In the event of apocalypse, remember the advice of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: “Don’t Panic”.

In fact, despite this being the Apocalypse Blog and all, in light of the reality that an apocalypse is really, incredibly unlikely… “Don’t Panic” is even better advice. If you panic, you may overlook the fact that the apocalypse is in fact not at all imminent, and make a complete arse of yourself. Whereas if you manage not to panic and instead think things through for a bit, you may come out ahead of the game once you’re done. And not look like an arse.

A key thing to remember in this is that when you see or read the news, when you read blogs, even this blog - in general the top priority of where you just got your information from is not to help you not look like an arse. It’s to sell ads, or to entertain so that you come back, and then sell more ads to you.

That’s true even of me. Maybe not so much me, because I really make so little money off this blog that I’d have to be insane to be doing it just for the money - and then who’d you be trusting? Some crazy guy you don’t know who wants to sell you ads? So you should take everything I say with a grain of salt as well.

Now, back to that satellite (or not even back to it, as I hadn’t gotten around to mentioning it yet). A couple of weeks ago the news was all atwitter with word that US spy satellite 193 is expected to make an uncontrolled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere during the first week of March. Uncontrolled, as in, it hasn’t worked since it got placed in orbit, so don’t expect much in terms of how it leaves orbit.

As soon as the news broke, everyone was all up in arms worried that the satellite was going to end up in their attic. Let me be the first to say that the weather here has been so bad recently that 2,500 pounds of potentially radioactive debris that might survive reentry streaking across our sky would be a definite improvement.

However - before you panic - remember a few things. The Earth is big. Very, very big - compared to you. And of that very, very bigness which is the Earth, 71% of its surface is water. That’s about 361 million square kilometers (thank you, Wikipedia).

You are very small. Compared to the Earth. Odds are that even laying down you don’t take up more than two to three square meters. Even if you’re participating in the “Obesity Epidemic”, your footprint is still probably no more than three square meters in surface area.

Let’s just be generous and say that you might occupy four square meters of floor.

The surface area of the oceans is roughly 361,000,000 square kilometers - that is - 361,000,000,000 square meters. That means that the oceans of the Earth have roughly 90,250,000,000 times the surface area that you do.

Now who should be worried? You? Or the Oceans of the Earth?

And that’s not even counting the other 29% of the Earth’s surface which is land - the other 29% of the Earth’s surface which you also are mostly not laying on at any given instant.

Even if the spy satellite manages to leave a long, long tail of debris as it reenters, the space you occupy is still very, very, very, very tiny compared to the overall size of our planet.

I know, I know, “Okay, it’s very unlikely that it will hit me but it will really suck if it does!”

And that’s true, it probably will really suck if it does. You’ll get some great press, but you won’t be around to enjoy it, unless you get to play out some kind of “Dead Like Me” scenario, complete with getting killed by some blue ice from Skylab and come back as a grim reaper. However, the magnitude of the suckiness of an event does not influence the likelihood of the event, so you might as well go back to wasting your time worrying about something which might actually happen to you.

Instead of making an arse of yourself, just sit back, relax, and put on Lou Reed singing “Satellite of Love”.

And yes - if it does actually manage to obliterate you after you read this and didn’t panic, I promise to feel bad about it.

Via: Heads Up: Satellite Crashing, but Experts Not Panicking - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog
[tags]satellite, falling, reentry, lou reed, spy sat, don’t panic, very very small[/tags]

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