It’s been a hell of a year for sci-fi, but the wildest stories are the ones that exist in our reality. Queen guitarist Brian May, a doctor in the impossibly complex field of astrophysics, has been fighting the good fight of asteroid awareness. It’s often easy to be oblivious to the fact that we could all be mercifully annihilated by unfeeling space rocks at any moment, with no paternally gruff oil rig workers to save us if the occasion arises. May has sought to change that with Asteroid Day, a project he and several other very smart people have been devising over the last few years to make sure we as humans never forget that we are at the mercy of gravitational forces. And it’s UN-approved, too, as of today.
According to the official site, Asteroid Day is held on June 30th each year, “the anniversary of the largest impact in recent history, the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia.” While it could be argued that there are government-altering hacker groups are to be worried about in Siberia instead of potential meteorite impacts, Peter Gabriel and Bill Nye are on board with Asteroid Day, so that counts for something. Here is “’39,” a very good country song that Brian May wrote about the theory of relativity.
Videos by VICE
Phil hasn’t written about space since he was ten. He’s very excited and on Twitter.
