Another memo intercepted from the Office of Big Rocks

December 30, 2007
11:47 p.m. EST

The Interdeparmental Dept. of Monitoring Departments
Decentralized Unintelligence Agency
1457 W. Unknown St.
Washington, DC 20061
Dear Secret Cabal:

It has come to my attention (thanks to my many spies), that a question I had asked in a recent blog has been answered. Here’s the excerpt from Blog 1 – “Memorandum from the Department of Big Rocks”:

First, in the fourth paragraph, Chang writes that the scientists who are tracking said asteroid “initially put the odds of impact at 1 in 350 but increased the chances this week.” What?! Did they get more information that led them to draw a different conclusion? Or was this a case of circumstances changing (like the trajectory of the asteroid) so that the chances of a hit itself increased? In other words, what changed: the objective situation or the scientists’ perception of the objective situation?

You can all rest easy now. Ms. Chang wrote another article for Yahoo! News updating the condition of the asteroid nearing Mars which can be found at
[http://www.bnd.com/living/health/story/213959.html].

In this new article, Chang writes:

“The odds were increased to 1-in-25 this week after a Ph.D. student pored through the archives and plotted the asteroid’s motions before its official discovery. The new information allowed scientists to improve their calculations of the asteroid’s orbit and flight path.”

…thus answering the question of how the chances of the asteroid hitting Mars increased. Yes, they got more information. From a lowly student, no less.

However, the most interesting parts of the article were the quotes given by Don Yeomans:

“I think it’ll be cool,” said Don Yeomans, who heads the Near-Earth Object Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Usually when an asteroid is headed toward Earth, I’m not rooting for an impact.”

Thank you, Don. I was worried that a bunch of lab coat-wearing geeks at the Near Earth Object Program were standing around the water cooler, shaking their fists at the sky and cheering for a collision with a major metropolitan population center.

Everyone can now officially chill out, return to your homes, and guzzle the beverage of your choice. Except, of course, the conspiracy theorists and believers in the apocalypse. The end of the world is what we’re all hoping for, isn’t it?

Sincerely,

David “Duchovny” R. Farthing

P.S. Please forgive Don, any Martians who may be monitoring Earth News wire services. He didn’t really mean it.