A massive fireball was witnessed by thousands Monday morning over the skies of Bangkok, Thailand, leading many to question whether the event was a signal heralding in the End of Days.
With the upcoming Jewish holidays, many highly anticipated events have struck fear into the hearts and minds of people around the world. The end of the Shmittah cycle coupled with the final Blood Moon of a special tetrad are understood to be significant harbingers of the messianic era.
“There is a high possibility that the object spotted this morning…on social media, is an object from outer space,” Saran Poshyachinda, Deputy Director of National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, told CNN. “It looks like an asteroid traveling to Earth and grazing through the air and it turned into a fireball.”
The fireball was conjectured to be a small meteor that burned up approximately 100 kilometers above the earth. For the time being, it seems to be an isolated incident, though many see it as a sign of greater things to come.
In the Bible, the name of God that appears first is Elo-him, which Jewish tradition understands as being the divine expressed through nature and also God’s aspect of judgment. Cataclysmic events can be perceived as an expression of God’s displeasure, the plagues striking Egypt being a classic example.
Predictions of a doomsday asteroid have become so prevalent that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been forced to address the rumors.
“NASA knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small,” a spokesperson explained. “In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years.”
NASA and the European Space Agency jointly operate the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Programs, which monitor asteroids and comets. It may be surprising to discover that there is an average of one close approach each day to earth. Of course, “close” is a relative expression and in astronomy that can mean a distance of several million miles.
In fact, major meteor impacts are rare, but they have occurred with dramatic results in recent years. The Tunguska Event in 1908 flattened 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest. More recently, in February 2013, the Chelyabinsk meteor, weighing approximately 12,000 metric tons, exploded over Russia, injuring 1,500 people and damaging 7,200 buildings. The meteor went undetected before it exploded.
It has been estimated that in the last 10,000 years, the earth has been hit 350 times by asteroids the size of that in the Tunguska Event. Even more disturbing is that despite a high level of monitoring, there exists no ready solution to deal with a threatening asteroid once it is detected.
