Professor Quippy: Did anyone else feel that?

Space is big. How big? Imagine a large dog. Something that drools a lot, like a St. Bernard. Now, think about a flea on that drippy dog. With me so far? Okay, then imagine that flea is a city, and its intestinal tract is the subway system. An on that subway system, there’s a guy who’s reading a newspaper, and the newspaper has a front page story about how big space is, and it says, “not even Dog can imagine how big space is.”

So yesterday an asteroid whizzed by the Earth. Real close.

The asteroid (dubbed 2008 DD45 by the Inventive Nomenclature Division of NASA) missed us by only 72,000 kilometers. To put the distance of 72,000 kilometers into perspective, imagine that a kilometer is a measure of distance unrelated to domesticated canines. (72,000 is about 44,738 miles — less than a fifth of the distance to the earth, and only twice the distance from where we like to play smash-up derby with billion-dollar satellites.)

So how big was 2008 DD45, which we here at the Skwib call “Larry”? It was large enough to level 2000 square kilometers of forest, like the one that wiped out Tunguska, Siberia in 1908, and caused the second largest inter-dimensional cross-rip in the last 100 years. (The one that nearly destroyed New York City in 1984 was three times as large.)

Now, I know that 2000 square kilometers of damage doesn’t sound too bad, but 772 square miles is roughly twice the size of New York City. (Which may have weathered the 1984 paranormal event, but no amount of proton-stream crossing would protect the city from the energy of impact with Larry not to mention the accompanying damage to Jersey caused by the shockwave.)

Let’s hope “Moe” misses us by a bit more.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are more concerned about “Curly”. You may be interested to know that a massive asteroid strike features prominently in The Amadeus Net, available from ENC Press. More about the asteroid at New Scientist (the Shemp of science news) and if you want to see what other asteroids you should worry about, check out the NASA list.