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Published: September 08 2012

Buzz Fleischman - Columnist Page. Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder where you are; even though you could be small, you’ll smash to earth and kill us all!

I’ve been watching the science channels lately and not for the important scientific advances that will allow us to understand what the Higgs Boson is, but for the news that sometime in the next thousand years or so a large inter-stellar object will come hurtling through space, smash into the earth and cause ‘significant damage’.  

Now think about this, every few million years or so an object will come along and threaten civilization as we know it almost like the video game ‘Grand Theft Auto’.

Some thought the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world in 2012 but in a big surprise to him, the head Mayan Chieftan received a 2013 calendar in the mail from both his auto insurance company and Purina Cat Chow. “I guess I’ll have to renew my AAA membership again”, he mentioned.

Just keep that ‘end of civilization tid-bit in the back of your mind as you run up a little more credit card debt. The sky’s the limit, so to speak.

As you know if you paid attention in Elementary school, the solar system, composed of 4 giant planets, 4 smaller planets and Pluto, the one we had trouble classifying began forming 4.6 billion years ago. In terms of a time-line, that would be longer than it would take us to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels.

A large chunk of galactic stuff doesn’t care where it lands, so what if we get hit with ‘the big one’? How will we preserve all the knowledge of mankind for any future diploids that may show up? Do we really want them to know what we did here?

According to the science section of the NY Times, some Japanese geneticists have not only programmed genetic information into molecules, they also postulated in a paper published in the journal Biotechnology Progress that DNA the ultimate storage information material able to withstand floods, terrorism and time can be encoded into the DNA of a roach. What makes a cockroach such a perfect receptacle? They’re hardy little creatures. A research center newsletter from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Department of Entomology states the amount of radiation that cockroaches can withstand is equivalent to that of a thermonuclear explosion. Hitting them with a bug spray can is about the only method of control, but it better not be a glancing blow. They, like the Twinkie, have existed virtually unchanged for most all of civilization.

The good news is that Florida can become the epicenter of a new industry; that of the safeguarding of all of mankind’s minutiae. Yes, we’ve got plenty of ‘storage space’ just running around (And sometimes flying around) the kitchens of South Florida.

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