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

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)