Support Your Wayward Asteroid AND State

Could there be synonymous-ity with these two pictures?

Read on to find out.

It hasn't necessarily been a slow news cycle, but leave it to me to find significance in the fact that on the same day, these two stories would share attention with things quite likely more important to the 'now'.

First: news reports tell us that yet another space body of dubious antecedence with cosmic geological tendencies, may prove a pending threat to Earth. Asteroid 2011-AG5. First discovered by astronomers in 2011. A space rock that's about 459-460 feet wide. A space rock that will "be visible" from Earth in the 2013-2016 time frame (if you dismiss the Mayans and their calendar). A space rock that will return with a near pass of Earth in 2023: and if, in this near pass, it negotiates a "62 mile keyhole", it will be placed on a collision course with Earth in the year 2040.

Don't you hate when that happens?

Now, I could quote all the technical data I read about this h'yar space rock and dubious cousin of my pet rock Seymour ("is NOT!!!"), but much of it is calculus-ized and physics-ized, and made as much sense to me as Jay Carney claiming that Nobama's recent speech to UAW workers was "not a campaign speech". But there are a couple things that I was better able to assimilate:

- 2011-AG5 has a 1 in 625 chance of hitting the Earth in 2040

- if it does, the impact of 2011-AG5 will be the equivalent of 102 megatons of TNT

Which means, in essence, that it will suck for the locale it hits, and the immediate area therebouts. And if it hits Guam, that means that a rather stupid Georgia legislator will have been proven right, after all: Guam could, indeed, capsize.

In any event, we don't have to worry about 2011-AG5. 'Cuz the UN is on it. Yep. The UN's Science and Technology subcommittee, acronymed COPUOS (Committee on Peaceful Uses of Space), is talking about this. And I'm sure that before the year 2040, they will have come up with a whole plethora of ways to blame a potential collision with 2011-AG5 on George Dubya Bush.

Meantime -- and closer to home h'yarbouts -- the state house of Wyoming just defeated a bill before them by a vote of 30-27. A bill that was meant to forward a study of what the state of Wyoming should do to prepare, in case the United States of America is bankrupted or seriously upheavalled by Nature, space, foreign threats or Nobama's unchecked spending spree.

The bill -- House Bill 85 I am given to understand -- was, in and of itself, meant to take some reasonably sound looks at what to do to help the state of Wyoming ride out potentially hazardous times, both defensively and economically. I think any state is rational to have disaster plans in place for any number of eventualities.

But the bill apparently had some 'add ons' attached that likely led to its defeat by one vote. One element that might have had something to do with it: an add on to the bill that would have had the state look into funding to provide themselves with an aircraft carrier.

Pick up your teeth out of your soup if they're false and just fell out.

Now, on first blush, I had something of a Warner Brothers/Looney Toons 'shake up' sound reaction when I read that, too. What would Wyoming do with an aircraft carrier? Where would they put it?

The unmistakeable photo up top answers that question.

Of course, if the disaster that Wyoming was preparing for was natural, and everything west of Jackson's Hole, or even Laramie, became part of the Pacific Ocean, THEN Wyoming would be lauded for their presentiment thinking and preparation in preparing to project their fledgling naval power beyond what's left of the Rockies.

Then again, what if 2011-AG5 turns out to be THE disaster that befalls Earth...and it hits Wyoming, right in its aircraft carrier?

Alas, we could have had to wait only 28 years to find out the answer. But Wyoming voted it down, 30-27. Had the vote been 31-28, we might have had a chance to find out. But not now.

This isn't only a loss for the Wyoming Navy Department; think of the tourist attraction billboards that Wyoming could have put up along I-80 or I-25, advertising their aircraft carrier. I think that would have put the giant prairie dog in Kansas, or the giant popcorn ball in Iowa, to shame...