Word: asteroidal
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...want to get contemporary--on a geological scale, of course--it was only 49,000 years ago that an iron asteroid blasted out Arizona's three-quarter-mile-wide Meteor Crater, almost certainly killing any living creatures for hundreds of miles around. As recently as 1908, a small rocky asteroid or chunk of a comet exploded five miles above the Tunguska region of Siberia, felling trees, starting fires and killing wildlife over an area of more than 1,000 sq. mi. Had the blast, now estimated at tens of megatons, occurred over New York City or London, hundreds of thousands...
...what about near misses? As recently as 1996, an asteroid about a third of a mile wide passed within 280,000 miles of Earth--a hairbreadth by astronomical standards. It was the largest object ever observed to pass that close and, had it hit, would have caused an explosion in the 5,000-to-12,000-megaton range. What was particularly unnerving about this flyby is that the asteroid was discovered only four days before it hurtled past Earth. All the more reason for a detection system that will discover asteroids early, plot their paths and predict, many years...
...asteroid-hunting pioneers were joined by a precocious upstart, a joint Air Force-M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory group supported by generous Pentagon funding. Using an Air Force satellite-spotting telescope in New Mexico and a camera equipped with an advanced M.I.T.-designed charge-coupled device, the totally automated, computerized operation quickly began discovering more asteroids and comets, large and small, than all the other groups combined. Getting further into the spirit of the game, the Air Force has deployed a second asteroid-hunting scope, is lending another to astronomers and musing, unofficially, about launching a fleet of microsatellites for even...
What to do if an Earth-bound comet or asteroid is discovered? Early detection, preferably many years in advance, would enable us to send out exploratory spacecraft to determine the nature of the interloper, much like the spacecraft near's current investigation of the asteroid Eros. Scientists at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories are already dreaming up a variety of ingenious defenses against an incoming asteroid. Depending on its mass and composition, they would use tailor-made nuclear explosions to pulverize a small asteroid or deflect a larger one. Given enough time, and under the proper circumstances...
...example, an asteroid impact of the kind that finished off the dinosaurs might do the trick, as might the appearance of a super-virulent and highly contagious virus. More probable, perhaps, is a man-made catastrophe--a general environmental collapse provoked by overexploitation of the world's resources, say, or nuclear conflicts. The awful possibilities are limited only by the imagination...