A meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk around 9:20AM local time Friday. First there was a fireball brighter than the sun, followed by a blast wave that blew down doors and smashed windows. More than 1,000 people were injured, mostly from flying glass.

Chelyabinsk is a tough town; it makes Chicago look like Fire Island. In Russia they make Chuck Norris-style jokes about its inhabitants. 

The city grew when Uncle Joe relocated heavy industries there back in the Great Patriotic War—people used to call it Tankograd. Later it became a center for nuclear weapons development. In 1957, a chemical explosion in a plutonium plant in nearby Kyshtym released vast amounts of radioactivity that just missed Chelyabinsk. For years there were minimum speed limits on the highways going through the contaminated zone. You had to go faster than that minimum—because the area was so radioactive, you see. I doubt a mere meteorite will leave much of an impression on Chelyabinsk.

Friday’s explosion was powerful—perhaps 25 times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb, judging from sonic data. Damage was limited because it occurred at a very high altitude. It appears to be the largest since the Tunguska impact, which exploded over a remote region of Siberia in 1908. That earlier explosion was even more powerful, a thousand times greater than Hiroshima. It leveled about a thousand square miles of forest, but there seem to have been no casualties since the region was uninhabited.

Injuries from such cosmic collisions are extremely rare. A meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in Sylacauga in 1954, bruising Mrs. Elizabeth Hodges. Evidently stars do fall on Alabama. In 1911, one hit and killed an Egyptian farmer’s dog. Worse yet, a meteorite totaled a red Chevy Malibu in Peekskill, NY in 1992. Chelyabinsk’s casualties are unprecedented.

Powerful meteor explosions like the one over Chelyabinsk are not so rare. In recent decades, military satellites have detected many such events. Generally they strike oceans or other uninhabited regions, since cities cover only a tiny fraction of the Earth’s surface.

Should we worry? Yep. If this meteor had exploded at a lower altitude, it would have smashed that city flat and killed hundreds of thousands of people. How likely that was depends on the details—most meteors are not strong enough to hold together during that kind of re-entry, although some nickel-iron meteors may be. The Tunguska explosion would have utterly destroyed any city it hit.

It’s not quite as bad as a nuclear weapon: It would only kill you with fire and blast, rather than fire, blast, and radiation. You’d only die twice—Sean Connery might survive. 

However, someone might mistake such a natural explosion for a nuclear strike, and that would be bad. I know that we spend most of our time worrying about terrorists from Trashcanistan wielding box cutters, but the nukes are still around, and they still matter.

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Space-based detectors allow us to reliably distinguish between meteorites and nuclear explosions—a good thing to know. Because of these “national technical means,” the US and Russia can probably avoid an accidental nuclear war, at least of this kind. Close allies of the US such as Britain and France, which have access to our data as well as some space assets of their own, should also be able to avoid accidental war. That might not be the case for other nuclear-armed countries that don’t have sophisticated space surveillance or close intelligence ties with those who do, such as India, Pakistan, or North Korea. North Korea has mostly been pretending to be crazy, but a meteorite striking Pyongyang might make the crazy real. Still, such a precise strike—hitting the capital city of the right country—is fantastically unlikely. The chance is something like one in a hundred million per year.

Anyhow, minor nuclear powers can only fight minor nuclear wars. We’d pull through. I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. 

There are other far greater risks associated with rocks from space. Consider a medium-size asteroid, say a mile across. If it hit anywhere, it would cause a worldwide disaster. Precise aim is no longer necessary. 

Certainly such an asteroid would destroy any city it hit, but that’s not the point. If enough dust is lofted into the atmosphere, it blocks sunlight. If this lasted for even one year, food production would collapse worldwide, and we would have to rely on reserves. Unfortunately, there aren’t any. Billions of people would starve to death. I’m not sure that they’d go quietly. More like the wreck of the Medusa rather than a Birkenhead drill. 

There have been events like this in recorded history, although they were far milder. Mount Tambora, an Indonesian volcano, erupted in 1815 and threw about 25 cubic miles of rock into the stratosphere. 1816 is known as the year without a summer: Connecticut had frosts in June. Snow fell in Albany on June 6th. Crops failed and prices skyrocketed. There were food riots in Ireland, England, France, and Switzerland. The more sensible New Englanders moved to the Midwest.

There are things that we could do to protect ourselves or at least soften the blow. We could try to develop methods of shifting the paths of dangerous asteroids and comets, although that’s far from easy. Humanity certainly couldn’t do it today. We could build up food reserves, which would be life-savers in this kind of crisis, and in others, such as supervolcano eruptions like Toba or Yellowstone, or massive crop blights like the Irish potato famine. We certainly know how to do that. 

But we won’t. We won’t do a damn thing. It’s hard to get Washington to worry about next year, let alone disasters that strike every hundred or thousand years. Nor would the public support such action: Preparing for a rainy day is terminally uncool. It’s as white-bread as being Swiss or joining the Boy Scouts.

Be prepared? Not on your life!

If Harvard geneticist George Church gets his way, we may be seeing Neanderthals in the not-so-distant future—without having to first drink a quart of Old Overcoat. 

The kerfuffle arose when Der Spiegel interviewed Church about his recent book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. People got the impression that Church favors using ancient DNA to create a Neanderthal and is looking for a woman crazy enough to be the surrogate mother. He’s trying to back off, but there’s no reason to believe him. He does favor this experiment, although he doesn’t have want ads out for the crazy lady. Yet. Here is the relevant passage in his book:

If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp—or by an extremely adventurous human female.

That’s clear enough. For some reason people make a distinction between what you write in a book and what you say to a reporter, presumably because no one ever actually reads the book. It only becomes controversial when it comes straight out of your mouth.
 
George Church says he believes that conjuring up a Neanderthal could be done in the near future and that it would be a good idea to do so. Genetic technology has been advancing furiously over the past decade, and if anything the pace is accelerating. And there is no fundamental reason why this couldn’t be done. So he’s likely correct in thinking that this will soon (ten years?) be possible—except that you certainly wouldn’t want to use a chimpanzee surrogate. Neanderthals had big heads, larger than those of people today, and I doubt if a lady chimp could manage. Church is a world-class expert in lab genetics, but he clearly doesn’t know much about birthin’ babies.

Church is not just thinking about creating a single Neanderthal. In the Der Speigel interview, he says:

You would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.

He’s a classic mad scientist—not that there’s anything wrong with that! 

I am not sure that reviving the Neanderthal race would be a good idea—but it sure would be interesting. 

A number of people have said that recreating Neanderthals would be fraught with ethical problems. Of course that does not matter one way or the other. It’s impossible to imagine contemporary Americans refraining from anything on ethical grounds. No, the key question is whether there’s any money in it. 

There might be. For one thing, Neanderthals were a good deal stronger than modern humans. They would revolutionize football, and what could be more important than that? They could out-hit Sosa and McGwire—without steroids. They’d dominate power events such as weightlifting, and people have done worse things than revive extinct species in the quest for Olympic gold. Certainly the East Germans did.

Their minds might differ in interesting ways, and that could be profitable. People think of Neanderthals as stupid, mostly because they lost out to us, but we really don’t know whether they were or not. Their brains were certainly bigger than those of modern humans. For all we know, they were smarter. If they turn out to be a lot smarter, there could be trouble. I think we’ve all seen that movie—the good one, with Charlton Heston, not the crappy one with Wahlberg. But even if they end up enslaving humanity in the long run, they might first give some hedge fund a short-term edge. Which is what counts.

Real money, though, is made by lawsuits rather than doing anything useful. The real value of Neanderthals must lie in their grievances rather than their possible accomplishments.

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It seems to me that born-again Neanderthals would have a pretty strong case against the entire human race. Many ethnic groups complain about oppression—some with reason—but they’re still here. We made Neanderthals extinct. That’s as bad as it gets. They’ll want reparations from everybody, or at least from everyone goofy enough to feel guilty about things their great-to-the-thousandth-power-grandfather may have done, which must include most Americans. Clearly, we’ll have to let them build casinos. Neanderthal gaming! I know that “Hard Rock” is a bit obvious, but themes bring in customers. 

Neanderthals might not be up to performing key management functions such as skimming and paying off politicians, but they would certainly make excellent bouncers.

Most important, those casinos, and the legal maneuvering leading up to them, would enrich innumerable grifters—which is the point, as always. 

I’m not sure that the French would buy into this, since they’re pretty hard-nosed, but France used to be Neanderthal territory. They ought to be able to spare a few châteaux in the Dordogne. 

After the initial excitement waned, Neanderthals would still be around. Lots of them, if Church has his way. There would be Neanderthal neighborhoods and Neanderthal restaurants. You may want to think twice about sampling Neanderthal cuisine, because they seem to have a taste for cannibalism. In one of the most famous Neanderthal archeological sites, every single bone had been split open for marrow. 
 
Once we got used to them, Neanderthals would probably show up as a standard type in pop culture, along with guidos, trailer trash, gay best friends, and inscrutable Asians plotting world domination. But what would that type be? Right now the stereotype is that Neanderthals are dumb, but that’s not based on anything. Maybe Neanderthals will turn out to be down-to-earth guys with common sense. That’s certainly an empty niche. 

Perhaps most importantly, how would they vote? It’s hard to tell, because the indicators point in different directions. They’re European, so they should be socialists. On the other hand, they like to rip people’s arms off. On the whole, Karl Rove ought to favor an influx of Neanderthals, because they might vote Republican, which is more than you can say for any existing wave of immigrants. 

You can’t get the show on the road without first finding that extremely adventurous human female, but that shouldn’t be all that difficult. I doubt if you’d even have to give her any money. The book deal will pay for it all.