Chances of death by aliens Massie Santos Ballon Philippine Daily Inquirer
October 09, 2009
THE STANDOUT moment to me, anyway in the book “Death from the Skies!” comes in Chapter 5, when astronomer Philip Plait defines the term “spaghettification.”
If you haven’t heard the word before, it refers to the process in which people turn into very thin, very long, pasta-like strands when they get “slurped” into a black hole much like the way the dogs made the plate of spaghetti disappear in Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp.”
As Plait put it in the book, which was published almost a year ago but came to my attention only recently: “You’re like a tube of toothpaste, and the black hole has a fist of steel. You’re turning into a thin noodle-like tube of human goo.”
The image conjured up by the above description may sound like something out of a science fiction movie, but it’s not artistic license.
Ways the world will end
In a series of chapters, Plait discusses the variety of ways outer space visitors in the form of falling rocks (learn the differences between meteors, meteorites and asteroids in this section), radiation (gamma-ray bursts, references to which invariably make me think of the Incredible Hulk) and heat (stars going supernova and the Sun burning out) can penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere to kill life on this planet. If the title didn’t already make the book’s purpose clear, the subtitle is “These are the ways the world will end…”
Each section starts with a potential scenario and then Plait explains the science behind the short story. In one chapter, for example, he talks about asteroids impacting the Earth in the past, and plausible ways of preventing such space rocks from doing so again.
Plait starts with a little history, mentioning previous encounters the Earth’s had with large rocks falling from the skies at great speed, such as the one that ended the dinosaurs’ reign millions of years ago and the one that flattened a good portion of Siberia in the first decade of the 20th century. He talks about how scientists have approached the craters left by the impact of these rocks and what they’ve learned.
And then he talks about the efficacy of possible preventive measures by referencing Hollywood plots. Recall two movies released within weeks of each other some years ago, both of which involved large rocks set to hit the planet and unlikely heroes deployed to stop these catastrophic events.
One movie featured Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck as oil men sent into outer space while Aerosmith played in the background, while the other had Morgan Freeman as the president of the United States. Both plot lines involved nuclear weapons to blow up the earth and Plait discusses whether such explosions, which impressive on the big screen, would actually work in real life.
Odds of person dying
Toward the end of the book, Plait notes the odds of a person dying from an asteroid hitting the Earth, the Sun’s death burning the planet, an alien invasion. He even differentiates between terms I typically associate with Marvel comic books, namely, “galactic doom” and “death of the universe.”
If you want to find out how likely events such as these and spaghettification really are, and how worried you should be as a result, you’ll have to go read the book yourself. No deep interest in astronomy, physics or geology required; the author’s tone is conversational throughout and he even manages to include asides in the form of footnotes that seem to get more excited as he starts throwing in calculations involving several dozen zeroes.
One last thing: despite the book’s contents, the hardbound edition’s glowing red cover still has a somewhat sober look about it. Consider looking for the comic book-style cover of the paperback version.
