July 6, 2008 New York Times

Cited from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/weekinreview/06revkin.html?ref=science

Ideas & Trends

Maybe Chicken Little Wasn’t Paranoid After All

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

1.     THE Earth is pockmarked with the evidence of ancient collisions—huge craters blasted into its surface by asteroids or comets.

pockmark a small permanent circular scar on the skin, especially one left by smallpox, chickenpox, or acne; a small hollow mark disfiguring a surface

pockmarked covered in or disfigured by pockmarks

blast (n.) explosion, or a sudden rush of air caused by an explosion; (v.) to destroy or break open something using explosives

2.     One such object, striking 65 million years ago in the Yucatán in Mexico, is believed by some experts to be linked to the demise of the dinosaurs.

3.     For a decade, NASA has been busy trying to identify what else is headed this way, particularly those potential “civilization killers” of 1 kilometer (.62 miles) or more in diameter that have orbits coming within 30 million miles of the Earth’s—too close for comfort by space standards.

4.     Perhaps nowhere is that so evident as in central Siberia, where 100 years ago last week, something—presumably a meteoroid, most experts say—streaked across the sky and exploded at an estimated height of 28,000 feet with a force equivalent to 185 Hiroshima bombs, leveling some 800 square miles of forest.

5.     The explosion that lit up the Siberian sky in a fireball shortly after 7 a.m. on June 30, 1908, is known as the Tunguska event, after the river the flows through the damage zone, and is widely considered the modern-day warning about the dangers slinging through space.

6.     Fortunately, the odds are good that the next one will fall over one of our oceans, which take up more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, or the planet’s still-vast stretches of uninhabited lands.

7.     How much in taxpayer dollars should be invested to pinpoint such hazards is one of the toughest risk-management exercises around.

Pinpoint to identify or locate something accurately

8.     Perhaps no bigger than a basketball, the meteorite was a reminder of the destructive power of what is lurking out there.

9.     “In fact, there was a daylight fireball event widely observed near Los Angeles two days ago,” Dr. Yeomans said in an e-mail message last Thursday.

10. NASA estimates that there are about 940 or so near-Earth space rocks a kilometer in diameter or larger.

11. Budget constraints have slowed NASA’s efforts to meet its goal of identifying 90 percent of those big objects by next year.

12. But awareness is just the first stage of grappling with the challenge, said Rusty Schweickart, the Apollo 9 astronaut who heads a foundation advocating more research on identifying near-Earth objects and developing unmanned spacecraft that could nudge them off track like a tugboat.

13. And he said there was still no significant effort to devise an international agreement, let alone a deflection technique, for dealing with the inevitable earthbound asteroid or comet, large or small, when it is identified.

14. It may be subtle,” he said, “but failure of the international decision process is the most likely reason that we’ll take a hit in the future.”

He likes to pull gags on me. 

他喜歡跟我開玩笑.

Cited from: http://som.twbbs.org/klee/notebook/

It cracks me up. 

把我給笑壞了.

Cited from: http://som.twbbs.org/klee/notebook/