Drippy, damp fog this early Saturday on California’s north coast. Part/parcel of the weather heritage up here, and maybe for summer seashores all over — fog in the morning, a breeze with sunshine in the afternoon — except yesterday, when the fog near-about remained.

And tomorrow afternoon, fog or no fog, another big piece of space rock just recently discovered will rocket way-close to earth, our planet, but astro-brainics claim, ‘no worries.’

Another brick in the wall, I suppose.

(Illustration: ‘An artist’s concept of the asteroid Apophis (Image ESA),’ found here).

Spotted less than a week ago, asteroid 2014 RC will be at its closest gap, about 25,000 miles, somewhere over New Zealand — too small for the eyeball, but apparently can be seen via telescopes armed with a diameter of 3.5 inches or greater.
Yet still the size of a city bus — similar dimensions to the asteroid that blew up over Chelyabinsk, Russia last year:

“The asteroid will pass below Earth and the geosynchronous ring of communications and weather satellites orbiting about 22,000 miles… above our planet’s surface.
“While this celestial object does not appear to pose any threat to Earth or satellites, its close approach creates a unique opportunity for researchers to observe and learn more about asteroids,” Jet Propulsion Laboratory officials explained.

Note the words, ‘does not appear to pose any threat,’ even if the bus didn’t ‘appear‘ until just a few days ago. I haven’t a clue how these guys figure out this shit.
And the talk of asteroid avoidance — via Vox:

Last week, I interviewed Alexander Rose, the direction of the Long Now Foundation, an organization that thinks our species has failed to engage in truly long-term thinking.
He felt an epitome of this was the way we largely disregard the threat of asteroids.
“We know that, at some point, a catastrophic meteor or asteroid will impact this planet,” he said.
“For the first time in human history, we have the capability to detect and potentially divert it.
“Yet we aren’t really putting any money into that.”
…
Further, if we did spot an asteroid heading our way, we don’t have any proven means of stopping it.
The simplest way would probably be sending a craft crashing into the asteroid, nudging it off its path enough so that it’d miss Earth.
The UN has proposed designing and testing a network of small probes that would be capable of doing so, but it’s still waiting on the necessary funding from various national space agencies, with an estimated price tag of about $2.5 billion.
Funding all three of these projects — the two telescopes and the impact avoidance system — would cost a lot.
Let’s be generous and say they’d cost $5 billion in total.
Now compare that to the cost of, say, the cost of the Sochi Olympics ($51 billion), or the cost of the F-35 fighter plane program ($400 billion).
Screw it, compare it to the cost of a new football stadium for the Dallas Cowboys ($1.2 billion, with about a quarter paid by taxpayers).
When it comes to asteroids, we’re talking about natural disasters that are probably preventable.
Figuring out how to do so would be a relatively cheap insurance plan that would benefit the entire species.

Sorry, buddy, need to stand in line — first, we need to figure out how to stop boiling the planet: Unlike the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs, this one will result from rising temperatures, not abrupt cooling, making it tempting to wonder if a well-placed asteroid strike could actually be a good thing. If it hit out in the middle of nowhere, it could generate a pall of atmospheric dust that would cool things for a while, counteracting the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases.

When an asteroid strike is looked upon as good, then real shit is really, really bad — way-too-many bricks for the wall.