‘THE sky is falling’!
Say that aloud or in a whisper, but Sir Crispin Tickell will not be tickled pink. For he knows about rocks, as big as trees, trucks and trains, hurling through space at monstrous speeds — sometimes barely scraping past Earth, and occasionally slamming head on.
Sir Tickell is part of a three-member Task Force set up by the British government in January 2000, to study the risks involved due to Near Earth Objects (NEOs) such as meteors and asteroids.
And this Chancellor of the University of Kent at Canterbury, is currently in the city as one of the visiting British scholars for the ‘India-UK Science Festival 2002’. Like any other environmentalist, Sir Tickell is worried about Mother Earth.
A member of the Bombay Natural History Society, he has written books on global warming, delved on population explosion, debated on preservation of hills and studied the early history of our planet. But what really gets Sir Tickell on his toes is ET — the extra-terrestrial.
‘‘Extra-terrestrial objects or ‘space bullets’ like meteors and asteroids, have hit Earth in the past, and will do so in the future. Just a few days back most newspapers reported how a giant asteroid was too close to Earth for comfort — enough to wipe out an entire country,’’ Sir Tickell told Newsline.
‘‘Our Task Force has spent over six months travelling around the globe to study space and the dangers lurking up there. We also visited the Pentagon in the US, as they have also carried out a detailed study on the subject. You will be amazed to know that in the year 2000, a space rock of barely 5 metre diameter exploded in the sky before hitting an icy terrain,’’ he informed. A huge amount of sulphur was also released in the air as a result of the explosion.
In 1908, another huge 60-metre long space rock (the size of former warship INS Vikrant) had hit Siberia at the speed of 20 kilometres per second. ‘‘If instead of Siberia it were Mumbai, I’m afraid this city would have been finished by the impact,’’ remarked Sir Tickell, stressing on the ever-present danger.
The Shoemaker-Levy comet that had rammed into Jupiter in 1994, for example, was travelling at a speed of 70 kilometres per second, and had broken down into several fragments on entering Jupiter’s atmosphere — one of these fragments was a big as Earth!
‘‘The only solution to this risk is to set up powerful telescopes to study the path of meteors and asteroids, and use space technology to destroy or deflect NEOs before they strike Earth. Also, a forewarning of a ‘hit’ can help in shifting the people of that area to another location in order to avoid tragedy,’’ he said.
Sir Tickell is one of those who believe that the theory of a giant asteroid responsible for dinosaurs’ extinction holds water.
‘‘A 180-kilometre long asteroid had crashed in Mexico over 65 million years ago, leading to a ‘nuclear winter’ as the sun’s rays could not penetrate down. This killed hundreds of species, and dinosaurs were probably one of them,’’ said the scholar.
So should people stop going out to the beaches and nature camps, lest they are hit by a
meteor?
‘‘According to an American study, the risk of being killed in a plane crash is just one in 2,50,000. And the same risk applies to being hit by an extra-terrestrial object,’’ he informed.
However, just this one-in-2,50,000 ‘space hit’ could eliminate half of Earth’s plant and animal species. Now who is really tickled by this probability?