Bitch-slapped by a space brick

I've been pondering. What would it be like to be as rich as Tony Stark? What would I like to do with basically infinite money and talent - assuming I can’t actually become a superhero and save the world? Would I like to just adopt his billionaire playboy lifestyle? Less Ironman, more Ladies-man? Heehee...

"Winter is over. Bikini season is coming..." - Lord Tony Stark

Let me tell you about the ultimate playboy role model in real life - a Dominican-born man called Porfirio Rubirosa. "Rubi" was variously known to have been a diplomat, jewel smuggler, political assassin, treasure hunter, Polo player and race car driver. More importantly, he was a prodigious skirt-chaser who scored with a whole bunch of the hottest Hollywood starlets. And the First Lady of Argentina, the Queen of Yugoslavia and the Empress of Iran. Also, he eloped with the daughter of a Dominican dictator and later married two of the richest women in the world. See below for more totally juicy deets.

 "Another B-25?!" - Me

Even his death at the ripe age of 56 was spectacular. He left a nightclub in downtown Paris after partying till 7 AM and perished at the helm of his silver Ferrari 250 GT - apparently after attempting to seduce a chestnut tree at 80 mph.   

"Slightly larger than normal? Please... " - Rubi 

Rubi’s lifestyle sounds like fun, but haven't a lot of things changed in the last 50 years? First of all, it will very quickly ruin my day if I try taking my silver Porsche Carrera GT to 80 mph in downtown Paris. In fact, I need only to screw up a gear change at a traffic light. Cackling philistines armed with iPhones will make sure that my "rich idiot Porsche fail" will end up on YouTube forevermore. 

And it seems that if you want sex these days, you pay a professional - even if you're a US Senator. Or Tiger Woods. Or Silvio Berlusconi. Or Charlie Sheen. What's with the prostitute fixation? Why aren't these alpha males interested in the challenge of properly pursuing properly classy women who possess the world's most coveted pair of X-chromosomes? Scarlett Johansson, perhaps? She may still have her Black Widow outfit for heaven's sake.

Ah. Right. Even Buddhist monks in Bhutan have seen her, you know, coveted pair of X-chromosomes. Ergo, no challenge there either. Cue table-flipping rage quit. It would suck to be an international playboy. 

Clearly, these are lameass excuses to hide the real reason - I would suck at being a playboy. Even if someone like SI cover girl Kate Upton was my dinner date for Valentine’s Day, I'd break the ice with “So, did you donate any money to Wikipedia last year?” And she'd start wishing she was stranded instead on a frozen lake in Siberia. In her work clothes. Like so... 

"Honestly. This is much better" - Kate Upton  

Conclusion - abort Operation Playboy Plutonium and go back to the drawing board. I think I'll have a better shot and a better time saving the world. From what? Remember what happened above Chebarkul Lake in Siberia on Feb 15, 2013? Here's a hint.

"He set me up" - Kate Upton

BOOM! A 10000 ton meteor the size of a school bus blazed across the sky above Chelyabinsk and detonated with the force of 30 Hiroshima bombs. NASA didn't even see it coming. We're incredibly lucky that no one was killed - it would have ended badly if the asteroid had simply entered the atmosphere at a more vertical angle.

Out of the millions of asteroids that harmlessly circle the Sun beyond the orbit of Mars, thousands of them, large and small, end up in new orbits near Earth because of gravitational harassment by Jupiter. The tiny ones can't hurt us but even the big ones are mostly too dim to be detected by our telescopes across large distances. And because their orbits change constantly, they can just pop up in our neighborhood with a death warrant, hitherto completely unnoticed. A recent NASA probe estimated that 3000-6000 asteroids bigger than 100 meters across [orange dots in the simulated image] have orbits that bring them worryingly close to Earth. And we have found only 20-30% of them so far. 

"Conclusion: Call Bruce Willis" - NASA NEOWISE survey, May 2012

And there are ten times as many "Earth-crossing" asteroids between 100-300 feet wide that we cannot detect until they're at our doorstep. But they're heavy enough that when they hit us, the resulting fireball reduces everything in a 2000-3000 sq km area to matchsticks. [I say "when" because it has happened before. Google "Tunguska 1908"]

In response to this threat, NASA recently approved $5 million for building a warning system that can detect these smaller asteroids 1-3 weeks before they smash into Earth, so that people in the blast radius can be evacuated. 

Sorry, what? $5 million? What does that buy nowadays? Certainly not Rubirosa's favorite Ferrari.

"I'd get the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 instead" - Me

Apparently, $5 million is only good for a last-minute warning that does nothing to protect us from getting bitch-slapped by a space brick. This is a pathetically inadequate response from a civilization that took only 43 years to go from this: 

""Every action has an equal and opposite reaction" - Sir Isaac Newton" - Robert Goddard

to this:

"LOL take one more pic, I blinked" - Buzz Aldrin

The reason we've lost our mojo as a space-faring species is that NASA is broke. The Apollo moon landings were marketed as America's victory over the Soviets in the Space Race, after which politicians saw no reason to continue funding the agency at the same level. NASA used to get more than 4% of the US annual federal budget back in the mid 60's. In FY 2011, it got 0.48% - the lowest since 1959. Any proposal to increase it will be met with much knee-jerk hysteria about "wasting" money when there are "real" problems on Earth.

Asteroid or no, this is absolutely unacceptable. In the process of saving the world as the billionaire wannabe-Ironman, my plan needs to rescue NASA from being slowly castrated. Here it is -

STEP 1. Throw $100 million at former NASA rocket scientists and astronauts to build a private space launch system that can get to orbit and back for 10% the present cost. This will free up NASA resources to get back to badass missions capable of blowing minds - Like fucking harpooning an asteroid in deep space and fucking dragging it back towards Earth. 

STEP 2. (While I'm at it) Fight global warming by building the modern world's first eco-friendly all-electric sports car and family sedan. And a solar energy company.

STEP 3. (Long term) Make human life multi-planetary by enabling a self-sustaining settlement on Mars, in case the Earth is targeted by an unstoppable dinosaur-killer comet.

Sounds unrealistic? FYI Steps 1-2 have actually been completed by an entrepreneur who's working towards fulfilling his wish to "die on Mars, just not on impact". His name is Elon Musk. 

"Sure, Steve Jobs was impressive too" - Elon Musk

Incidentally, Mr. Musk had a cameo in a movie that you may have watched in 2010. I shall leave you with the video clip: