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Cassini visits Earth
mwillis writes " Between 8:22 PM PDT and 8:51 PM PDT on August 17, Cassini swung by earth for a gravity assist, coming about 725 miles from the Earth's surface. It still needs a Jupiter flyby before reaching its target, Saturn. Video and mission status here " /sarcasm And, despite fears to the contrary, Cassini didn't smash into the planet and spread 75 pounds of Plutonium across the surface of the planet.
Galilleo had two close passes with the Earth in '90 and '92 (the '90 was closer, 1000 km no ?) It was a lot sicker than Cassini, too, with the failure in the main antenna. Didn't hear a peep, then. Why ? Because no-one had an agenda to push back then. Now they do, and they go "Plutonium! Nasty! Be Scared! Cancer! They say it can't happen!!!!!!" and hope that no-one bothers checking up on the facts. (Oh, and the fact that most of the US was keeping an eye on that little tussle in Iraq.) Remember, the people who launch these things have friends and families here on earth, and, also, a mistake at this point means no more funding for the next 5 or 7 years.
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Yeesh. All this whining makes me wonder why people aren't impressed with heavy-duty science anymore. Instead of the thrill of discovery, people would rather occupy their time panicking and whining about a 75 pound lump of "angry rock".
Reminds me of that episode in All In The Family where Gloria complains to Archie about how many people die every year by guns. Archie quips back, "Well little girl, would you be happier if they got pushed out of windows?"
Lets suppose for a moment that 75 pounds of plutonium *did* come hurtling through our atmosphere. First and foremost, it would probably be so badly degraded upon re-entry that it wouldnt matter *what* it was. You could send a damn dump truck full of boubonic plague through the Earth's atmosphere, it would probably disintegrate before ever reaching the ground. The earth is continually bombarbed by fairly large chucks of threatening debris 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Its been this way for millions, if not billions of years. There's a _reason_ why we arent living in a sea of craters, kids.
Besides.. Earth has already seen far worse man-made ecological disasters over the past 200 years than 75 pounds of plutonium could ever cause.
The Industrial Revolution, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, thousands of Cold War nuclear tests , Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, The Gulf War, just to name a few... I'd be willing to bet that if you took every single person who experienced irreversible physical illness as a result of these catastrophies, you could probably arrive at a figure of around 400,000 to 500,000 people grand total. And as tragic as those numbers are, they amount to less than one one-thousandth of a percent of Earth's human population. 75 pounds of plutonium, even *if* it came back to earth, would not reduce us to the level of a bunch of custard-eating Teletubbies living below ground for the next 10,000 years. Besides, i'd trust an engineer over a hippy, wouldnt you?
In other words, the 90's are over. We can all put down out guitars and quit whining now. Putting limits on what science can investigate is far more dangerous than sending a silly little spacecraft out for a spin.
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Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag