杏吧原创

ON 30 November 1954, 34-year-old Ann Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, was taking an afternoon nap on her living-room sofa when a 4-kilogram meteorite smashed through her ceiling, bounced off her radio and struck her on the left hip. The grapefruit-sized swelling it left eventually healed, but Hodges was left traumatised. Ironically, her home was opposite the Comet Drive-in Theater, decorated with a neon sign showing a piece of cosmic rubble streaking through space.

This tale, quoted by in his fascinating book , provides a timely reminder that while we go about our daily affairs worrying about things like what鈥檚 happening at work or the price of fuel, we are forever at the mercy of a capricious universe that may have something far worse in store for us.

The more we know about these celestial events, the more precarious our existence on Earth seems. Ice ages are triggered by tiny variations in the amount of summer sunshine, due to cyclical changes in the Earth鈥檚 orbit and the tilt of its axis, changes first calculated by the Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch. Some think the Little Ice Age, which lasted roughly from 1350 to 1850, was due to a dip in the output of the sun. We all know about asteroid and comet impacts from science-fiction movies, and we have the strong suspicion that the 170-kilometre crater on the sea floor off Yucatan in Mexico is the calling card of the extraterrestrial impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Then there is the possibility of a supernova exploding in our cosmic neighbourhood, something which must have happened on several occasions in our planet鈥檚 history. At one time, says Kanipe, it seemed we were pretty safe as long as the supernova was not within 30 or so light years of us. But now we have discovered super-supernovae 鈥� 鈥渉ypernovae鈥� 鈥� which are 100 times as powerful. And a gamma-ray burster, even as far off as 10,000 light years, could rip away the Earth鈥檚 ozone layer if we were unlucky enough to be caught in its pencil-thin beam.

鈥淎 gamma-ray burster could rip away the Earth鈥檚 ozone layer鈥�

Kanipe peppers his accounts of these cosmic connections with anecdotes. Did you know, for example, that a solar flare in 1859 packed the punch of 2 billion 1-megaton H-bombs? What鈥檚 more, such events are by no means isolated. Concerned that a flare on this scale today would wipe out power and communications networks, potentially leading to widespread civil disorder, Kanipe contacted the US Department of Homeland Security only to discover that Washington appears to have overlooked such a possibility, obsessed as it is with the threat from terrorism.

The Cosmic Connection is not all doom and gloom. Far from it. Kanipe also reminds us of the celestial circumstances that have conspired for us to be here. If only we could stop squabbling and realise we are all in this together.