Gravitas

I believe Earth came close to some pretty serious devastation this morning. Breakfast tv, usually not very stetching on the old intellect, furnished me with the news that an asteroid as big as a house had just missed our lovely planet by a couple of hundred thousand miles. Oh yes, just um, fifteen minutes ago. While I showered doom lurked not very far away.

 

In the grand scheme of things a couple of hundred thousand miles is close, too close, and though house size asteroids may not sound like much planetarily speaking, I know given its speed etc. that impact would not have been pretty. Not quite dinosaur extinction scale, but a nasty bump for some country or other nonetheless. As the show's guest pointed out a few hours earlier and things might have been different.

 

Then to keep things relatively serious they had a plug for the Horizon documentary on tonight (I'm missing it right now!!!!) about Gravity (with a big 'G'). I don't know about you, but the whole concept of Gravity fascinates me. To pervade everything, vacuums included, strikes me as a marvellous attribute and very much part of the whole Space-Time concept. Anyway I shouldn't make too many claims for breakfast tv; one of the presenters kept dropping his pen and asking, 'There! Gravity! What's there to explain?' Oh, dear.