More about doomsday

I know what you're thinking.  "Oh boy.  Another doomsday nutcase."  Or something like that.  Or, if you're not thinking any such thing, then perhaps by the end of this post, you will be.  Let me just say that I neither believe nor disbelieve that the world will end on December 21, 2012.  It might, just like it might end today or any other day.  I like to keep an open mind about things.  I think that having an open mind is important to be able to continue learning, and I love learning new stuff.

Anyway, all this talk about the Mayan calendar (or one of them) ending next Friday has spurred my interest in astronomy, and I've been busily reading up on things like comets, the Oort cloud, and Planet X, to name a few (yeah, I really do have a lot of time on my hands lately).  The result, at least in my mind, is that it seems to be entirely possible that a large comet or asteroid could come slamming into the earth at any time.

My research eventually lead me to the NASA website, where, not surprisingly, I found a statement by someone (sorry, I don't know exactly where it was) stating that there was absolutely no evidence of any large space junk (my term) headed for earth, and as proof said that if there were, we would be able to see it, and that we could rest assured that NASA had no reason to keep any such finding a secret.  I immediately had to ask myself what the purpose of telling us would be, and decided that there would be no purpose, so I didn't feel particularly reassured.  To make it worse, whomever was making this statement said something to the effect that people should concern themselves more with "real science" like climate change than any doomsday theories.  Don't get me started on the real science of climate change.

In perusing the NASA website, I happened to see an article about the X-37, which was supposed to be a follow-on project for the space shuttle.  The X-37 project was cut by NASA a few years ago and was taken over by the Air Force and classified, so there's not a lot of new information about the X-37, other than a few days ago, when the craft was launched for a classified mission.

Now, everything I've read about this mission, which isn't much, says that the Air Force is just doing some testing.  Pretty standard stuff.  The funny thing is that it appears that nobody is quite sure why the Air Force would be interested in this type of aircraft, with speculation going so far as to say that the only reason for it is to keep the Chinese guessing what we're up to.  Of course, being a classified mission, launch commentary ended at about 17 minutes after the launch, because, you know, they're doing lots of secret testing, and besides, we don't want the Chinese to know what we're up to.

So, what does the X-37 have to do with doomsday?  One of the guesses as to the Air Force's interest is that it could be used as a device to carry nuclear weapons, rather than using a missile.  Of course, the obvious problem with this is that, because of its slow decent, it would be too easily destroyed before reaching its target.  But, that wouldn't really be a problem if the target were some massive asteroid heading straight for Earth, would it?

So, what to do... Same as everyday, I guess.  Live today as if it is your last, but don't forget to plan for a long and healthy retirement, just in case.