Space Rocks

The Hubble Telescope has shown us a massive debris plume which is probably from a recent impact on the planet.

The Hubble team says the force of the explosion was thousands of times more powerful than the Tunguska impact, which devastated 500,000 acres of Siberian forest land in 1908.

One big question about the impact is: Why didn't we see this coming? What does this say about our ability to detect potential killer asteroids or comets before they hit Earth?

Jonah Goldberg compares the attention that a possible asteroid hit gets in the scientific world, compared to the attention given to global warming. A snippet:

. . .A scientist quoted last month in Maclean’s noted that “there are more people working in a single McDonald’s than there are trying to save civilization from an asteroid.”

Meanwhile, the global-warming industry — and it is an industry now — could fill football stadiums.

It makes you wonder. For all the rush and panic, the truth is, climate change — if real — is a very slow-moving catastrophe. Moreover, it happens to align with an ideological and political agenda the Left has been pushing for generations. . . .

Decisions on which types of scientific research to fund are sometimes more political than scientific.

Update: Jupiter = Gitmo? Heh.