BAN #425: How to Take Over the World, Space rocks updates

9 May April 2022 Issue #425

May 09, 2022

Book ’em

Sometimes I read books

Ryan North is probably best known for his very funny dinosaur comics — the same panels in every comic, literally the same drawing of three dinosaurs, but the words are different every time, usually discussing the philosophical ramifications of the T-Rex’s terrible ideas — but he also writes books. His latest is called How to Take Over the World, and in a nutshell, it’s funny and charming and interesting, so go buy it and read it [affiliate link].

[The title is fairly descriptive. Credit: Riverhead Books]

The title pretty much lays it out: He tells you step by step, how to become a supervillain and take over the world. Need a secret lair? Covered. Need to start your own country to rule? Check. Various evil schemes to hold the planet hostage, like cloning dinosaurs, manipulating weather, inventing time travel? It’s all there.

This is the kind of writing I like to think of as “taking an idea and really running with it”; as in taking some common trope like a secret base in a volcano and really, thoroughly going into how that might work. I think I first ran into this sort of thing when I was in high school reading scifi author Larry Niven’s essays, where he’d squeeze every last possibility out of a topic, and it’s so much fun. It takes a lot of imagination but it has to be backed up with logic and science.

Ryan does exactly that. Each chapter really dives into each Bond-like over-the-top villainry, with tons of facts and sidenotes of trivia that make this a great read. It’s both silly and serious simultaneously, taking ridiculous ideas and examining them carefully. It’s a bit like Randall Munroe’s what if book (another fantastic read, and yes that’s also an affiliate link) but with an overall narrative theme.

So, even if you don’t want to take over the world but maybe are thinking about it in an abstract way, read the book. It’s fun.

Blog Jam

[Beam of matter and antimatter particles (long linear blue feature) shot out by a pulsar (upper left) emits X-rays as it interacts with the galaxy’s magnetic field. From Thursday’s article. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./M. de Vries; Optical: NSF/AURA/Gemini Consortium]

Space news

Space is big. That’s why we call it “space”

I’m not just an astronomy science communicator, I am a true astronomy nerd. I enjoy getting press releases about interesting stories, I like reading journal papers about new research, and I am endlessly fascinated by the sky above us.

I subscribe to a lot of science news outlets, and one that’s particularly interesting is the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre newsletter. It comes out once a month with updates about asteroids that slide near Earth in their trips around the Sun. If you’re keeping up with my blog, you may know I found out that the small asteroid 2009 JF1 wouldn’t hit us via this site.

The May 2022 newsletter is particularly cool. It felts like a clean-up of fun info they’ve been meaning to get around to sometime, and I love stuff like that. For example, reading it I found out that as of now over 1,000 new near-Earth objects (or NEOs) have been discovered this year to date! That’s a lot. Before you panic, most are small and never get all that close to us. The reality is there are millions of objects out there, but space is big, and an impact big enough to do real damage is rare.

And honestly, I feel better knowing we’re looking for them and finding them. As long as that happens we have a chance to do something about one if necessary.

I also learned about the wee rock 2022 GQ5, which is only 2 meters wide — so small that if it did hit us what we’d see is a very brief seconds-long spectacular light show. On April 8 it passed over out planet by a distance of just 12,500 kilometers — about one Earth diameter. Close! An asteroid that size passes Earth that closely all the time, but they’re so small they’re hard to spot.

[The orbit of 2022 GQ5, showing its position on April 8, 2022. It was so close to Earth that on this scale they overlap. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech]

What amazed me most about this is that it was discovered when it was still roughly the same distance from us as the Moon! That’s actually pretty far for a rock so small. It’s amazing it was seen at all. It would’ve been roughly 20th magnitude when discovered — the faintest star you can see by eye is hundreds of thousands of times brighter! It was so faint that it was only observed over the course of one night, so the calculated orbit of it is pretty uncertain (I’ve explained how this works many times on the blog), meaning it’s hard to predict where it will be in the future. Its orbit brings it near Earth every few years, though, so I have little doubt it’ll get seen again and its orbit highly refined.

The newsletter also, just apropos of nothing, listed all known asteroids roughly 1 meter in size. Amazingly there are only 7! I would’ve thought there were more. But they are very hard to detect, and generally seen when they get extremely close to Earth. They also move so rapidly across the sky when they’re that close that they’re hard to track, too.

I enjoy checking out their newsletter every month. If you want to learn more about planet-skimming rocks, you can subscribe, too.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!

Reply

or to participate.