THE idea that today’s science was dreamed up by earlier storytelling visionaries is beguiling. There is some truth to it: consider the space elevator, now thought of as a real possibility given the trajectory of advances in carbon nanotubes, but envisioned and written about by a range of authors over decades, from Arthur C. Clarke to Terry Pratchett.

Yet inspiration rarely comes entirely from a vacuum, and visionaries of fiction often have their imaginations sparked by something real, a train of thought that they follow to a logical end.

I find myself dwelling on this with the news of yet another school shooting in the US. Earlier this week, four students were killed and several others injured when a sophomore opened fire at a Michigan high school.

There’s an old song that I’m embarrassed about not having been familiar with: ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’, from 1979, by the Irish new wave band Boomtown Rats. It is about school shootings and AI, and when I first came across it a few months ago, I thought it was extraordinarily prescient; who, back then, even thought about such atrocities and digital self-awareness, which today are buzzwords?

One wonders at the enduring curiousness of the human mind.

But, as it turns out, the song was written about a shooting at the Cleveland Elementary School on Jan 29, 1979. A 16-year-old girl was convicted, and she will be eligible for parole in September 2022. When reached by a reporter on the phone (while she was still in her own house after the shooting) as to the why, she reportedly answered: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” (In fact, school shootings in the US go back to over a century and half.)

But now, in another illustration of fiction visionaries having earlier put into words what has indeed come to pass, is the following news: some 10 days ago, Nasa launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test — DART — (on a Space X launcher) to deliberately smash a spacecraft into an asteroid, in a real proof-of-concept experiment to see if it was actually possible to knock it off course.

The goal is to slightly alter the trajectory of Dimorphos, a “moonlet” approximately 160 metres wide, that circles a much larger asteroid called Didymos, which together orbit the Sun.

Whether the diversion is possible or not will become clear in the fall of 2022, when the impact is estimated. That is when the binary asteroid system will be 11 million kilometres from Earth, pretty much the nearest point to which they ever get.

This scenario — of a space object (that Nasa calls the Near-Earth Objects) becoming a danger to Earth and the need to somehow divert its trajectory — has been the subject of countless pieces of fiction. Of particular concern, with today’s science, to Nasa’s Planetary Defence Coordination Office, are NEOs larger than 149 metres in size, which would have the potential to level entire cities or regions with several times the energy of nuclear bombs (as we know them today).

The DART probe will use the so-called “kinetic impactor” to knock Dimorphos off course, reportedly. This isn’t the only way to hypothesise an asteroid being kicked out of the way, but it is the only technique ready to deploy with current technology. Another hypothesis — perhaps most well-known in pop culture today are the films Armageddon and Deep Impact — is detonating a nuclear device.

Why the idea did not come out of nowhere is, obviously, because according to science’s best guess, it was an asteroid collision 66m years ago that led to the extinction of most life on Earth, including the dinosaurs.

So much manpower and money spent on an event — a strike by an asteroid large enough to do significant damage — that is thought to be a danger once every 20,000 years or so.

Contrast this with another piece of news recently: about a fortnight ago, the US condemned Russia for conducting a missile test of blowing up one of its own satellites (Russia’s) that, the US said, endangered the crew aboard the International Space Station.

And earlier, reportedly, China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle that circled the globe twice through low-orbit space before striking within a few kilometres of its target. These, and others, are examples of an increasing arms race in space between major adversaries at a pace of conflict that is intensifying, often (at the moment) with satellites as targets.

One must wonder, then, at the enduring curiousness of the human mind: part of it is willing to expend incredible effort at safeguarding life on Earth against a distant threat; but another part of it indulges in manmade dangers clear and present. Whether DART succeeds in its mission we will only know next year; what, meanwhile, of the threats that are playing out before us every day, in real-time?

The writer is a journalist.
hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 4th, 2021