Save the Date: April 13th, 2036...

It's a bird! It's a plane! No it's, it's, uh-oh! Kaboom!

The other morning I was channel surfing on my Slingbox.  I watched an interesting interview between Leno and astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.  So I did some more research on what he was talking about.  This is what I found.

Let me start from the beginning....literally.  You see in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.  The heavens in this case is a generically vague term for everything else floating in space and the universe that's not the Earth.  Well about 5 years ago one of these floating objects, otherwise known as a meteor (named Apophis), was discovered.  Not that big of a deal because there are millions of asteroids and meteors in our solar system and to discover a new one doesn't seem so novel right? Wrong!  After Apophis' discovery, astrophysicists using calculations and supercomputers (a bit more powerful than my TI-84) came to the conclusion that on April 13th, 2036 it has a strong chance of hitting Earth somewhere between  Las Vegas and off the Southern California coast.  Keep in mind that Apophis, aptly named after the Egyptian demon god of darkness and chaos, is neither nearly as big as the one that took out the dinosaurs, nor the one that took out Bruce Willis in 1998.