However, this time, a team of British space scientists has devised a plan to nudge an asteroid out of its orbit and send it hurtling into the centre of Telford, a town in Midlands. Their study is a serious attempt to show how asteroids could be turned into weapons of mass destruction, without the enemy knowing that it was intentionally planned and not an act of nature. The satellite would carry 15 one-megaton nuclear missiles. On July 2022, while the asteroid was hidden from view behind the Sun, a bomb would detonate every 24 hours, a few hundred feet from the asteroid, nudging it into position. HH49 is due to miss Earth by at least 600,000 miles in October 2023, but just in case we get a hit, we know who to blame.
Human beings have the rare capacity to connect with each other, against all odds.
It was definitely not some Hollywood movie star. Fifteenth century Chinese judges didn't worry about being recognized. But they did care, in the interests of being even- handed, about hiding their reaction to trial testimony. They didn't want people to follow their eye movements so they wore smoked-tinted quartz spectacles to conceal them. Our modern, widespread use of sunglasses to keep out the glare, however, stems largely from pilots in the 1930s, who began to wear them to shield their eyes from the sun.