Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for January 14, 2022

“An asteroid might be heading toward Earth!”

How those in power stay in power: fearmongering.

Oopsie…

Who didn’t see this one coming from yesterday’s ’toon?

Interesting timing considering that there is large asteroid doing a ‘fly-by’ in the next couple of days.

Lars is probably buffing out those little ping marks

called it.

I always KNEW that Danae would destroy the world someday.

Ruh-ro.

After “Don’t Look Up,” I’m more interested to see how Wiley’s story is going to play out.

(With a Welsh accent) – “Oh dear, whattashame, never mind”.

Will wait out this skein just to see what happens

Soon to be a moronic star filled Netflix movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and the usual cast of idiots.

It always makes me wonder how fast these fictional spaceships are supposed to be when they are rarely big enough to have a place to sleep or use the facilities. If they can travel between solar systems and make the spaceship with the interior size of a car vs an RV then it must take them as long as it takes to do a car trip (with no stops in hotels); basically 12 hours or less.

In the past week, NASA started tracking an asteroid heading our way. I will miss us … this time.

For a guy who thinks Lars is “a kid who’s really good a cosplay,” Joe seems surprizingly cool about the idea that his daughter spent several hours alone with Lars in a “space ship.”

Better beat feet Diana. I think I saw a couple of men in black driving your way.

It seems it all started when Danae tried to take a selfie which distracted Lars piloting through asteroid cloud.

What does it take to be a planet? Astronomers have 3 criteria:

 (1) It must orbit a star (in our cosmic neighborhood, the Sun).

 (2) It must be big enough to have enough gravity to force it into a spherical shape.

 (3) It must be big enough that its gravity cleared away any other objects of a similar size near its orbit around the Sun.

Failure to meet Criterion #3 was what got Pluto demoted to merely “dwarf planet”. Ceres (biggest asteroid) spectacularly failed to meet it. But notice that qualifying phrase “near its orbit”. Most of the meteors we see on Earth no longer share our ruffly circular orbit around the Sun (since we’ve long since sucked all of those out of the sky) but rather cross it in their own elliptical orbits. And the really interesting ones come from way the hell out in the Oort Cloud, since Jupiter and Saturn have largely taken care of most of the closer ones.

Most asteroids get sucked into Jupiter’s gravity anyway, so I don’t worry about it

Love Lucy’s eyes in fourth panel!

I’m almost ready to cheer the asteroid.

Will there be an “Earth shattering ka-boom?”

That is one pampered horse!

Keep track of NEOs here: https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/asteroids/#/asteroids

You do know, of course, that horses cannot be housebroken.

70 years I don’t hear a thing about asteroids. Now, suddenly, asteroids are EVERYWHERE! (Don’t say anything, keep the population calm and unknowing.)

Nobody mentioned the time-causality paradox. If Danae and Lars wipe out the Earth, he won’t be able to come back in time to do this.

Hopefully aiming for Florida?

Don’t destroy the Earth, Wiley—all my stuff is there!