San Francisco I don’t worry much about asteroids. It’s not just because it’s light years, perhaps literally, out of my lane and way past any high school courses and subsequent reading would have given me much of a clue. It’s more in the nature of the old saying, “I got a guy,” which substituted for a host of gaps in knowledge and experience, because it was an indication that you had someone, definitely not yourself, who was all over the problem. In this case, as it should be more and more, the line should be, “I know a woman,” and in fact I do: Danica Remy, who is the president of something called b612, which is a foundation at the bleeding edge of doing everything it can to make sure we know where asteroids are and, most importantly, where they are in relation to our small patch of the universe on the planet Earth.
Danica was a comrade working with Drummond Pike and the gang in the Tides family of organizations during the more than thirty years I was honored to be on the board of the organization. She had a number of pieces in her portfolio, was chief operating officer at times as well, and always a bright and cheerful spirit, which counts for a lot in my world. In the sometimes gray, careerist, and confounding world of entitlement and self-importance that is viral in philanthropy, despite the best intentions and even social justice cultures, it was always encouraging to me to see Danica drive off from the Tides lot at San Francisco’s Presidio offices in some kind of shiny, brightly colored convertible, knowing she would shake and shape the place for the better.
Drummond and I lassoed Danica for breakfast to get a Chicken Little’s sense of whether the sky was falling. The short answer is, “we don’t know.” At least not yet. The Asteroid Project which is a part of b612 has done the work to identify more than 20,000. Danica is surrounded by a team of astronauts, scientists, and brainiacs who are trying to muscle the money, working with partners, to do the science and computations working with artificial intelligence and anything else they can put their hands on to identify these asteroids and plot their paths to determine the risk. That’s Job 1. I didn’t ask, but would speculate that if they get there, then Job 2 will be figuring out if there’s the will and the way to alter the course for Earth’s sake.
It’s important to remember that we’ve been there and done that when it comes to asteroids. Ask the dinosaurs. Danica organizes an annual tour with the scientists and others to go into restricted areas of a huge crater near Flagstaff. She regaled us with some of the stories of getting people down and out again, since helicopters can’t just drop the team at the bottom. Even from the pictures on her phone, we could get a sense of how deep and massive it was. Though for those of us drowning in the immediate issues and needs of millions, it probably seems something out of our control and more in the by and by, but there’s no question all of this is important, so we’re lucky Danica is representing our interests big time.
I should add what this foundation’s name, b612, comes from. B612 was adopted from the story “The Little Prince”, a tale you may remember from your youth or children about a pilot that meets a little prince who comes from a small planet called Asteroid B-612. I’m not sure Danica came up with that name, giving a light touch to something so serious, but if she did, it’s so like her.
To get the word out, she and her team now put together Asteroid Day around the world. Asteroid Day is held annually on June 30th, the anniversary of the Tunguska event in 1908 when a meteor air burst levelled about 2,150 km² of forest in Siberia, Russia. They’re hoping for 1000 events in 2025. Might be worth a lot for us to give it a shot, or a least make sure we take a look at the sky in solidarity to see if we see any asteroids that night.