Author: Tony Taylor
Publisher: iUniverse
Pages: 492
Genre: Science Fiction
Format: Ebook
Purchase at AMAZON
It’s 1997 at a mountaintop observatory in Southern California where spacecraft navigator Harris Mitchel and astronomer Diana Muse-Jones discover a dangerous asteroid which may hit the earth within two decades. As the asteroid tumbles through space towards an uncertain impact, Harris and Diana fight bitterly over how to announce their discovery. When Harris goes public to a skeptical world—at the cost of his and Diana’s careers—he sends their already turbulent relationship into a blaze of conflicting passions. As his notoriety builds, a fanatical preacher and his unhinged followers stalk him while an obnoxious radio personality provides disruptive help. Harris becomes an unwilling Pied Piper for his own overzealous followers hungry for belief and eager for guidance into an uncertain and tumultuous future. In this science fiction drama the characters battle each other in contests of Damn your world view! against a background of hard science, religion, romance, metaphysical speculation, and the forces of nature versus human passions and dreams. Meanwhile an asteroid hurtles through the solar system and global salvation or disaster hangs in the balance. “A courageous and visionary work … an instant classic.” —BlueInk Reviews
Thanks very much for the opportunity to participate in your
blog. I appreciate the effort and hard work you put into this site.
About Some Things Asteroidal
The Darkest Side of
Saturn is, among other things, an asteroid story—an astronomer and an
engineer co-discover a two mile wide asteroid that might or might not hit the Earth
in 16 years. Their conundrum (besides the potentially illicit affair between
them that the asteroid exacerbates) is
how to announce it without making jackasses of themselves.
Since the story is about a fictional dangerous asteroid, and
since we know that real asteroids present the Earth with problems now and then,
I’ll say a little about them here. If you want to either put your mind at ease
or scare the b’Jesus out of yourself—depending on how paranoid you are—read on.
Do we need to worry
about an asteroid collision?
In a word—NO. It’s not something you need to lose sleep
over. If you allow a few more words, it’s a very low probability but very high
consequence event. It’s like that old fighter pilot’s saying about flying: “99%
boredom, 1% stark terror,” except for large asteroids it’s more like 99.999...
(and a lot more digits) boredom, and a teeny tiny little bit of really stark terror.
If a two mile wide asteroid like the one in the book hit,
the explosion would be like detonating the whole world’s nuclear arsenal,
except nearly a hundred times larger. It would likely induce “asteroid winter”,
causing crop failures and 100 times more deaths than from the direct blast
alone. Hundreds of millions—maybe even billions of people—including you and
everyone you know—could die of starvation and wars because of the collapse of
civilization.
So, it’s not likely to happen, particularly in the short
term, but over the long term the odds go up. If we wait long enough, we will be hit, the question is whether
it’s in tens of years, or thousands, or millions, or longer. For the big ones,
it’s millions, like the six mile wide asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. But
then, that was 65 million years ago. Are we overdue? To paraphrase Ray
Bradbury, “Does something wicked this way come?”
Regardless, if we find one with our name on it in the short
term, small or large, we better do something about it. That brings up the next
question:
If an asteroid impact is predicted, what could we do and how much time
would we need?
We’d need lots of lead time. It
takes a few years to build and launch a spacecraft and a few more years to get
there and do something. For some asteroids, like Bennu (500m wide), we already
know the risk more than 150 years out. It’s about a 1:1000 probability of
impact in the last part of the 22nd century. We won’t have to worry about it,
but the children of our great-great-great grandchildren might.
Others might pop up with less
warning. If it were a really big one, say over a kilometer diameter, we’d
probably need at least 15–20 years to do something about it—even earlier would
be better. We’d want to deflect it. We’d want to send a spacecraft out, or
maybe even a fleet of spacecraft to nudge it a little bit. Not much, just a few
millimeters per second. That’s enough, over a decade or more, to cause it to
miss.
One way to nudge it is the old tried and true method of the
movies— nuke it! But nuke it very carefully! Some asteroids turn out to
be rubble piles of rocks barely held together by weak gravity. If you’re not
careful, you could turn what would have been a rifle shot into a shotgun blast
and be worse off than before. Nuke it, but a little distance away so that it
vaporizes some of the surface rather than blasting it apart, and the reaction
drives it in the opposite direction.
If it’s smaller, say around 100
meters wide like the Tunguska asteroid of 1908 that leveled most of a thousand
square miles of Siberian forest, we might do with a little less warning time to
mount a mission with nuclear devices, or we could do other things if we had
more time, like hit it with a massive spacecraft going as fast as we could make
it go. That would be like the Deep Impact spacecraft that we deliberately drove
into Comet Tempel 1 in 2005. You might need to hit it with more than one to get
it moving enough.
If it were still smaller—like the
20 meter asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia last year (generating
an explosion 25 times the Hiroshima atomic bomb)—and we had plenty of time,
there are other methods like zapping it with lasers from a fleet of spacecraft
to vaporize surface material and depend on the reaction to nudge it. Or we
could even hover a spacecraft nearby and use the mutual gravitational
attraction to pull it, like a gravity tractor but a very weak one.
If you want more information about asteroids, I suggest
Googling names like “Asteroid impact” or “Asteroid deflection,” or going to
Wikipedia for the same topics. There’s also the NASA Near Earth Object Program
web site at neo.jpl.nasa.gov that
has great detail on potentially hazardous asteroids, but maybe too technical
for some.
One last thought:
Why should I read The Darkest Side of Saturn: Odyssey of a
Reluctant Prophet of Doom?
Why wouldn’t you if you want to know the fate of the
universe, the meaning of life, and the answers to other religious,
philosophical, and metaphysical questions, all of them asked and answered in an
alternate universe? That’s not even to mention the illicit romance between
Harris and Diana, the co-discoverers of asteroid Babylym, and the ballet thrown
in for added entertainment. You know, all those things like asteroids,
religion, sex, metaphysics and dancing that just naturally go together.
Tony Taylor spent a long career navigating NASA spacecraft—including Voyager, Cassini, Mars Polar Lander, Galileo, and MESSENGER—to every planet in the solar system. He graduated from the United States Air Force Academy and earned an MS in physics from the University of Arizona. Tony and his wife, Jan, live in Sedona, Arizona.
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