So Now There’s an Asteroid to Worry About (Just a Little); How AI Could Force a Nuclear-Energy Comeback–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Jan. 30, 2025

Indy Digest: Jan. 30, 2025

Bad news: The news generally remains, uh, bad.

Worse news: The planet could be in for a big collision just before Christmas of 2032.

The Associated Press reports:

A newly discovered asteroid has a tiny chance of smacking Earth in 2032, space agency officials said Wednesday.

Scientists put the odds of a strike at slightly more than 1%.

“We are not worried at all, because of this 99 percent chance it will miss,” said Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. “But it deserves attention.”

That quote cracked me up: “We’re not worried at all.” If there were a slightly more than 1 percent chance of something epically bad happening to you, wouldn’t you, like, worry at least a little bit?

Anyway, this meteor, which could hit us on Dec. 22, 2032, is estimated to be 130 to 330 feet across. The story says: “Earth gets clobbered by an asteroid this size every few thousand years, according to ESA, with the potential for severe damage. That’s why this one now tops ESA’s asteroid risk list.”

After reading this, I went into a internet-research rabbit hole, of sorts (hey, it beats listening to the leader of the free world claim, without any lick of evidence whatsoever, that DEI caused the awful plane-helicopter crash in Washington, D.C., last night) to see what kind of “severe” damage a meteor of that size could do.

Back in 2022, Space.com did a deep dive into this very question. Here’s what that article says would happen if a 330-feet meteor hit the planet:

The pressure blast would destroy buildings up to 9 miles (15 km) from ground zero, and windows would shatter more than 60 miles away (100 km). To make matters worse, as the partially burned rock hit the ground, it would trigger seismic tremors that would spread through the planet’s crust, carrying the destruction further away from the epicenter. The debris ejected into the air by the force of the impact would rain back on the ground miles away from the impact site, and the finer dust and dirt would remain hanging in the air, spreading with the wind across large distances. 

In other words: Humanity would survive—but it would be pretty awful if the meteor struck in your neck of the woods.

For what it’s worth: The AP reports that scientists are studying both past images of the meteor, and will be watching it in the future, to learn more about the strike probability. So, stay tuned.

—Jimmy Boegle

From the Independent

More News

• Air-traffic controller staffing levels were “not normal” at Reagan Airport last night when the helicopter-plane collision occurred. The New York Times says: “The controller who was handling helicopters in the airport’s vicinity Wednesday night was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from its runways. Those jobs typically are assigned to two controllers, rather than one. This increases the workload for the air traffic controller and can complicate the job. One reason is that the controllers can use different radio frequencies to communicate with pilots flying planes and pilots flying helicopters. … Like most of the country’s air traffic control facilities, the tower at Reagan airport has been understaffed for years. The tower there was nearly a third below targeted staff levels, with 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023, according to the most recent Air Traffic Controller Workforce Plan, an annual report to Congress that contains target and actual staffing levels. The targets set by the FAA and the controllers’ union call for 30. The shortage—caused by years of employee turnover and tight budgets, among other factors—has forced many controllers to work up to six days a week and 10 hours a day.”

• The Los Angeles Times reports on concerns that deportation threats could jeopardize California agriculture: “California has an estimated 162,000 farmworkers and more than half of them are undocumented, federal data show. Given that, it’s no surprise that immigrant communities in the Central Valley and beyond are on heightened alert as President Trump looks to follow through on his vows of historic mass deportations. After dozens of people were arrested during a Border Patrol operation in Bakersfield earlier this month (in the final weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency), immigrant advocates voiced concerns that it was a harbinger of what to expect in Trump’s second term. … And as California braces for a promised blitz of raids and deportations, farmers in the state are expressing fears that targeting their workforce could lead to lost harvests and higher food prices.”

• European disease and food agencies are sounding the alarm that bird flu is increasingly becoming a pandemic threat. Politico reports: “To date, cases among humans have been low. The U.K. reported its first case of this winter on Monday, while there have been 67 cases in the United States and one death. The risk of infection for the general European population remains low, and low-to-moderate for people routinely exposed to potentially infected animals. But the situation would change if there was any ‘confirmed human-to-human transmission,’ said Edoardo Colzani, head of respiratory viruses at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). And this risk is increasing. The ECDC and (the European Food Safety Authority) have identified 34 key genetic mutations that make the virus more likely to jump from animals to humans but also to replicate to allow human-to-human transmission.“

• Today’s recall news involves … Hondas! USA Today says: “Honda is recalling about 295,000 vehicles in the United States due to a software error in the fuel injection electronic control unit that may cause the engine to stall or lose power, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The automaker said in a news release Wednesday that due to improper programming of the fuel injection electronic control unit, ‘sudden changes in the throttle could illuminate the check engine light and cause the engine to lose drive power, hesitate and/or stall,’ increasing the risk of a crash or injury. The recall affects certain 2022-2025 Acura MDX Type-S, 2023-2025 Honda Pilot, and 2021-2025 Acura TLX Type-S vehicles, according to the NHTSA.”

• Could the need for more energy, thanks to AI, lead to a comeback for nuclear power? Our partners at Calmatters look at that very real possibility: “If you’ve used ChatGPT to write a breakup text or figure out how to not burn the Christmas roast, you might’ve actually helped create jobs and profits in California, where the artificial intelligence tool was born. Unfortunately you’ve probably also contributed to climate change. Artificial intelligence is an energy hog, and every query to ChatGPT is like running a lightbulb for 20 minutes, a research scientist recently told NPR. Artificial intelligence is so wasteful, in fact, that its rapid spread could endanger California’s goal of eliminating all carbon emissions by 2045—even as AI companies may be flooding the state treasury with tax revenue. The conundrum has legislators considering what was once unthinkable: Bringing back nuclear power as a driver of innovation and economic growth, sort of like it was the 1960s all over again. Some lawmakers are pushing for exemptions to the state’s 49-year-old moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power plants; they’re also mulling a possible future for the once-left-for-dead Diablo Canyon on the Central Coast, the state’s last operational plant whose operator, Pacific Gas & Electric, says it is prepared for the possibility of the plant staying open longer.”

• And finally … some things are still apparently happening these days at the Food and Drug Administration. CNN reports: “The US Food and Drug Administration signed off Thursday on the first new type of pain reliever to be approved in more than two decades. The drug, suzetrigine, is a 50-milligram prescription pill that’s taken every 12 hours after a larger starter dose. It will be sold under the brand name Journavx. ‘A new non-opioid analgesic therapeutic class for acute pain offers an opportunity to mitigate certain risks associated with using an opioid for pain and provides patients with another treatment option,’ Dr. Jacqueline Corrigan-Curay, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a news release. … About 80 million Americans fill prescriptions each year for medications to treat new instances of moderate to severe pain, according to a study by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed the new drug; about half those prescriptions are written for opioid medications, which can lead to dependence and addiction.”

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