Musk Vs. Trump: Your Thoughts?
The inevitable has happened.
Back on February 5, 2025 I wrote a post about the asteroid that had been calculated to have a steadily increasing chance of slamming into the Earth in 2032:
Elon Musk, Future Defender of the Planet
The chance of asteroid YR4 hitting the Earth on December 22, 2032 keeps edging upwards, now approaching 2%.
… That reminds me. I figure that it’s pretty inevitable that Donald Trump and Elon Musk, being two very big men, will eventually have a falling out and the President will fire his most important supporter. (I don’t see any evidence of that happening right now, but it just seems like the kind of thing to expect some day.)
Trump’s not usually really good at graciously kicking his underlings upstairs when they fall out of his favor, but Musk deserves better. So when Trump decides that the time has come for Musk to leave DOGE, allow me to suggest to the President that putting Musk in charge of Planetary Defense would be a right and fitting gesture.
But more observations proved the asteroid would not hit Earth, so that potential graceful exit ramp vanished.
Today, Musk and Trump are going at it hammer and tongs.
What do you think? Please let me know in the Comments.
P.S., I see that the tabloids are currently playing up a scientific article warning about a new Menace From Outer Space: that city-killing asteroids could be hiding in the sun’s glare near Venus. From the Daily Mail:
By CHRIS MELORE, ASSISTANT SCIENCE EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
Published: 17:23 EDT, 27 May 2025
At least three city-killing asteroids that could strike Earth are hiding behind our closest neighbor in the solar system.
A new study warns that Venus is blocking out our view of many near-Earth asteroids - large space rocks that cross or come near Earth's orbit - setting up the potential for a devastating impact.
Researchers from Brazil, France, and Italy found that several asteroids in sync with Venus's orbit are extremely hard to spot because they're often hidden by the Sun's glare.
Three in particular, 2020 SB, 524522, and 2020 CL1, have orbits that take these asteroids dangerously close to Earth.
Even worse, the asteroids don't follow perfectly stable paths, meaning any kind of gravitational change could shift their course and pull them towards Earth.
The three asteroids flying along with Venus measure between 330 and 1,300 feet in diameter, making each one capable of leveling entire cities and setting off massive fires and tsunamis.
The researchers noted that the Rubin Observatory in Chile might be able to spot deadly asteroids approaching from our blind spot near Venus, but the window to see them would be extremely short, possibly lasting only two to four weeks.
So, they aren’t actually going to wipe out Guadalajara or Ho Chi Minh City or whatever in the next few weeks as the headline might have made you think.
But they COULD.
Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner
Hoping it is 4D chess.