Asteroid – the end of the world. Is that bad?

The old lady checks the Tomahawk very precisely. She weighs him back and forth in her hand. Does she want to give her grandson to the war? Hunt chickens? Or killed her husband? Your facial expression does not allow a clear answer. She puts the Tomahawk back on the table with the other toy on the sidewalk in front of the second-hand shop. Is that too dangerous for the grandson or too harmless to chickens or man? She takes the answer to the question – yes, where? It is gone. Not watch out for a moment and the old lady has disappeared. As if she had dematerialized!

Wasn’t that not the look of a loving grandmother, a chicken hunter or a murderous wife? Was that the look of a researcher, a scout from another world? The incredulous view of an artifact that she did not expect here: a Tomahawk in front of a second-hand shop on the border between Wedding and Reinickendorf.

But how is the scout on the streets of this city? Has the petite old woman from Star Dust materialized? Every year 40,000 tons of cosmic dust trickle onto the earth, I recently read in the Museum of Natural History. A researcher calculated one kilo a week for Berlin. Do the interplanetary travelers come to earth quite inconspicuously in this way? So not with massive spaceships full of technology and how we otherwise imagine when the Klingons land?

I don’t find an answer in the Natural History Museum. Maybe because something distracts me. No, I can’t have winked the Tyrannosaurus Rex – his eyes turned out 66 million years ago. But it is clear: the guy you call Tristan Otto here wants to tell me something. It sounds: “Don’t take yourself so important! Don’t take all so important! ”A whisper just.

Tristan Otto is a skeleton. In December 2015 he was the first original Tyrannosaurus-Rex skeleton to Europe, to the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. It is twelve meters long and four meters high. His bones are black. This glossy of darkness is “characteristic of fossils from the so-called Hell Creek formation,” explains the museum. The Hell Creek formation is a fossil-rich rock layer in the US state of Montana, where this T-Rex was found in 2010.

Dinosaurs, explain the boards in the museum, were “an incredibly successful animal group”. They populated the earth for more than 150 million years. »Your rule comprises three Earth age: Triass, Jura and chalk. They survived one of the five great mass extinction and adapted to changing environmental conditions. The end of her rule suddenly came and took place 66 million years ago. “

One day in spring it was over. A huge meteorite hit Yucatán in the north of the Mexican Peninsula. Violent pressure waves spread across the entire planet. Then the whirled dust darkened the earth and the dinosaurs died.

Simply wiped away on this planet after around 150 million years. Yesterday the gentlemen of the world, and then: Wumms! 66 million years later, a species that has just started to populate the planet will find a few remains and places them in the museum, not far from the contemporary table on which it is shown: If the previous history of the earth were shown as a 24-hour day, then man would only appear shortly before midnight.

But you never go completely. Has the T-Rex said that now? No, I can take that to a sign next to a small stuffed bird. The birds stand there, are the descendants of the dinosaurs. I turn around and look at the T-Rex. I was sure he laughed. No, skeletons cannot have a humor. And this skeleton cannot read any messages either. It may not know that it may soon make “Wumms” again.

In any case, the European Space Agency (ESA), i.e. the space authority, considers it possible. She sees “one of the highest probabilities for an impact of a rock brocken of significant size that ever existed”. It’s about the Asteroid YR4. The highest probability, that is, for the ESA: two percent there is the possibility that YR4 will hit the earth. As for the date, the ESA is very tight: December 22, 2032.

Should he really hit the ground, everything will be destroyed within a few kilometers around the impact crater. But there is no reason to panic, says the ESA. Because asteroids do not adhere to what the human experts calculate. There was already a similar scenario in 2004: At that time, the probability that the Asteroid Apophis will meet earth in 2029 was forecast with 2.7 percent. A collision is now excluded.

What if the ESA should be offset in the wrong direction? So if the probability of hit is higher than predicted? If we were in an American action film, Bruce Willis would take care of the matter. In 1998 it simply flown into space in »Armageddon« for the dangerous rock, drilled a hole in, filled it with a explosive charge, and the big »buzz« took place at a safe distance.

Bruce Willis is out – for health reasons. But we have a “heavenly cannon” in Berlin. Can’t we just blow away YR4? The thing that is located in the Archenhold starry in Treptow is really called that by Berliners. But the thing is only there to look. The giant scope, which was built in 1896, is still impressive. With a focal length of 21 meters, it is the longest fully movable lentil scope of the earth. It has a lens diameter of 680 millimeters and is therefore one of the ten most powerful lentils in the world. The thing weighs 130 tons and is fully functional.

And because we Berliners love superlatives: The Archenhold Sternenwarte is the oldest and largest Volkssternwarte in Germany. Since 1896 you can watch the sky here – in the middle of Treptower Park. Like the Museum of Natural History, the observatory “a place of imparting scientific and astronomical knowledge for the broad population” wants to be. And in 1915, in 1915, Albert Einstein gave his first public lecture on the general theory of relativity in the large lecture hall of the observatory, in which there are still lectures.

A movement tears me out of my galactic thoughts. Just in the Natural History Museum, I materialize on the border between Wedding and Reinickendorf in the middle of the sidewalk. And that of the old lady who just looked at the Tomahawk. She came from the second-hand shop and has a children’s lamp in her hand. There are stars on it – and it looks like they are shining in the dark.