EARTH ALMOST GOT ROCKED
November 12th, 2009 |Just in: Scientists have discovered an asteroid which nearly annihilated life as we know it on planet Earth during a close fly-by. “We knew about it roughly 2 hours prior to impact,” said Dustin Forester, a NASA dispatcher who was first alerted to the threat by an anonymous amateur astronomer. He continued, “what, we were going to call CNN? No, we got on the red phone to the White House, but that’s it. Didn’t you see ‘Armageddon’? That was just a movie. Imagine what people would actually do.”
President Obama learning of imminent threat
After the brief phone interview, we asked the White House for comment. Will Bridges, the Obama Administration’s Press Secretary for Astronomical Anomalies (WHPSAA), gave the following statement: “The President was advised of the danger and was deeply troubled. He did open the vault protecting The Button, but he erred on the side of caution. Yes, we could have done something, but at what cost? The probability of the foreign body hitting our planet was less than 1 in 1,000,000, but the probability of causing mass hysteria from using The Button was 100%. What would you have done?”
2009 VA, the planet killer
The asteroid has been named by astronomers “2009 VA”. It is approximately 100 miles across and is thought to weigh about 1/100,000 the mass of Earth. “It’s a planet killer,” remarked Ron Bingham, an astronomy major at Virginia Commonwealth University, “if it had impacted, we’d all be doomed. Have you ever heard of ‘nuclear winter’? Yeah, it’s like that. This is worse than the rock that took out the dinosaurs over 60 million years ago.”
Astronomers aren’t sure yet whether our planet’s gravity will slingshot* the rock back around to impact us in the future. They’ve estimated that there’s only a 12% chance that this may occur, which isn’t satisfying AT ALL to me. So, keep checking back for end of the world updates.
*Referenced from the film “Apollo 13″
