Arianna v. Ben Stein: Apocalypse Soon?

Ben Stein has taken his droll "I-am-SO-smarter-than-you" schtick to the big screen in a lame attempt to become the Right's pseudo-intellectual answer to liberal gadfly and moralist Michael Moore. His effort, entitled "Expelled," purports to show how closed-minded science is toward the self-described "scientists" who support Intelligent Design (ID). Known to detractors as Creationism Lite, ID is considered the thin end of the wedge against Evolution, since it embraces the mechanism but ascribes mutations not to chance and circumstance, but to Someone they never quite get around to naming.

In her new book, "Right is Wrong" Arianna Huffington has devoted all of chapter 5 to the Right's War on Science. She argues that on issues like evolution, the Right continues to dumb down America by countering scientific truth with pseudo-scientific truthiness. They push the old "reasonable people can differ" chestnut, and trot out their pet "scientists" with divinity-school diplomas to muddy the waters. That's why Ben Stein is so desperate to champion them in his movie about how it all began.

But the real danger facing us is not how it all began, but how it all ends. Enter Apophis.

Apophis is a quarter-mile long, 220 billion ton "near-Earth" asteroid (NEA) that was discovered in 2004. And if a certain 13-year-old German schoolboy is right, there's a 1 in 450 chance that he won't live to see 42. Because those are the chances that this boy, Nico Marquardt, has calculated that Apophis will slam into the Earth, in April 2036, as opposed to NASA's previously stated odds of 1 in 45,000.

Putting those odds in practical terms: let's say you flip a coin 8 times, and it comes up heads each time. Flip it a ninth time. If it's heads again, a very big space rock just landed on Venezuela. While that might not sound so bad, given our current relationship with Hugo Chavez, it's estimated that an initial impact there would kill about 10 million people, more or less instantly. But for the rest of us, the end would be just beginning.

The explosive force of this particular hunk of iron and iridium would be equal to a nuclear blast of 850 megatons. That's 65,000 times bigger than the Hiroshima blast, 4 times bigger than Krakatoa's eruption in 1883, and about on a par with the 1000-megaton explosion of the Toba supervolcano 70,000 years ago, which nearly wiped out humans on earth due to volcanic winter.

On land or sea, the Apophis impact would eject billions of tons of debris into the atmosphere, to circulate up there, covering the whole earth, cutting off sunlight, and dropping average temperatures precipitously, perhaps as much as 5 degrees centigrade, for years.

Physically, humans can handle that drop in temperature. We're a hardy bunch, overall: just look at the Eskimos. They live in (what used to be) much colder climes and did just fine. No, the problem for the other 6.7 billion of us who aren't Eskimo is food supply. That kind of extended cold means billions of acres of lost growing fields and curtailed growing seasons in the remaining farmlands, which in turn means starvation on an apocalyptic scale. Which, incidentally, is also the big threat of global warming, due to a combination of drought in some places and flooding in others.

Maybe that's why so many people like Ben Stein cling to their favorite myths. If the earth was only created 5,000 years ago, then there was no Toba. And we can ignore global warming, because the Apophis winter is going to cool us off again. And even if that doesn't work, they'll be Raptured on out of here before the "Apophalypse."

And that, dear readers, is why it is so damned important to stop electing the George Bushes of the world to positions of anything approaching power. And why it's so damned important to keep our science classes free of Creationism and Intelligent Design and any other philosophies requiring a willing suspension of disbelief in favor of My Invisible Friend, be He Jehovah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Because once you subjugate science to religion, you'll end up fighting for the survival of the species with a National Day of Prayer, asking Him to deflect the asteroid with His Noodly Appendage.

Or do you think that it's more than just a coincidence that both NASA and Nico calculate that Apophis will arrive on EASTER SUNDAY in 2036?

Nico's science fair project, entitled "Apophis - the Killer Asteroid," was completed using telescopic data from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam. It's doubtful that the German competition committee would have accepted a project titled "How the Unicorn was Naturally Selected Off of Noah's Ark," but some school districts in Florida and Kansas may. Marquardt's correction of NASA's data is based on the possibility of Apophis colliding with man-made satellites during a VERY close pass, 18,000 miles or so, on an unlucky Friday the 13th of April, 2029.

Another coincidence? Ben Stein would have you believe that it was design.

Things may not be as dire as Nico is predicting. NASA's figures appear to have already discounted the satellites, as this report indicates that the asteroid's course actually takes it INSIDE the belt of geo-stationary satellites. That means that it will take not 9, but 16 straight coin-flips coming up heads for this one to smack us.

But it is a 100% dead certainty that some unknown something this large or larger is going to smash into us eventually. This rock's year around the sun is shorter than ours, and it crosses our orbit about twice a year, and we didn't even SEE it until 4 years ago. And while science has as many as a dozen plausible theories on how to avoid such collisions, any or all of them require infusions of time, talent and treasure to implement.

After eight years of George Bush and his approach to science, we're shorter than ever on all three. We won't survive Stein's next movie "Incurious George, the Sequel."

Comments

[KillTheMessenger]

Now, now, now. Ben Stein might be a bumbling anti-intellectual who is hiding his failure in science class behind a facade of false faith, but this whole asteroid hits earth story is nothing but the stuff Hollywood SFX summer movies are made of. While asteroids do hit Earth, they do it exceedingly rarely. On average major hits occur on the 10-100 million year time scale. A failure to comprehend how ridiculously long these time scales are compared to human lifetimes is just as much a failure to wade into the deeper end of the science pool as ID is.

In general, there is an enormous amount of interest in asteroid research, of course (which is the REAL reason why NASA is aiming their instruments at these things). Asteroids can tell us something about the past of the solar system because they contain the oldest materials of planetary formation. Thus, they teach us about a very important step in our origins.

As for the diverse deflection etc. scenarios to deal with the non-existent asteroid "threat", I keep pointing out that the very people who call for development of such technology completely fail to realize that it is not the savior they are looking for. Quite to the contrary, such a system would be the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, far worse than even Dr. Strangelove's "doomsday machine". Because if you can deflect one asteroid so it does not hit, you can deflect ten so that they will.

[DannyHaszard]

I agree,I was burned out from being born raised in the apocalyptic end of the world Armageddon coming any minute Jehovah's Witnesses cult.I mean I cut my baby teeth on this apocalyptic jazz and am sick of it.
It turns out the JW Watchtower religion just used the end of the world scare mongering to extort the assets of it's followers.