{"id":1448,"date":"2008-11-03T12:22:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T12:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=1448"},"modified":"2013-12-03T15:41:13","modified_gmt":"2013-12-03T15:41:13","slug":"nick-allen-is-worried-about-asteroids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/nick-allen-is-worried-about-asteroids\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Allen is worried about asteroids"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font size=\"2\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">Extinction<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">No one is there to see them, for they lie far beyond the orbit of Mars. Fifty thousand asteroids tumbling and jostling in the blackness of space. Unobserved.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">They have done so for nearly 5 billion years, answerable to no one, obeying nought but the laws of gravity. They are space debris \u2013 pieces of a planet the mighty forces of Jupiter refused to allow. Some are giants over a hundred miles across, but most are babies chasing each other around the oh-so distant Sun, it\u2019s heat and light, feeble this deep into space.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">And every once in a while they collide and splinter. Today, one, less than a mile across, is nudged by a neighbour and begins its two year journey to Earth. No one witnesses the rock as it gracefully, silently, speeds through the void towards a blue dot in the blackness.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">Men go about their business, unaware that a countdown has begun.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">* Nick Allen is a mental health nurse from Manchester, England.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ExtinctionNo one is there to see them, for they lie far beyond the orbit of Mars. Fifty thousand asteroids tumbling and jostling in the blackness of space. Unobserved.They have done so for nearly 5 billion years, answerable to no one, obeying nought but the laws of gravity. They are space debris \u2013 pieces of a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1448"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6025,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions\/6025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}