NASA cuts: a danger for everyone

I was still awake at 2 in the morning when the first reports of the Russian meteor began filtering in via Twitter, and by morning, full videos of the thing passing through the atmosphere, shattering windows and creating general panic as it went, were all over the Web.

One, which shows a blip streaking across the sky before flashing brighter than a half-dozen suns, is particularly captivating and looks like a scene out of a movie – just not the movie that I ever, ever wanted to see in real life. Had that happened in New Jersey I would have been hiding behind the couch, chain-smoking cigarettes and ranting about how the world was ending.

Thankfully, it was in Russia, and because the 10,000-ton meteor wasn't all that large (in cosmic terms), the video remains a fascinating bit of science instead of an impromptu documentary on how the world ended.

But even knowing how bad it could have been, the event has had one huge benefit: in one fell swoop, that chunk of rock reinforced the faltering notion that space science is, well, kind of important, and it illustrated that in a way that hundreds of broke, frustrated columnists like me couldn't do in a century.

Make no mistake: nothing was stopping that meteor from being three miles wide, and it is a total roll of the dice as to how close these things come to Earth. If it had been that big we likely would have detected it, of course, but that doesn't mean that we could do anything to stop it aside from launching some "Hail Mary" nukes and praying — a pretty poor game plan for saving humanity and ensuring the survival of the human race.

Sound like a movie script? Of course it does. But it’s wholly possible, and it has happened, over and over and over again. One need only look up at the massive craters on our own moon to realize that the biography of the Earth is rife with apocalyptic, world-ending impacts.

But we, in what seems like a permanent mission to swallow the barrel of our own shotgun, refuse to adequately fund our one line of defense against all this (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and in this "GOVERNMENT IS SOOO EVIL!" era, you can pretty much type "NASA budget cuts" into Google on any given day and find something new that’s on the chopping block.

Every year the pool of money devoted to scientific exploration shrinks — down to $17.7 billion from $18.4 billion two years ago — and programs are cut and ideas abandoned because politicians (including President Obama) refuse to devote money to it. That is not how it should be.

I will never understand the zeal with which we’ve abandoned our space program, and the lack of progress we’ve made since the leaps and bounds of the mid-20th century is especially frustrating. But hopefully, the Russian meteor will renew both interest in and concern about our space program and let us move forward again on the grand plans we’ve walked away from.

After all, as the famous Bill Nye succinctly said in a CNN interview last summer: "If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it’s game over. It’s control-alt-delete for civilization."

Being as we are the only species to walk the Earth that has both the technology and the ability to avoid this fate, I suggest we take this responsibility more seriously.