Editorial: Rocky Invaders

Mercury, November/December 1998 Table of Contents

Just sixty years ago the Earth was invaded from outer space, and a small portion of the world panicked as it listened to reports of an attack on New Jersey. Objects piloted by intelligent creatures from Mars had penetrated our planet's protective air cocoon. They delivered fire and destruction; we were essentially powerless as their metal machines marched about.

And then the Mercury Theater's radio broadcast ended.

A young Orson Welles and his Theater company, modernizing H. G. Wells's late nineteenth century novel War of the Worlds, had brought the warring alien to Earth, and we humans were found wanting. Over the past few decades, Hollywood has also brought the alien to Earth - creatures that waggle and spurt and speak eloquent English without lips or tongues. But the alien has also come in the form of rocks. Dead stones or icebergs the size of planets, as in "When Worlds Collide," or smaller ones the size of states or cities found in flicks like this year's "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact." And despite "Armageddon"'s bad science, global jingoism, and "ya ain't gonna murder my planet" conclusion, we humans were again found wanting.

It seems we have a hard time dealing with the thought of death from above. On a recent trip to Vietnam in September, I found myself in front of a large group of college physics students. My formal lecture complete, we were discussing climate changes, the Sun's future, and the possibility of life elsewhere in the solar system. There were a number of questions from the students, and I had one of my own.

"Who here worries about objects from outer space hitting the Earth?" The translator's eyes widened at me as she asked quietly, urgently: "Hit us here? The planet?" I replied, yes, and she translated the question. Others' eyes opened and then smiles came to faces. I heard a few chuckles. "Deep Impact" and E.L.E. ("extinction level event") were not names familiar to the students. 1997 XF11 and the Spacewatch Project were as much fiction to them. So we talked about asteroids and comets, about how popular culture had turned cosmic threat into money, and about dinosaurs who were probably forced from the scene by an enormous rocky alien moving 50 times faster than a bullet 65 million years ago.

Most of the smiles remained. It is just so difficult to imagine sometimes that big things from outer space can hit us and potentially hurt us. But they can, as views of Meteor Crater in Arizona verify. And they do, as moderately large objects strike our planet every year. Only six decades ago the thought of alien invaders was silly to many, but as soon as Welles's radio broadcast began, that fantastic notion became real. Popular culture can, in a sense, legitimize an idea. While some astronomers have known about it for years, a large portion of the population is now aware of the threat from small bodies whizzing silently past us here in the inner solar system.

Life at the bottom of the atmosphere seems generally peaceful, and we who live here feel comfortably isolated from the harsh, sucking emptiness of space. But there are aliens of rock and ice out there who may eventually reach us.

James C. White II, Editor

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