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TODAY Tuesday 17 March 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: St Patrick and Your Asteroid Insurance

Today is a day when all true Irishmen want to crawl under a rock. Suburban louts invade our city, wearing green plastic hats, and bawl sentimental songs without knowing the lyrics. Bands of homophobes crowd Fifth Avenue and taunt gays. Everyone drinks too much, many get pickled (and then sing even louder), and more than a few end the day with a gut-clearing vomit into a municipal litter barrel. In this they are encouraged by the merchandising of Irishness as a charmin', magical, irrepressibly lyrical kind of thing. It runs the gamut from leprechauns drinking Budweiser to New Agers talking about the spiritual depths of the pre-Christian Celts.

It's a good thing we're rich and so obviously well-adjusted.

So today, dear friends, let's turn to an authentically Irish theme: the pleasurable contemplation of death. Deeply ashamed by his own unworthiness and lack of accomplishment, the Irishman draws solace from the knowledge that everything finally rots and that all human endeavors come to heartache sooner or later. Not for him the cheery uplift of your Protestant ameliorists.

So it was keenly disappointing to learn last week that the earth was not going to be hit by an asteriod next summer after all. The latest guess is that it will miss by 60,000 miles or so. We love asteroid scare stories around here ("Duck!"; "Duck [Again]!"). Luckily, an e-mail from a colleague in the Society for Environmental Journalists alerted us to a wonderful new development in the field: the emergence of asteroid lawyers. Michael Gerrard and Anna Barber, of the New York offices of Arnold & Porter, have written a marvelous law review article entitled "Asteroids and Comets: US and International Law and the Lowest-Probability, Highest Consequence Risk." The article was published in the NYU Environmental Law Journal (1997, Vol. 6, No. 1); ask co-author Gerrard for a copy by e-mailing him at gerrami@porter.com.

The authors note the emergence in the last few years of considerable new data on the frequency and force of impacts on our planet by extra-terrestrial objects. "Overall," they write, "current estimates are that objects about ten meters across strike the Earth almost annually...objects about 100 meters across arrive about once every 300 years and could destroy a large city; objects four times [that] size, expected every few thousand years, could cause tsunamis with waves over 60 meters high that would wipe out coastal cities in all directions. Objects about one kilometer across are estimated to hit approximately once in 500,000 years and can cause global catastrophic effects including the death of billions of people."

Now we're talking.

Let's say that four billion people are killed every one million years. That averages out to 4,000 people per year, which is close to the number of Americans who die each year from drowning (4,500), fires (4,100), choking (2,800) and the accidental discharge of firearms (1,400). Considerable expense is undertaken to reduce those numbers, say the authors, and logic dictates at least some parallel effort to reduce asteroid fatalities. Would the risks of counter-measures (e.g., the maintenance of nuclear missiles) be greater than the risks of the asteroids? Would counter-measures be bound by the strictures of the National Environmental Policy Act and therefore required to submit Environmental Impact Statements? How would domestic and international law dovetail? Who would regulate insurance coverage?

Not long ago the idea that humans would dramatically affect the climate of the planet was straight out of sci-fi. So don't laugh about asteroid insurance, and have a careeningly happy St. Patricks's Day.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

One response to the asteroid threat, of course, is to get off the planet. For the best websites on space colonies, consult the excellent feature on that subject by H. Hilliard Gastfriend in our High Fives section.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

3/16: Rebellion in Tennessee
3/13: Good News from the Senate
3/12: Children and Cancer
3/11: Save Our Beaches!
3/10: Die Gruenen und der SDP
3/9: In Search for the Holy Grail of the Forests
3/6: My Doom, Your Gloom
3/5: The Great D. P. Moynihan
3/4: "An Earthquake in Insurance"
3/3: Salmon Farming
3/2: Our Friends the Duck Killers
2/27: Trust El Nino
2/26: That Darn Triple-A
2/25: Cutting a Deal on Endangered Species
2/24: Fire? Again?
2/23: Garbage
2/20: Population Rebellion in the Sierra Club
2/19: The Trouble With Cattle

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.