The meaning of meteors | Roz Kaveney

Despite advances in scientific knowledge, many of us still want random events and misfortunes have a deeper meaning

There was a time when people looked at the sky to see the movement of clouds calm or storm, or the revolutions of the celestial spheres, or the system that eventually replaced sundial. At the end of the Age of Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson may not have been as skeptical about the meteor - "easier to believe that two Yankee professors would be to admit that stones fall from heaven" - as the legend tells us but certainly found the idea unlikely. Even as late as 1943, Michael Innes could write a detective novel deliberately absurd, the weight of evidence, in which the murder weapon was a meteorite fell from a tower academic elders.

But now we realize that our planet is at the end of the gap, with balls carom celestial almost perpetually beyond. Luis Alvarez determined from layers of dust and a big hole in Mexico, one of the things that killed the dinosaurs was something falling from the sky. It was almost more comforting for some people to think about the Tunguska event in 1908, when something crashed in Siberia hole logging of millions of trees, like a visit no stranger to random shock that was - in interpretation that foreign cheese crashed his ship falling objects to save. And now, in the next 24 hours, a large meteorite event steal things in Russia coincides with a pass near an asteroid in bulk. As the prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully.

• Like all random events and misfortunes, we want these things mean something. All Russian politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, rushed to the microphones to say that the rain of stones that smashed the windows with his sonic boom, injuring 400 people, was a test of a coward American weapon. Supporters of a renewed space program instantly told us that the asteroid passes test, we need to be in space, so that all that can approaches somehow pushed out of the way to Earth. More generally, over Twitter, people are asking to go to land on the rocks, for example, the offices of Sun (by the publication of photographs of the late Reeva Steenkamp), because once you asked Zeus rays the wrath of Jehovah or Betjeman friendly bombs.
• The problem with the desire to acquire important events random numbers unpleasant and distressing powerful otherwise untouchable, is that everyone makes. The religious right, Christian and Islamic, are amateurs compared to tsunamis and hurricanes, as instruments of anger - Pat Robertson has proposed a version of this particularly dark moment Haiti's problems attributed to divine punishment for a pact alleged satanic made by successful slave revolution in this country. It is not limited to the religious right, right science-fiction writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in his 1977 novel imminent collision of a comet with the Earth, a character that survives the impact that good calamity was the women lib was over. Divine vengeance is actually an idea that has no place on the left.

Perhaps it is better to use asteroids and meteorites as a way of thinking about the fragility of existence. If the world should end tonight, David Cameron would really like to have spent her last day being a politician cast disabled in their homes instead of punishing the corrupt bankers? Not by the prospect of hell, but because it is a way to get sticky precious hours that could be invested in chocolate and string quartets. Perhaps, however, the point about poor people is that they like really go wrong. As Stephen Sondheim Sweeney Todd says: "The life of the wicked should be short for the rest of us, death would be a relief.." On a sunny day, the prospect of universal death adds flavor to a walk in the park.

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