Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth

by Gordon L. Dillow

Overview

This “accessible and always entertaining” (Booklist) combination of history, pop science, and in-depth reporting offers a fascinating account of the asteroids that hit Earth long ago and those streaming toward us now, as well as how prepared we are against asteroid-caused catastrophe.

One of these days, warns Gordon Dillow, the Earth will be hit by a comet or asteroid of potentially catastrophic size. The only question is when. In the meantime, we need to get much better at finding objects hurtling our way, and if they’re large enough to penetrate the atmosphere without burning up, figure out what to do about them.

We owe many of science’s most important discoveries to the famed Meteor Crater, a mile-wide dimple on the Colorado Plateau created by an asteroid hit 50,000 years ago. In his masterfully researched Fire in the Sky, Dillow unpacks what the Crater has to tell us. Prior to the early 1900s, the world believed that all craters—on the Earth and Moon—were formed by volcanic activity. Not so. The revelation that Meteor Crater and others like it were formed by impacts with space objects has led to a now accepted theory about what killed off the dinosaurs, and it has opened up a new field of asteroid observation that is brimming with urgency. Dillow looks at great asteroid hits of the past and modern-day asteroid hunters and defense planning experts, including America’s first Planetary Defense Officer.

Satellite sensors confirm that a Hiroshima-scale blast occurs in the atmosphere every year, and a smaller, one-kiloton blast every month. While Dillow makes clear that the objects above can be deadly, he consistently inspires awe with his descriptions of their size, makeup, and origins. Both a riveting work of popular science and a warning to not take for granted the space objects hurtling overhead, Fire in the Sky is, ultimately, a testament to our universe’s celestial wonders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501187766
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	06/04/2019
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	566,577
File size:	24 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Gordon Dillow has been a reporter, columnist, and war correspondent for more than thirty years. He has written for a number of newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, and is the author or coauthor of numerous books. He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. 

Read an Excerpt

Fire in the Sky
Just before 4 a.m. on June 2, 2016, I was enjoying a pre-dawn cup of coffee on the back porch of my home in Arizona. And suddenly it was as if the sky was on fire.

It began with a glow that spread across the steep hillside behind my house, a kind of angry molten light, all red and orange and amber, the color of lava. The glow grew more and more intense, lighting up the mesquite trees and saguaro cactuses and casting their long, tortured shadows on the ground. It looked like something from the netherworld, like high noon in hell. Then, seconds later, way up in the sky off to the northeast, there was a blinding, thermonuclear-style flash, a burst of white light almost as bright as the sun, followed later by a sound like distant thunder that set my dogs to howling.

As the light faded and the night returned I stood there, transfixed, not quite believing it. As a soldier and journalist I’ve traveled the world for decades, and experienced all manner of cataclysmic natural and unnatural events—wars and riots and all manner of mayhem, typhoons, tornadoes, major earthquakes, even (from a distance) the deadly volcanic explosion of Mount St. Helens in 1980. But this was easily the most astonishing natural event I had ever seen. It occurred to me that this was how the world will end: with a flash of light, and a roar like God’s own artillery, and then—darkness.

Of course, the world didn’t end on June 2, 2016. And in the age of 24-hour news and social media, an explanation for this amazing phenomenon was soon forthcoming. Apparently a small asteroid, a rocky piece of space debris only about six feet across, had wandered into the Earth’s path and exploded in the sky some fifteen miles above Arizona’s White Mountains. The asteroid’s fiery passage through the atmosphere and subsequent brilliant explosion lighted up thousands of square miles of ground and startled observers as far away as Texas. Despite the early hour, the event had been captured on scores of dashcams and smart phones, so although no one was killed or even slightly injured, the Arizona “fireball” was a major story not only on local TV but on the national newscasts as well. And as I watched and read the news reports, a couple of things quickly caught my attention.

One of them was the almost unbelievable power of the explosion. Soon after the event, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reported that the little asteroid had burst apart in the atmosphere with the energy equivalent of half a kiloton of exploding TNT—that is, a million pounds of TNT. To put that into perspective, the U.S. military’s most powerful non-nuclear bomb is the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb—the so-called Mother of All Bombs—which has a blast yield of a mere 22,000 pounds of TNT. That little asteroid made a MOAB look like a firecracker.

And there was another thing about that fireball in the Arizona sky that surprised me. That was the fact that no one had seen it coming. Sure, the streaking fireball and its subsequent explosion had been picked up by some U.S. spy satellites, by ground-based Doppler weather radars and by NASA’s All-sky Fireball Network, a national network of cameras set up to record events like this one. But that only happened after the asteroid entered the atmosphere, not before. That space rock hurtling out of the clear black sky was a complete surprise to everybody.

As often happens, the more I learned, the more questions I had. Such as, how in the world could a piece of rock the size of a La-Z-Boy recliner pack an explosive wallop almost fifty times greater than the most powerful conventional bomb in the U.S. military arsenal? Why in this era of satellites and space-mounted telescopes and world-spanning radar networks did no one spot the thing before it arrived? How often do events like this happen? What’s the history behind our understanding of Earth-colliding asteroids and comets?

Those are some of the questions this book will try to answer. And it will also take a look at the Big Questions: What are the chances that a much larger chunk of space rock, something hundreds of yards or even miles wide, will find itself on a collision course with Earth? And if that happens, what if anything will we be able to do about it?

Actually, I can answer that first Big Question right now. The chances that an asteroid or comet of potentially catastrophic size will come hurtling toward Earth are exactly 1-in-1. It’s 100 percent, a sure thing, a lead-pipe cinch. The only variable is when. It could be a hundred thousand years from now—or it could be next Tuesday. True, the U.S. government’s comforting official position is that for at least the next century or so, there is no significant risk of Earth being struck by any large asteroid or comet that we currently know about. But given the fact that our Solar System is home to billions of asteroids and comets that we don’t know about, that’s a pretty significant qualifying clause. It’s a loophole you could drive an asteroid through.

As for what we could do or would do if we spotted a potentially damaging space body headed our way—well, that remains to be seen.

Should we be worried about this? Should we as individuals be concerned about the threat of cosmic impacts? Yes, but not to the point where we toss and turn all night over it—at least not yet. But we should understand that the threat is real; it’s science fact, not science fiction. And we should expect—even insist—that somebody pays attention to the problem. Fortunately, as we’ll see, a relative handful of men and women are dedicating their professional lives to assessing and planning for these threats from space. But one of the themes of this book is that there should be more resources committed to the impact problem. To do otherwise seems foolishly short-sighted.

I have to confess that when I began this book I knew next to nothing about asteroids or comets or other things astronomical. I don’t say that with any perverse, anti-brainiac sense of pride, the way some people boast about being terrible at math. It truly made me regret the shocking shortage of science classes in my college transcripts. Like most people, I had heard about the dinosaur-exterminating giant space body that hit Earth sixty-five million years ago, and I vaguely recalled the silly mnemonic for the order of the planets: My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto—although even that was outdated, since poor little Pluto was kicked out of the planet community years ago and reduced to mere dwarf planet status. And of course I had seen some of the giant-space-rock-on-a-collision-course-with-Earth movies that Hollywood has been churning out for decades—although none of them offered much in the way of expanding my scientific knowledge, or anyone else’s.

So it was a little daunting to suddenly find myself immersed in a world of astronomical units and albedos and arguments of perihelion and the kinetic energy of hypervelocity impactors—which, as I’m sure everyone already knows, is equal to one-half the mass times the velocity squared, or Ek = 1/2mv2. I had a lot of catching up to do. There were hundreds of books and scholarly papers to read, countless hours spent perusing past and present articles in Sky & Telescope and Space.com and EarthSky.org and the Planetary Society website, and dozens of interviews with astronomers and planetary scientists and other people who are a lot smarter than I am.

On the other hand, starting out with a clean science slate did have its advantages. For one thing, even at a relatively advanced age there’s a certain child-like joy in learning something new, especially when that something new is—to use the scientific term—really cool. Also, not having any preconceived notions spares you from stubbornly holding on to them. As this book will show, when it comes to Earth-impacting asteroids and comets, stubbornly held notions set back the cause of scientific progress for generations.

I should note that while this book is about a complex scientific issue, it’s not really a science book. Instead, it’s a story—a very human story about our long struggle to understand Earth’s place in the Solar System, and the pivotal role of Earth-impacting asteroids and comets in shaping our world. Sure, there are scientists in this tale, men and women whose personal lives and characters are often just as fascinating as their scientific discoveries. But there are also cowboys and Indians and astronauts, Stone Age toolmakers and aerospace engineers, bold explorers and backyard amateur astronomers. King Tut and the mad teenaged Roman emperor Elagabalus make appearances in these pages; so do Teddy Roosevelt and the lead guitarist for the rock band Queen. On the technology side, picks and shovels and horse-driven machinery share the stage with space-deployed gravity tractors and laser ablation devices and ion beam shepherds.

In case you’re wondering, yes, there are UFOs in this book—millions of them in fact. But these unidentified flying objects are asteroids and comets, not spaceships from faraway galaxies. I’ll admit that given the breadth and scope of the universe, it seems likely that there is life somewhere beyond our own little planet. But with all due respect to the UFO belief community, when it comes to Earth visitations by vaguely humanoid space aliens, the science doesn’t seem to be in on that one quite yet. Besides, as far as I’m concerned, the proven science behind Earth-approaching comets and asteroids is already out-of-this-world astonishing; we don’t need to dress it up to make it more so. Same thing goes for astrology. I heartily agree that fate is written in the stars and planets. But the basic premise of this book is that the fate of Earth and our Solar System is determined by the collision of celestial bodies, not their alignment.

Finally, I should note that science, like the Earth itself, is a constantly moving target; sometimes it’s hard to get a bead on it. Theories that were once scientific heresy have become scientific dogma, and vice versa—with the asteroid-related extinction of the dinosaurs being a prime example. Over the past almost four decades, hundreds of scientists have written literally thousands of scientific papers on that subject; entire forests have perished. And although the asteroid- or comet-impact extinction theory has largely carried the day, some scientists are still arguing about the issue, often in the most bitter personal terms. In this book I will chronicle that and other scientific controversies concerning Earth-impacting asteroids and comets, but I don’t intend to litigate them. When there are competing theories on any given subject, I’ll say so—and then I’ll go with the one that currently seems to make the most sense.

With all that said, our story is waiting. It begins in the not-too-distant past, when another, much bigger asteroid came blazing through the Arizona skies. . . .

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Impact! 7

Chapter 2 Miraculous Apparitions in the Ayre 23

Chapter 3 Asteroid Miners 45

Chapter 4 Star Wounds 75

Chapter 5 T-Rex with a String of Pearls 105

Chapter 6 Asteroid Hunters 139

Chapter 7 Planetary Defense 163

Chapter 8 Asteroid Killers 179

Chapter 9 Asteroid Wars 203

Epilogue 229

Acknowledgments 235

Chapter Notes, Sources, and Relevant Fun Facts 239

Index 269

Editorial Reviews

03/25/2019

Journalist Dillow (Where the Money Is) packs quite a punch with this volume about humanity’s expanding understanding of the threat posed by objects from space. He reveals Gene Shoemaker, who became an asteroid hunter in the 1950s when he noticed the resemblance between Arizona’s mile-long Meteor Crater and nuclear bomb test craters, as a key figure in shaping this understanding. Two others are father-son team Luis and Walter Alvarez, for their 1980 theory that a meteorite was largely responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. Dillow identifies an additional touchstone for asteroid hunting in 1993, when Shoemaker’s wife Carolyn and assistant David Levy discovered the Shoemaker-Levy Comet 9 that, by spectacularly colliding with Jupiter the following year, impelled the U.S. government to greatly increase funding for projects searching for dangerous Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). Dillow also touches on recent instances of asteroids intersecting with Earth, including one that burned up in the atmosphere above his Arizona home in 2016, and proposes “kinetic impactors,” rather than nuclear weapons, for defense against Earth-bound asteroids. Revealing the estimated chances of a disastrous strike over the next century to be low but not zero, this enjoyable survey should have appeal beyond pop science fans to the researchers and officials concerned with preparing for such a potentially calamitous event. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Journalist Dillow packs quite a punch with this volume about humanity’s expanding understanding of the threat posed by objects from space . . . Revealing the estimated chances of a disastrous strike over the next century to be low but not zero, this enjoyable survey should have appeal beyond pop science fans to the researchers and officials concerned with preparing for such a potentially calamitous event.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In an accessible and always entertaining narrative, Dillow shares the somewhat alarming news that objects from outer space collide with Earth's atmosphere on a regular basis... [He] describes unimaginable catastrophes with such detail that readers feel like eyewitnesses and reimagines vast expanses of space as easily digestible scenarios...Dillow [makes a] compelling argument that we really should be paying more attention to the heavens.”
—Booklist

“A century ago, Scribner published a book about how the world, as many knew it, was ending. It was called The Great Gatsby. Fire in the Sky is our generation's contribution to this crucial theme. Gordon Dillow has written a beautiful and riveting book, a thunderous book, about how we might defend our planet from the collision with a comet or an asteroid that is surely to come.”
—David H. Levy, co-discoverer of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet, author of Skywatching, Science Editor at Parade, and columnist for Sky and Telescope

“Just when you thought you had enough worries, it looks like chunks of the sky will indeed someday fall. Gordon Dillow’s breezy, gentle humor proves an engaging vehicle for absorbing his well-researched, quite serious subject. What’s amazing is how refreshing it feels that, at least this time, we’re innocent of the resulting global havoc.”
—Alan Weisman, New York Times bestselling author of The World Without Us and Countdown

“The scope of Fire in the Sky is epic—covering millions of years and spanning the solar system as well as the globe—yet the effect is intimate: Gordon L. Dillow writes with an irresistible You can't make this stuff up sense of personal wonder about asteroid impacts measured in Hiroshimas, the kind of character who manages to misplace a 40-pound chunk of meteorite while on a three-day bender, and the scientists of today who cheerfully go about their work while knowing the end is, if not nigh, inevitable.”
—Richard Panek, author of The 4% Universe and The Trouble with Gravity

"Nobody wants to contemplate a giant asteroid smashing into their hometown. But such a catastrophe is basically inevitable, if we don't take measures to prevent it—it's just a matter of when. In Gordon Dillow's engrossing book, we learn a lot about the Solar System, and more important, about our fascination with bodies moving through the skies. That these considerations might someday save our species is a bonus."
—Sean Carroll, author of The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Informative, timely and entertaining . . . a great read! Dillow’s treatment is never dull—often humorous—and provides accurate information about the potential of near-Earth asteroids for space resources, their impact threats to Earth, and the ongoing activities to mitigate these threats.”
—Donald K. Yeomans, author of Near-Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us, and former manager of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Near-Earth Object Program Office

“Lucid and engaging . . . a comprehensive look at the threat to our planet from asteroid impacts. . . . Dillow stresses that the threat is real, that the Earth is routinely hit by objects from outer space, and that it is certain that sometime in the future—maybe in coming decades, maybe millions of years from now—unless mitigating actions are taken one of those objects will be large enough to cause catastrophic damage. . . . A convincing case for the need to pay more attention to planetary defense.”
—John M. Logsdon, Founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, NASA advisor, and editor of The Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration

“It’s only a matter of time before a really large space object hits the Earth. Asteroids and comets have created disaster many times in the Earth’s past, including the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, and the vestiges of their havoc are still apparent. Gordon Dillow’s enthralling discussion unlocks the secrets of how and why these objects jeopardize the planet and what thousands of people around the globe are doing to detect and defend against them. Fire in the Sky is nonfiction that reads like a great adventure novel even as it points toward a hopeful future for humanity.”
—Roger D. Launius, former Chief Historian for NASA and author of The Smithsonian History of Space Exploration

“The number one threat to the extinction of the human species is a huge asteroid hurtling out of the deep cosmos on a collision course with Earth. This is the book to read before that happens. Compelling and lively, Fire in the Sky is a critically important call to action, because for the first time in our history we can build a defensive system to avoid that fate.”
—Stephen Petranek, former Editor-in-Chief of Discover and Washington Post magazine, and author of How We’ll Live on Mars

“A comprehensive and informative treatment of the past, present and potential future of asteroids—whether they be globally hazardous or infinitely valuable.”
—Chris Lewicki, CEO of Planetary Resources and former Flight Director of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity

From the Publisher

2019-04-10
According to scientists, it's inevitable that a giant piece of space rock will eventually hurtle toward Earth: "So where do we currently stand in terms of planetary defense against Earth-impacting asteroids?"

We've all seen the movies in which an asteroid is on a collision course with our planet and we have scant time to devise some way to destroy it or change its path. In this entertaining book, Dillow (co-author, with Charles Campisi: Blue on Blue: An Insider's Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops, 2017, etc.), a veteran reporter and war correspondent, investigates how much truth there is to these narratives. In short, how much should we worry? Regarding the chance of an impact, he offers an alarming conclusion. "It's not a question of if," he writes. "It's only a question of when. And at this point, we can only hope that the world will be ready." Using his own research and numerous interviews with scientists and other experts, the author provides an elegant overview of the history of terrestrial collisions and breaks down what governments are doing to prepare for another—and whether that preparation is good enough. From asteroid hunters to planetary defense officers, a cadre of specialists are working to identify threats and devise realistic plans to neutralize them. Dillow explains the science behind these efforts in plain language and, despite the sometimes-weighty subject matter, good humor. He also engagingly describes his awe in considering Earth from a new perspective, that of a vulnerable, smallish planet flying through a crowded solar system. One medium-sized asteroid (never mind a comet) slamming into Earth could easily destroy a city, a country, or even most of mankind. After all, it's generally accepted that a 6-mile-wide asteroid wiped out almost every living thing on the planet 65 million years ago, including dinosaurs.

Dillow threads a lovely history of asteroid impacts into an urgent call to arms, and the result is a thrilling read.

Kirkus Reviews