Complex Numbers

Scale

Oh no! Here come the asteroids!

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/world-news/three-huge-asteroids-fly-dangerously-...

This weekend, three enormous asteroids will make a ‘close approach’ to Earth, NASA has warned.

The asteroids - the biggest of which is predicted to measure up to 30 metres across - will whizz past our planet on November 10.

At around 14:03 GMT, an asteroid dubbed 2018 VS1 will pass the Earth.

This asteroid is predicted to measure between 13-28 metres across - suggesting the asteroid could be five times as tall as a giraffe!

Everybody panic! Time to freak out! Also, what if they're actually ALIENS?!

Or maybe a tabloid is just trying to generate ad revenue? ...nah, couldn't be.

Seriously, though, apparently they're now measuring asteroids in units of giraffe. I guess they used up all the Statues of Liberty. That might also explain why they use both miles and kilometers (as well as meters) in the same article - trying to conserve units.

To be fair, a big part of science communication is the attempt to translate mind-bogglingly big or small things into terms we might be able to comprehend. This many Earths could fit side-by-side across Jupiter, and that many Jupiters could fit across the Sun. Kilometers and miles are just fine for measuring most distances on Earth, but astronomers and cosmologists use larger units like AUs, light years, and parsecs (which are a unit of time, not distance, regardless of what Han Solo said; also, Han shot first). People who study tiny things use angstroms or nanometers or whatever.

A giraffe is a nonstandard unit of measurement, but perhaps it helps with visualization. It's probably a better unit for measuring asteroids than a cat or a paramecium, unless the asteroid is cat- or paramecium-sized. Actually, the latter would be classified as space dust, not asteroid or planet.

People like to smugly tell other people just how insignificant we are. "Look at the universe," they'll say, or something to this effect. "We're barely a speck of dust." Well, compared to the observable universe, we're smaller than a speck of space dust. We're even smaller than an atom, relatively speaking, by this comparison. But it turns out that the smallest particles - smaller than actual atoms; on the scale of electrons or quarks - are close to the same order of magnitude smaller than us as we are smaller than the known universe. In other words, we're right in the middle in terms of size. So maybe not so insignificant after all? Especially since we were able to deduce this fact.

Incidentally, going back to the asteroid thing, let's be clear: these may be close encounters from a scientific point of view, but there's zero chance any of these rocks are going to hit the planet. The closest one will miss by roughly the distance to the moon  , or 30 times the diameter of the Earth.

A miss is as good as 240,000 miles, I suppose.