On July 25, while half the world’s population slumbered peacefully and the other half went merrily about its day, Asteroid 2019 OK — about 57 to 130 metres wide and travelling at roughly 86,900 kmph — whizzed past Earth. The cosmic missile completely escaped detection until a few hours before it narrowly missed us. The distance at which it passed, 75,000 km, may sound like a pretty wide margin, but in space terms, it is practically whispering distance.
So what would have happened had it hit Earth? Well, the size and path of the asteroid qualified it for the nickname ‘city-killer’. The force of it hitting earth would have set off a shockwave equal to the detonation of 10 megatonnes of TNT, close to a powerful hydrogen bomb. The last time anything like this happened was in 1908, when an asteroid crashed into the wintry forests of Siberia, flattening a staggering 2,000 sq.km. of land.
If 2019 OK had indeed hit your city, how do you think you would have survived? How would you fare in a world without electricity, food, clean water, or any administrative structure to help you access these?
This is the question astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell answered in his GREAT talk, organised by the British Council in Kolkata last month.
Dartnell wears many hats. He is a TEDx speaker and an author of four books, including The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch. He has also appeared on radio and TV shows in his efforts “to get science out of the lab and onto people’s breakfast tables”, as he puts it. His ‘day job’ is that of a researcher and an academic: he is Professor of Science Communication at University of Westminster.
On the day we met at the British Council, Dartnell had just returned from a lecture with a group of schoolchildren. He was very impressed by the thoughtful, searching questions they asked. “It wasn’t just ‘Can you tell me this fact?’ Or ‘I’ve heard this, is it true?’ They listened to what I said throughout the talk, understood that, pulled things together and then asked something new that they wanted to find out.”
Moon mission
The conversation automatically turned to news dominating the headlines: the launch of Chandrayaan-2. “Chandrayaan-2 is a phenomenally inspiring mission,” he exclaimed. “It will be the first to land on the South Pole of the moon. No one has ever done that before. If the mission does find water-ice on the moon, in its permanently shadowed cold craters, that will be very important to the future of humans. To explore space and put a base or a colony on the surface of the moon, you need water. And you can melt the lunar ice down, you can split the water to give you oxygen to breathe, it’s all about in situ resource utilisation. Everything that you don’t have to carry from earth makes the mission so much more accomplishable and cheaper. And this Indian programme has the potential to solve it.”
In Dartnell’s prolific profile, it’s the rather unfamiliar term, ‘astrobiologist’ that creates the most intrigue. The temptation is to immediately associate it with tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories, such as Area 51, the high-security U.S. Air Force facility in Nevada. Memes about civilians storming this base, supposedly to find aliens, have invaded social media recently (Dartnell roared with laughter at this suggestion).
“Astrobiology is not about looking for little green men,” he said. “It’s not about UFOs, or abductions. It is extending what you know about biology on earth, about bacteria, biochemistry and the origins of life. We’ve got the evidence, and we’re extending our understanding of it to the environment of other planets. Is Mars habitable, as we understand it?”
The deeply interdisciplinary field interacts with biology, chemistry, geology, planetary science, physics and astronomy. The ultimate aim of studying astrobiology is to find signs of life in other planets in the solar system, or other galaxies. And how close are we to finding it? “Well, it takes as long as it takes, and it can be solved quicker if you devote more resources to it. But there are very good reasons to be optimistic that we can find it in our generation,” said Dartnell.
Dartnell’s other area of interest, the one that caused him to discuss Asteroid 2019 OK, is equally unusual. He might be referred to as a survival expert, but he makes it very clear that he is not ‘Bear Grylls’. At the GREAT talk, he showed the audience several slides depicting general doom (such as buildings on fire). He then asked them to imagine that “some kind of global catastrophe, doomsday event, has happened, and that the world as we know it has come to an end”. He insisted it was a thought experiment, and that he doesn’t think the world is actually coming to an end; but that if it did, he could provide you with the keys to survival.
What are those keys? Dartnell pointed out four basic needs that every human being must satisfy to get through what he calls the ‘grace period’ or the period immediately after apocalypse, where people are gone but the resources have been left behind. These tools are food, water, fire, and a storehouse of accessible knowledge.
Alternative facts
The lecture gave the audience a lot to think about, testified by the rapid-fire questions at the end. One question cropped up again and again: even if this entire exercise is a thought experiment, what, according to Dartnell, is the greatest threat to human civilisation at the moment? He had a one-word answer: “Ourselves.”
He elaborated: “We are doing this to ourselves through climate change, global warming, ocean acidification, the sea levels rise. It is well-established that they are occurring, and that we’re causing them.”
And yet, in spite of this, we are currently living in a world of alternative facts, in which there are climate change deniers and ‘anti-vaxxers’. “Many of the challenges we have been facing recently are because people have, to a certain extent, rejected science,” admitted the astrobiologist. “I think the solution isn’t to teach people scientific facts but to teach people a more scientific way of thinking, of thinking logically about what might be the better solution.”
Would he ever consider writing fiction? “I don’t think I’d be very good at it!” He does have favourite fiction writers, though, particularly, Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds. On the website he has built around The Knowledge , he has a complete bibliography, and lists of films, podcasts and other materials in popular culture that can teach a person how to be the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ of the post-apocalyptic world.
He has spent the last week talking to young students as part of the GIAN (Global Initiative for Academic Networks) scheme to boost higher education, and thus clearly walks the talk. “Every single one of us who has chosen to study science or to research can probably remember someone from their own childhood who inspired them. It was more than watching documentaries and reading books that got me interested in science; it was also seeing people like (David) Attenborough, or Sir Patrick Moore. So, in a way, I’m just passing that on.”
The writer is a journalist, poet, blogger and translator from Kolkata.
