On the night of 20th April 2018, the end of normal life on Earth began. Everyone in Britain saw it come to pass on TV, specifically on a high-budget live documentary on the BBC with Dr Brian Cox and Dara ó Briain.
The meteor had been designated 2017 WWU-Epsilon and its passing through earth’s inner atmosphere had been the most highly anticipated event in the astronomical calendar for months, not that it had much competition. An intergalactic object passing the earth at a proximity closer than any other meteor had reached in 100 years presented a unique opportunity for scientists around the world for observation, research and to laugh at conspiracy theorists calling the event the next Mass Extinction.
Not all intellectuals took such a dim view of people’s fears about the meteor. Dr Tobias Deichmann, the astronomer at Münster University that originally spotted WWU-Epsilon, gladly made an appearance on the documentary’s panel to explain how his peers were certain there would be no apocalyptic collision tonight. As CGI graphics costing a few houses span around him he simulated the gravitational slingshot that would propel WWU-Epsilon through the skies over England before rocketing out of the atmosphere, back into deep space.
Deichmann’s flashy lecture came as a great relief to the late-night viewers in the Berkshire town of Hungerbury. The small valley community, which had gotten very comfortable with never attracting wider attention in its 700 year history, was unwillingly dragged into the spotlight when scientists realised WWU-Epsilon would reach its closest distance to the Earth over the town’s suburbs. Vans filled with scientists and their fanciest equipment trawled across every road winding across the town estates for a week before the event. Their presence infuriated Hungerbury’s hordes of car-owning commuters, but they quickly became small potatoes to the numerous journalists demanding asinine voxpops from people tending their gardens, and “alternative scientricians” screaming prophecies of doom on the high street through loudhailers. Residents of this humble town were thrilled to finally see the meteor pass overhead because it meant everyone would finally leave and life could go back to normal.
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As the time approached 1.30am the arrival of the meteor was heralded by Dara’s interview with a local stargazing group being interrupted by a HD live-cam of an empty patch of sky. WWU-Epsilon would be visible in just a few minutes. Observatories around the world quivered with anticipation, vans parked in the Hungerbury fields beeped a digital melody, in an ode to data collection. Suddenly, the meteor lit up as it grazed the inner atmosphere, appearing in the night sky as a flickering pin-prick of light that immediately underwhelmed all of the casual observers.
The global network of scientific researchers remained alert and excited, turning briefly to utterly horrified panic when a dozen monitors in each lab flashed a message warning that WWU-Epsilon was deviating from its projected course. A second glance calmed the collective mood as it transpired the meteor was actually heading away from the earth at a wider angle than anticipated.
News of the meteor’s wandering came to the documentary studio, and Deichmann was asked how the meteor’s path could deviate so far from the projected path, and does this mean the astrologers were right all along? The old professor was measured in his response,
“It is said a scientist’s ideal world is a frictionless vacuum populated with spherical people of uniform density; that is to say, a world with no outlying factors that is easy to predict and study. But the reality is we live in a complex, intricate cosmos, where every object has countless forces acting on it. The most likely explanation is that WWU-Epsilon had an unseen fissure in its structure, leading to a fragment breaking off. A minor anomaly in the grand scheme of things that resulted in a major consequence as the change in mass accelerated its outward trajectory. It’s a shame our team didn’t account for this possibility, but all we can do now is observe this event and analyze it further so we can improve our predictions for the future.”
In the sky above Hungerbury, the more major consequence of that minor anomaly was rocketing downwards at a giddying pace. The meteorite fragment, faltering out of its parent’s slipstream, was coming in to land just outside the sleepy town. And as the town switched off their TVs to go to bed, the meteorite made a violent impact on a fortunately untended patch in a hodge-podge plot of land. The sign at the front of this land, which would become the most significant place in the world from that moment on, identified it as:
“Viceroy Gardens Community Allotment Site - No Trespassers - Please Drive Slowly”
