Friday 8 January 2010

Carpe Diem


With both sides of the Atlantic as cold as the South Pole, global warming is fast becoming at article of faith.
But what’s this? Reports of an even bigger catastrophe with a nearby star set to explode. Like a volcano, T Pyxidis has been regularly erupting every twenty years, except the last minor blast was in 1967. So the big one (or supernova) could be any time soon (though soon in astronomical terms can be up to ten million years).
But hey, people say the star is 3,260 light years away, so we’ve got plenty of time. But what they forget is that we are observing the star at it was 3,260 years ago, and the devastating nuclear radiation will reach Earth just as soon as the light which tells us it is exploding -- in other words not even the four-minute warning of nuclear Armageddon we were promised in the 1960s.
It is a mystery why there are no signals from other life forms in the universe, so maybe mass extinctions are commonplace.
I say live for the day, and preferably not under another five years of Labour Government.

No comments:

Post a Comment