Gary Brown: Chicken Little was right. The sky really is falling
Apparently, Chicken Little was right. The sky really is falling.
A meteorite supposedly hit a home in New Jersey.
"The metallic object crashed through the roof of a house and ricocheted around a bedroom," CNN reported. "No one was in the bedroom at the time of the incident, and no injuries were reported."
Still, to quote one of the "Godfather" films — "In our bedroom, where my wife sleeps! Where my children come and play with their toys. In my home!”
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Granted, Michael Corleone was talking about a different kind of "hit" in the movie. But, a meteorite hit is scary, too. Especially if it hits you.
I'm assuming, optimistically for me, that it will be you. Sorry to be selfish. But, when it comes to a meteorite hitting us on our noggins, it's pretty much every noggin for itself.
Chicken Little wasn't wrong
Technically, Chicken Little always has been right.
"The sky is falling!"
A lot of things besides Chicken Little's acorn have been falling from the sky for centuries. Rain and snow, for starters. Hail and sleet, as well. A saying also notes that it has rained "cats and dogs," and in a "Reader's Digest" humor column, Meghan Jones listed a number of other animals that have rained from the sky. Fish, frogs, iguanas, and spiders were among them.
Golfers can tell you that the sky is full of falling golf balls and the odds of getting hit by one of them are about the same as the chances you will fail to hear the shout "Fore!"
Various pieces of space junk are frequent fallers. The website livescience.com estimated that "over the past 50 years, more than 5,900 tons (5,400 metric tons) of space debris has survived re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. Luckily, your odds of being hit by such debris are about a million times smaller than your odds of winning the Powerball jackpot."
That's sort of what oddsmakers said about getting hit by a meteorite, until little space rocks started hitting closer to home. Or should we say on a home?
How infrequent is rare?
No less an authority on natural phenomenon than National Geographic magazine, in an online article by Brian Clark Howard, noted that, "Most people have the sense that meteorite strikes on people are exceedingly rare, but how rare?"
Anybody who got hit by one would say it wasn't infrequent enough.
The United Kingdom lottery website, in trying to convince potential players that they'd have better odds trying the Irish Lotto, claimed that "about 500 meteorites strike the Earth each year on average."
But, "if we consider the odds of an average house of size 2,500 square feet being hit, out of the whole wide expanse of 5.9 quadrillion square feet, a targeted house-collision by any of the 500 meteorites in a year, comes to 1 in 2,196,267,379,587."
The U.S. Geological Survey does, I'll admit, estimate that about 71% of the Earth's surface is covered in water. So, most of the 500 meteorites that actually make it to the ground in varying sizes instead of burning up on entry, likely make a splash rather than a splat.
I suspect, however, that if you told that to the New Jersey homeowners whose bedroom became a landing pad, they'd feel a lot like that golfing buddy who told you, "I can hit it through those trees; it's 90% air," then had to duck when the ball bounced back.
Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com.
On Twitter: @gbrownREP
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Gary Brown: Meteorite falls from the sky
