On September 17th, a meteorite crashed near a village in Peru. As if the thought of large chunks of space rock smashing into your neighborhood wasn’t enough to scare you, the thing is emitting toxic fumes that are hospitalizing people, inducing vomiting and headaches.
This straight-out-of-bad-science-fiction scenario’s still in the mystery stage, so even though the numbers affected are minimal so far, we can always imagine the worst. Here we are, betting on a massive comet slamming us into a dino-legacy, and the bloody thing’s got the nerve to bring along a mysterious illness. It’s that insult to injury overkill, like Superman being able to shoot molten-hot laser beams from his eyes even though he’s already got incalculable strength and speed, and is indestructible. Unless, of course, Kryptonite falls from space and lands near him and he gets sick and barfs. Hmm. Don’t trust space rock.
Here’s the original story.
that’s a freaky story. meteorites in general make me jumpy. do you know of any meteorite tracking site like at NASA? is there public access to this kind of data?
as scary as it is, i’d wanna know. i think!
Acutally there is! They are underfunded and can only scan a small portion of potentially “earth killing” asteroids and meteorites. I think there is even a program similar to SETI@Home to help them.