Rock Fall
Copyright© 2015 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 2: The Afternoon of the Morning After
A car horn tooted a few feet away and Chris blushed. Mike had arrived and he’d been too lost in his thoughts to notice. This was a first, in all of the years Mike had driven him to school, usually he was impatiently waiting curbside.
“Sorry,” he told Mike as he climbed into the car.
“You were thinking about that asteroid thing, right?”
Mike had been an Army Ranger and had served with Delta Force in Somalia. He’d been one of those to go into Mogadishu to try to capture a warlord, fomenting the battle that was the focus of the book and movie Blackhawk Down. Mike wasn’t a rocket scientist, but he wasn’t stupid either.
“Yeah.”
“What’s going to happen? You’re into that astronomy stuff. What’s really going to happen?”
Christopher sighed inwardly. This man was as close to a friend as he had — not to mention the only one. He couldn’t lie to him — but he wasn’t going to let an adult be in a position to overrule him on things. That simply wasn’t going to happen.
“Mike, you’ve never lied to me about anything I know of. And I swear, I’ve never lied to you about anything important — maybe a couple of times when I wasn’t as sick as I pretended so I could avoid school.”
Mike guffawed and beat his palm on the steering wheel as they waited for Pine Valley’s sole traffic light to turn green. “Christopher! I never told you how many times I ditched school! That doesn’t count!”
“The government’s lying, Mike.”
“Lying?” Mike’s voice changed to uncertain.
“Yeah. Worse, this is about a technical subject — all those bureaucrats who majored in Women’s Studies or African-American Studies or Sociology are the ones who are supposed to make things happen. They have trouble spelling ‘scientist’ without their spellcheckers. The brighter ones, say about a 2 on the intellectual scale of 1 to 10, studied Poli Sci, or a few went into business; mostly marketing. The best and brightest — maybe 4’s on the intellectual scale — got law degrees and went to work for the government.
“I think they’ve been told to downplay this. I think that scientists in general and astronomers in particular have been told to downplay it — unless they can prove for certain they know what’s going to happen. And there isn’t much true certainty in science.”
Chris waved towards the sky. “Right now, the politicians are making a lot of mistakes because they don’t have a clue and aren’t asking anyone good questions. They say the rock is a mile in diameter — that’s part of the ‘downplaying’ scenario. Most people think the most common shape of celestial objects is the sphere.
“Nope! Everything large — yes. But most of the bits and pieces of the universe aren’t that big — and the vast majority of the smaller chunks appear to be potato-shaped.”
He sketched a potato in the air, and put his thumb and index finger around the short diameter. “This dimension is a mile. The ‘potato’ part is three and a half miles long.”
“They said it’s just a fraction of the size of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.”
“And that’s the truth. There are two main factors that determine how much damage an impact will do. Mass — that is what it weighs — and velocity it is traveling at. The total weight, or mass, of the asteroid is a function of its volume and density. They aren’t talking volume and they aren’t talking density and they aren’t talking velocity. Three strikes and you know they are out there lying.”
“You were up all night — I saw the lights.”
“I get things most people don’t get. I know those numbers, Mike. If the rock was round and a mile in diameter it would have a volume of half a cubic mile. But it’s not a sphere, it’s a potato and thus the volume is three and a half cubic miles.
“Water is the yardstick scientists use to measure density. Water is equal to one point zero on the density scale. There are some asteroids that are just rubble piles — bits and pieces stuck together and that actually have a density lower than that of water. I’m sure you’ve noticed that some rocks are heavier than others.”
“A time or two, yes,” Mike said with a scowl.
“This is important, Mike. Rocks have different densities. In our case, our luck was about as bad as you can get. The density of that rock is just a bit less than solid iron. A little under seven on the density scale.”
“How can they know? It’s not like they can get out and weigh it!”
“Well, actually they can. They know the force of the sun’s gravity and they can tell how much the sun is bending the asteroid’s path. From that, they know how much it weighs.”
“The sun’s bending its path? It’s going to miss after all?”
Christopher sighed again, this time audibly. “Scientists, Mike, know just as much about leading a clay pigeon or a dove when you’re shooting at them as you do. They take all of that into account.
“The last, the real deal-breaker, is how fast it’s going. If I shoot you with a nerf-ball gun, the ball doesn’t go very fast and it doesn’t weigh very much and you might not even notice getting hit. Getting hit by a softball isn’t fun, but it isn’t nearly as bad as being hit by fast-moving hardball. A bullet is a serious, possibly fatal, injury. Mike, this rock was going more than twice as fast as most objects in the solar system. It’s going so fast, in fact, there is no doubt that it comes from interstellar space.
“The mass of this rock means it is going to hit us four or five times harder than a spherical rock that was really a mile in diameter would. The velocity is going to raise that to two and a half times as hard than if it was just in orbit around our sun. Ten or twelve times harder than what they seem to be saying — only they really aren’t saying anything.”
“And is this going to do to us like what happened to the dinosaurs?”
“Like I said, Mike, I’m not going to lie to you. The simple answer to that question is, no it’s not at all comparable to the one that took out the dinosaurs. They estimate that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had an average diameter of six or ten miles. This rock is a fraction of that size.”
“So we’re safe then?”
“Mike, you’re making assumptions, something you’ve warned me not to make.
“The asteroid that was the size to take out the dinosaurs and the rock that smacked down up near Williams are the opposite ends of a spectrum of effects. One wiped out a good percentage of the higher animal life on the planet, and the second flattened a couple of hundred square miles of sagebrush. Somewhere between one and the other is a tipping point — where something goes from a local catastrophe to a global one. Scientists have no idea where that tipping point is.
“This rock, Mike, is in the error bar of the worst case scenarios. And that’s if we were lions or lambs. We’re humanity; we have a global economy these days. The US still needs some oil imports, and we need foreign markets to sell our goods.
“We can easily get everyone out of the way of the initial impact. Piece of cake, really. Anyone on a Pacific ocean coast line with a straight shot to where the impact will occur, however, are going to have to head to high ground. They have no idea how high those tsunamis will go: the scientific models are just so many badly educated guesses.
“Still most people are going to look at a map and say, ‘That is thousands of miles away. Feh! Who cares!’
“Except a couple of hundred cubic miles of debris is going to go flying through the air, a great deal of it molten. Secondary impacts won’t kill very many people unless we’re really unlucky, but they will kill some people.
“Earthquakes? They have no idea, Mike. None. Odds are, yes, the impact will trigger some. Here, it’s going to feel like a 6.0 earthquake, and that probably isn’t enough to trigger anything local. Probably. There may be local landslides though.
“As well as hundreds of cubic miles of debris going up into the air and some of it landing here and there, most of it is going to go into the upper atmosphere and stay there as dust. How long, what the effects on the weather will be ... they have no idea. Not only will a couple of hundred cubic miles of debris go up from the impact, it’s going to leave a couple of hundred cubic miles of melted rock at the bottom of that crater ... a crater I might add that is likely to be seventy-five miles across and twenty to twenty-five miles deep ... that’s way, way, way below sea level.
“Those hundreds of cubic miles of melted rock are going to boil another few hundred cubic miles of water as the ocean rushes back to fill the hole. There will be steam explosions like none of us can imagine. It’s going to treat the entire planet as if it was a wind chime hanging in a gale.
“And all of that steam — and absorbed heat — is going to go into the atmosphere and guess what? They have no idea what it’s going to do once it’s there. None. Precipitation, certainly. How much excess ... they have no idea. How strong the storms that crater is going to drive, and how long they are going to last — I’d give you three guesses, but you’ll only need one.”
“They haven’t a clue,” Mike mused.
“So, I think the president, and probably the rest of the major world leaders, have decided to put a happy face on it, and put the effects far closer to Meteor Crater in Arizona in their effects, than the K-T Boundary rock that killed off the dinosaurs. Then they are going to cross their fingers and hope for the best.”
Mike drove steadily on; the only hint to his mood was Mike steadily tapping his thumb on the steering wheel. They reached the house and he pulled to a stop. Finally, he turned to Christopher. “Bottom line, what do you think is going to happen?”
“On December 5th, there will be some bad pictures of the impact — but none will last for more than a few seconds, if that. On December 6th and 7th there will be a lot of talk about how terrible it was that all those people were killed by the tidal waves ... no matter how hard they try they couldn’t get everyone to move. I mean, this is going to wipe out all of the South Pacific Islands and most of New Zealand, some of Australia and a big chunk of the west coast of South America. There are a lot of south facing beaches in New Guinea, Borneo, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Taiwan and Japan. Hawaii’s biggest port faces the south. The South American west coast from Chile north, who knows how far, is going to take a huge hammer blow.
“This would not be a good time to be in Antarctica, summer down there or not.
“After the impact, I think the weather will slowly go in the toilet. By spring, I expect it to be in seriously bad shape and if nothing else, that’s when the lid will blow off — we won’t be able to plant many crops and belts will be really tight by the end of the summer. Mike, a year and a half from now there won’t be nearly as many of us as there are now.”
Christopher paused, licked his lips and finished his last thought. “I have trouble imagining the government still existing by this coming spring. I’m sure it won’t exist by the end of next year.”
Mike hit the steering wheel with the flat of his palm, very hard.
“Shit!”
Christopher sat patiently, waiting for the inevitable question. The question that would demonstrate the bankruptcy of an entire nation.
“What can we do?”
Christopher swallowed and licked his lips. He’d heard the joke from Mike a couple of times. “What do you mean, ‘we,’ white man?”
For a second Mike looked confused, and then he shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Mike, right now, today, my share of the eighteen trillion dollar national debt is nearly sixty thousand dollars. That debt is going up by almost a half trillion dollars a year, and we are expected to add a that much or more of new deficits over each year in the next couple of years because the government is printing money to pay its bills, and inflation is about a percent a month now, and they’re thinking it will hit two percent a month a year from now and that raises the interest we have to pay on our debt.
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