“This Is Only A Test” • Written and Narrated by Rob Dircks

Hey, Rob here. For a long time now, there’s been the awareness that what happened to the dinosaurs – an extinction-level event caused by an asteroid impact – could happen again. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of if, but of when. A hundred years? A thousand years? A hundred thousand years? In the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact (both strangely released in the same year, 1998), we triumph over the threat by nuking a huge asteroid into pieces. In reality, a nuclear explosion as a planetary defense is potentially unpredictable. What if the asteroid doesn’t break into the pieces we’d like it to? So… fast forward to yesterday, November 23, 2021, and NASA launched a different kind of test: slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid to deflect its path, just a fraction of a percent, but enough to make a difference. The asteroid they’ve chosen is, unsurprisingly, not on a collision-course with Earth, so it poses no threat. I repeat: it poses no threat.

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