There are many problems at home on Earth, but there is still time to worry about the bad things that reach above. The most recent is the Asteroid 2024 YR4which could be a “murderer of the city” if it hits a heavily densely populated area of ​​our planet in the early years of the next decade.
The chances of this event are now estimated to be about 0.001%. But there was a brief moment after the asteroid’s discovery last year, when the estimated risk of an immediate blow crossed the 1% of the comfortable risk.
There is a need to worry about planetary defense if we want to avoid going to the dinosaurs. But there are many other things that could kill us, including climate change and wars. So what is the time that grabs our attention? And how do these fears affect us – individually as a society?
In the long run, something big will hit us unless we can redirect it. The responsibility for the preparation begins with us.
However, preparation also carries risks. Daniel Deudney, Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in USA, has warned That technologies used for planetary defense can not only guide asteroids away from Earth – they can also guide them in the direction of a military conflict.
As explained in Dark Skies’s book, Deudney’s solution is to reversed, regulate and resign Most of our human activities in space For several centuries coming. The more we do in space, he believes, the greater the possibility that states will end up in catastrophic conflicts. “Avoiding the destruction and disappearance of the species of culture now depends on discerning what it should not do and then make sure it is not done,” he writes.
He finally argues that the expansion of the space has come very soon and we have to reverse the process until we are ready. Taking this, he believes that we can still need some form of planetary defense, but that it may be limited.
Booking for centuries is an unlikely choice. The chances of an asteroid strike can be very high. And the political interest in expanding space It is, at this point, irreversible.
The fear of space has increased alongside space programs. Concerns about asteroid strikes and excessive miles lean into deeper fears of space as unknown. However, they are also based on concerns about the self -destructive side of mankind.
Both fears are very old. One of the first detectors human stories, the history of secular hunting dating from at least 15,000 years, combines the two.
A Native Sami version, surviving in Scandinavia, He describes how a large hunt in the sky will go wrong if the hunter is impatient and fire an arrow that loses his goal and accidentally hits the star of the pole. This would bring the dome of the night sky to crush the earth. Again, the fears of the wrong human actions and the threat of the above security.
We can see it with modern technologically driven fears like Ufology. Some Hard cores in UFOS They are not only concerned about hostile visitors, but about the secret collaborations between scientists on Earth or, a whole conspiracy to maintain the truth from the public.
Without belief in a conspiracy to suppress the evidence, the whole idea collapses. But without conviction that there is actually something you are afraid of from space, there is nothing about the conspiracy. The fear of space is an indispensable part of this image.
This is an idea that was recorded at the same time by the author of the Chinese science fiction Cixin Liu, who compares the space with a “dark forest” in which alien cultures are trying to hide from each other.
All of this presupposes something like a mentality, an excessive split of land and spaceor the sky and the ground. This is something I have mentioned as prejudice. Prejudice allows the space to appear as a threatening outside, and not something we are part of.
Foreign viruses
The rationalization for such fears shifts and is not limited to asteroids, foreigners, meteors and military conflicts. There is even a theory that viruses come from space.
When Covid Skeptics was looking for an idea to explain why the mask wearing was pointless, what many of them hit was A dark theory Combined by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe in 1979.
Lopin Viacheslav
The twin eventually had a good idea that followed a bad idea. The good idea was that the ingredients for the appearance of life could come from space. The bad idea was that they came ready were formed as viruses and bacteria, and that they are still coming.
According to this theory, the well-known pandemics of the past (such as the deadly pandemic of the 1918 influenza and even epidemics in antiquity) were apparently the result of viruses from space and could not be the result of the transmission of a person-predecessor-at least by asymptomatic agencies.
The Covid version included a meteor exploding over China. In an interviewWickramsinghe claimed that “a piece of this volleyball containing trillions of Covid -9 virus broke from the convenient as it enters the stratosphere” released the viral particles that were subsequently transported with prevailing winds.
The idea depicts how fears of space are used to lead stress for human failures or injustices. Covid’s skepticism has since been I went up to the White House.
But fears about space can also be used to criticize those in power. In our times, they are used to feed narratives about billionaires with private space agendas and presidential access, rich space tourists and even richer Mars and beyond colonists. It is a tempting narrative, but the one that sees the Earth as a closed system, which should not open outward.
We can, at some level, be afraid of the space itself. We certainly have an excessive sense of our separation of separation from it. And there are some specific things we have to worry about. But there is also the danger of fear of space that it can be combined with suspicions about governments, leading us to embrace conspiracy theories as a way of consolidating different kinds of concerns in a single, manageable set of beliefs.
