arrival – and along with it, our own personal kingdom comes. So too bad about the yelping dog – that’s part of your epitaph now. “He could have taken the high road, but he chose the low – he could have been the brave heart, but tucked his tail instead - too late, too late – so sad, too bad.”

Still from 'Breaker Morant'

They have come before. Tunguska. Chicxulub. Manicouagan. Barringer. Manson. And they have made big messes, including radical climate shifts and the extirpation of vast numbers of species – the dinosaurs being merely the most high-profile. The asteroid belt itself, lying broadly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, contains billions of asteroids, which means ‘little stars’, the largest of which is several hundred kilometres across. They are made of rock. Occasional minor collisions and gravitational fluxes betimes send one or other of them careening into cross-wise orbits to ours. But it only takes one a few hundred metres across to wreak untold havoc on our little world, ranging from colossal tsunamis if it were to strike the ocean, to massive firestorms, earthquakes, pan-global cloud cover, and the possible onset of what has euphemistically become know as nuclear winter if it strikes land – a phenomenon first articulated during the Cold War to describe the meteorological result of a large-scale thermo-nuclear exchange and the throwing up of trillions of tons of dust into the stratosphere. In short, nobody wants one of these hyper-velocity flying mountains homing in on their back yard – because tomorrow never materializes out of the back end of one of these bad boys – just a bleak silence, other than the grim howling of the hot, dirty wind.

So, if an asteroid were to come thundering in next Tuesday say (well, there wouldn’t really be any sound at all – this thing would be coming way supersonic – and just like in WW2 London, if you heard the V2 rocket, then by definition you weren’t under it), how would your plans stack up? Got your RRSPs cozied away? Did you call your Auntie? Planning to maybe really get out and vote next time? – next time? – next time? Or rather, how would your brains stack up? Pack up the SUV and head for the cottage? Go give the mayor that damn good talking to you’ve been planning to do for years? Suddenly wish maybe you’d paid a bit better attention to all those grave warnings the preacher had been intoning down at the church all this time? Just shut down maybe and plunk down to watch Sunday baseball? – draw the curtains and unplug the phone? Whoa! – waidaminit! – I got stuff to do! – hang on there – can’t we reason this thing out? – I just put four grand down an a 2013 F350 for god’s sake! – I don’t need this kind of crap!!

Ah, poor little monkeys. What a lot of funny noises there would be – wailing and gnashing and entreating and hollering and crying and just generally raising a fine ruckus at the injustice if it all - justice, or rather judgement perhaps, being the operative term here. Because this putative asteroid event is a lot like what we have come to know as Judgement Day, favourite of lore and soothsaying. But, whereas Judgement implies, of course, a Judge, the beauty of the asteroid postulate is that no such agent is required. There never would have been any way to buy your way out of this one – it is implacable, it is without either mercy or vengeance, and it simply unfolds as a fact of astrophysical misadventure. It cares not one whit for the behaviour of any human being, neither condemns nor absolves. It’s chief attribute would simply be its arrival. Gotta love it – no confusing provisos or pacts- just parked on the tracks – stalled – with that freight train bearing down. Jeez – wish I’d gone pee before I left the house………….

Oh, this is a well-worked-over notion. Much philosophical wind has been blown over this one. “Live in the moment!”, we are told by the Buddhists. “Repent!” we are told by the Evangelists. “Prepare for your next incarnation!” we are told by the Hindus. It is all about behaving, or not, and reaping reward, or not. Indeed. Perhaps my favourite treatment of the whole thing is this little aphorism offered by Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant, in the film ‘Breaker Morant’, who has been condemned to die by a British Court Martial during the Boer War on trumped-up charges – Harry is a poet as well as a soldier, and under the influence of a little libation on the night before his sentencing, offers this to his co-accused - “Live every day as though it were your last – one day you’re bound to be right…….”

And so it is deeply instructive to consider this…… any day – whichever day – one of them will be your last. There is no time to be anything other than the best and the bravest and the truest we can be. The asteroid is hurtling. Tomorrow is just a fancy rumour. Be nice to your dog. Relish this day’s rising sun.

Phil Burpee

July 7, 2012