The Zen of Periodic Mass Extinctions

Cats don't worry about stray asteroids.

That may seem self evident given a cat's general indifference to everything - save, of course, the odd piece of fuzz under the couch that Must Be Hunted To Extinction.

You know how it is. You buy a twenty dollar cat toy and the poor guy sniffs at it for an hour or two, then turns up his whiskers at it - or worse, pretends it isn't there in the first place. It’s a fact known to all people familiar with cats: a cat can ignore anything to death.

But free junk, man, now there’s a way to get a cat’s attention. Try this: take an old plastic Easter egg and put a snad inside it. A snad is that funny little piece of plastic that holds a bag of bread closed.

We have one cat who Must Chase and Destroy these little vessels of cat amusement. Then again, we have another cat who sits and watches with one of those oh so superior cat countenances as the first cat makes a complete and utter cat ass of herself chasing stupid plastic eggs. So, obviously, your mileage may vary.

Kids are kinda like cats in that respect. There is absolutely nothing like an empty cardboard box to keep the kids – and the cat – occupied for hours.

I think it must have something to do with imagination. Kids, cats, and those adults who aren’t dead yet have great imaginations. It’s a real treat to get to use it once in a while, isn’t it?

That’s why books are better than movies, why old movies are better than new movies, and why a plain cardboard box beats the latest toys. A new toy is just one thing, whatever the designer wanted it to be – and probably not even that in the eyes of the kid. A cardboard box, however, can be a fort or a Space Shuttle or anything else the cat can imagine.

But imagination can also get the better of us once in a while.

NASA is currently looking for about a billion dollars - yes, billion – to locate and catalog all the potentially Earth impacting chunks of rock flying around up there. Seems there are some folks who are letting their imaginations get the better of them. I mean, really: these events happen only once every coupla hundred million years on average. You’ve a better chance of being struck by lightning or winning the lottery.

But let us accept, for the moment, NASA’s desire to go find the stuff. That’s actually not so bad; after all, to know is better than to not know.

Thing is, even if we thought an asteroid or comet was going to do the Triceratops Tango all over our planet-bound behinds, what could we do about it? We really don’t have any good way of deflecting an incoming chunk of ice and rock. There are a few ideas, some half decent and some not so decent. None have much of a chance of really working. The really dangerous rocks simply weigh too much and move too fast for us to effectively change their paths through space.

Even worse, we do not yet have the capability to predict a potential impactor’s orbit very far into the future. It sure would be ironic if we wiped ourselves out by deflecting an otherwise near miss into a bullseye impact. All we’d need is for someone in a pickup truck to yell, “Hey, watch this!” before we launched the mission and we’d be on The Galaxy’s Funniest Home Videos for the next billion years.

All is not lost, however. Notwithstanding our technical and scientific limitations, there is at present one sure fire way to deflect an asteroid shaped Fourth Horseman: send a cat up there to ignore it until the asteroid gets bored and goes away.