Walking to Chicago (finally)

Some number of years ago I fell off my bike and broke my arm.  Because of when I broke it I ended up not biking for another year and so when I finally began to ride a lack of practice and fear of injuring myself again kept me from biking as often as I had been.  

When I first got a job working as an assistant Hebrew school teacher for my synagogue I would bike the three miles it took to get there.  After breaking my arm my mom drove me and this worked until I got my permit but refused to drive myself so I was back to getting myself to Hebrew school.  But I wasn’t about to bike so I started walking.

This, along with walking to school, meant that I was walking 13.5 miles a week (excluding walking that I did in school).  It quickly became my ‘thing’ to walk anywhere and everywhere if I could even if it would take me an hour or more. 

I’ve walked for hours on end to run errands or see a movie but walking was just a mode of transport that allowed me to take routes that cars couldn’t and listen to music and text and whatever else I felt like.  This continued for a year and a half or so before I started talking about walking as more than just a mode of transport.  I started talking to people about walking to every state capital or across the country, but baby steps would need to come first.  And this is where I got the idea to walk to Chicago. 

I planned it out in my head a month or so before going.  I would walk along the train tracks to avoid getting lost since I wouldn’t have a map or a smart phone to help.  Then I would finish at Union Station and take a train back to Deerfield.  So I put out an open invite on Facebook and starting talking seriously to my friends.

When the day came the sky was a bit overcast so I packed a poncho for the wet and a sweater for the cold.  I brought money and a camera and my phone and a water bottle.  I left Deerfield train station with one other friend (three people had responded to the open invite, one was a maybe and then canceled, one was a yes and then got sick, and the third made it) at 8:30 am on a Monday morning in early June.  We took a picture at Deerfield and planned to take one at every station on our way into the city

Since we were familiar with the Deerfield area we didn’t walk next to the tracks but instead walked to the next station down the line before we left the town behind and walked along the tracks through some forest for a couple miles.  This is how it went for quite a while, walking along the tracks when there wasn’t civilization around and sticking to sidewalks and trusting my friend’s smartphone to guide us when there was. 

After stopping for lunch we continued on for another couple hours before my friend received a text from his mom telling him to come home once we reached the next station because he’d have reached the city limits of Chicago.  I started texting my mom about wheter or not I would continue on alone.  We walked and I agonized over my decision as we got closer and closer to the point at which my friend would leave me.  I finally made my decision almost in sight of the station to continue the whole way to Union Station.

After this point I walked along the tracks for several miles under now clear skies.  The tracks still cut through a forest which I found weird because I hadn’t thought that there would be so much nature so close to/inside of Chicago.  I randomly met two boys with bikes while crossing a bridge.  Luckily it seemed that they weren’t doing drugs or drinking (although I’d seen plenty of broken bottles on my way) so I continued on my way after an acknowledging nod. 

As I continued I saw up ahead someone in an orange neon reflector vest and, considering the fact that the last official person I’d seen was a cop that had asked me if I knew I was trespassing if I was walking along the tracks I quickly looked for a way off the tracks which is more difficult than you might think because although there are ways to get on close to civilization where there are lots of people who might want to get to the train tracks there was a nice high fence along the border between the tracks and the forest.  Fortunately there was a way out that took me into an interesting neighborhood that was full of cookie-cutter houses, some still under construction.  It was particularly unusual to see smiling faces and talk to and be talked to.  I wandered around this community trying to stay close to the tracks and trying to avoid people in case they asked me who I was and what I was doing.  Eventually I made my way back to the fence and followed a forest path along a low hill that lead me to a back yard and another hole in the fence.

I was able to walk next to or close by the tracks for the next 10 minutes or so until I started to enter the actual city part of Chicago, but this wasn’t an issue because I was still able to zig and zag to follow the tracks.  This took me through some interesting neighborhoods (not interesting because they were particularly X but just because they didn’t look like what I’d imagined Chicago would look like and they were oddly both similar and different to my neighborhood. 

This zigging and sagging went well for half an hour or so until I zigged under a bridge and was about to turn right onto a sidewalk that would follow the tracks I’d just gone under turned into US 94 a 4 lane highway that I wouldn’t be able to walk along.  Looking around for what to do I found a bus station with a map of the area.  I noted when I should turn: right at the first street, straight for a couple blocks, left, right, and so forth before setting out.  This turned out to be a bad idea because the map had spaces between roads that I thought simply showed the map was zoomed in, instead they were spaces between major roads and I quickly became lost.  I was lost for so long in fact that I had dinner.  I estimate that it was about an hour and a half before I was back on track.

Nothing super eventful happened for the next several hours until my mom started to text me around 6:30  because she was worried about how long I was taking and because I was about to enter the worst neighborhoods in my journey just as it was getting dark.  She wanted me to come back at the next station but acknowledged that I wouldn’t feel much if I didn’t complete my mission so we decided that after reaching the next station I would skip strain to Union and try to catch an 8:35 train back to Deerfield.  My mom thought this a daunting task because I would have 90 minutes to walk 6 miles and to make it I would need to walk much faster than I had been.  So I put on the gas and began to power through the last leg of my journey.  To keep myself from getting lost I got text updates with directions from my mom.  Eventually as I got close and my time was running short I called my mom to get ‘live updates’ since my position was changing regularly and my mom was now following my progress on Google maps.  At 8:31 I told my mom I was going to hang up and sprint the last 8 blocks to try and make it to the train.  And so I flew down the street running faster than I would’ve believed possible considering that I’d been walking for 12 hours and gone 30 miles (including my hour and a half of being lost), sprinted into the station, down the stairs, and onto the loading platform where my train was waiting.  Relief flooded through me until I approached the first door and it was closed.  So was the next, and the next, and the next, so I look through the windows and see a conductor.  I knock to get her attention and to ask her to open the doors, but when she turns to face me she just shakes her head.

I then spent two hours cooling off waiting for the next train home to arrive at 10:35.  I got on this train and spent an hour or so on the ride home being ridiculously sore.  My mom picked me up at the Deerfield station close to midnight and drove me home.

Post End of High School and Stuff

So this blog was originally created as part of an ongoing homework assignment in my Issues in Modern America class, but now the school year is over.  Therefore this is no longer a place for homework and whatever, instead I will be using it off an on as my regular (regular as in not for school not as in regularly updated content) blog-ish type thing.  Feel free to read by back entries they're still worthwhile, but subsequent entries won't always be on similar tangents.  So without further ado; Welcome to my blog!

Rain of Iron and Ice #4

Now back to info about history as it relates to asteroid/meteorite impacts!

The space race is given (rather interestingly) a quick run-through that also manages to capture more info than I knew about it.  Races to get probes to the Moon, Mars, and Venus are described and the successes and failures of both Russians and Americans were numerous.  So it was very exciting when three American probes returned over 17000 images of the moon that depicted enormous craters to those less than a meter in size.  These images also showed that these were all impact craters as evidence for volcanic activity was absent.  However, the plethora of craters told scientists nothing about the frequency of their impacts because no data could yet be collected as to their age.  The crater ages were later measured by Apollo space missions allowing for accurate calculations of cratering rates both on the Moon and the infall rate of asteroids and meteorites on Earth.  The evidence collected by later spacecraft of Mars and Mercury showed that Earth was in prime impact real estate, but scientists were perplexed by an apparent lack of evidence and so a quest to find evidence of impacts on Earth began.  And by 1962 more than 200 Earth craters had been identified and authenticated.  The biggest of these was the 65 million year old, 200+ Km wide Yucatán Peninsula crater which is now believed to be evidence of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.  Using all this data a variety of frequency estimates were made.  It was approximated that hundred-megaton (about 5 times more powerful than a WWII nuke like the ones from Hiroshima or Nagasaki) impacts occurred every 1500 years, one gigaton impacts every 12000 years, teraton impacts every 800000 years and petaton (globally devastating) impacts every 100 million years (Lewis 74).  Other, smaller impacts are more common but were harder to measure with the devices of the time. 

In 1967 in response to the close approach of the asteroid Icarus (which had no chance of actually hitting Earth but created quite a stir due to the closeness of its approach) an M.I.T. class was tasked with creating a solution if it was discovered that Icarus was on a collision course with Earth.  The end of the year presentation by students was attended by the M.I.T. community, and the press (who ended up circulating widely inflated reports about the circumstances of the asteroid's pass by the Earth).  However, Icarus was nothing new to astronomers who had known about it since 1949 when it became the 13th body to have an orbit that brought it close to Earth. 

I'm glad that I'm finally getting where I want to go with this book.  The information about the relative frequency of asteroid/meteorite impacts on Earth is very intriguing as is the 1967 M.I.T. project which suggested one of the favorite methods in the case of imminent asteroid impact; use a satellite to slowly pull the asteroid out of an Earth-bound trajectory.

Rain of Iron and Ice #3

How meteorite impacts work:

This section begins by differentiating meteors from meteorites.  If a meteor doesn't complete its fall to Earth, if it burns up on the way, it remains a meteor.  If a meteor falls from the sky and hits the Earth it becomes a meteorite. 

As a meteor enters the Earth's atmosphere it begins to be ablated (the name for the process in which a projectile melts and vaporizes) and the rate at which this occurs is based on the density of the air in which the meteor is traveling (which doubles every 5K) and how fast the object is going.  This means that a faster moving object will penetrate to a lesser depth into the Earth's atmosphere than a slow moving object. 

The book brings up that since asteroids and meteorites regularly impact the Earth or other planets, if they weren't replenished there would be no more and meteor showers would stop.  However this isn't the case so scientists came up with some hypotheses: 1, that Jupiter's gravity acts on harmonically orbiting asteroids slowly pulling their orbit away from normal sending them on tracks through the inner solar system or 2, that comets with long orbits are disturbed by Jupiter's gravity and sent on shorter orbits through the central solar system.  Astronomers then calculated the approximate number of asteroids and meteors that are created and how many each hypothesis would produce and the numbers suggest that both hypotheses are correct, about 50% of newly created Near Earth Asteroids come from bodies dislodged from the Asteroid Belt by Jupiter and the other 50% come from comets that Jupiter's gravity effects in such a way to have them orbit by the Earth too.  This is relevant because comets and asteroids have different chemical makeups and so they'll do different things when they come into contact with the Earth's atmosphere. 

Not all impacts leave lasting evidence.  Since they are random the vast majority will land in the ocean and disappear without a trace.  Additionally events like the Tunguska meteorite occur with unknown frequency.  The meteorite exploded with great force, but because it didn't create a crater the evidence of felled trees would only last 100 years or so.  Despite not impacting the Earth the Tunguska meteorite could still have caused plenty of damage if it had come only minutes or hours later and exploded over a populated city.  The only evidence that will remain of the Tunguska event will be small spheres of magnetite which no one will be looking for because there isn't a crater.

Here is what happens when there is an impact explosion: the kinetic energy of the object is almost immediately converted into heat which produces a small, exceedingly hot fireball of vast energy and pressure.  The fireball briefly reaches temperatures of several hundreds of thousands of degrees and the energy released is significantly greater than that of the Sun before expanding faster than the speed of sound and producing high amounts of x-rays.  The fireball will continue to expand until its pressure is equal to that of the surrounding atmosphere.  At this point the fireball, which is still ridiculously hot, will begin to rise from the burning remnants of whatever was on the ground and allowing the relatively cold surrounding air to rush in.  These winds can reach hurricane speeds and serve to fan the blaze around ground zero.  The fireball may release so much energy that surfaces illuminated by it can spontaneously burst into flame while anything within the range of the fireball is vaporized (this can occur even with relatively small explosions like the one in Halifax, Nova Scotia on December 6th 1917 during which many people were never found having been consumed by the explosion).  Due to the forces involved the volume of matter excavated by the explosion will usually be about one hundred times greater than that of the impacting body (Lewis 59).  The rapid excavation creates a shock wave both in the air and in the ground causing buildings several kilometers away from the explosion to have the ground beneath them pushed outwards.  The glass in these buildings will shatter and then accelerate to near the speed of sound becoming deadly projectiles directed at the people who may be unfortunate enough to be around (or in the case of the recent Russian meteor, the people who went to their windows to see what had happened).  Aerial explosions typically effect a larger area less severely and impacts or explosions in water will have a similar effect except that the water will rush in to fill the gap left by the explosion, rising up in the center before splashing down again (this process can repeat several times).  Such an initial explosion and the splashing that follows will often create tidal waves or tsunamis that will devastate shorelines nearby.

This is the kind of thing that some sort of prevention strategy would try to... well... prevent, and why shooting a rocket at an asteroid is usually a bad idea.  If a rocket were to hit an asteroid and blow it up, usually the asteroid would simply be in many smaller pieces and these pieces could each go through the process described above.  Fun stuff.

Rain of Iron and Ice #2

Rain of Iron and Ice continues to discuss the issues with proving that meteors were not heavenly bodies (or that they existed at all).  Lewis brings up the issue that despite people finding a variety of strange iron deposits around the Earth they couldn't be confirmed as meteorites because there wasn't an observed fall to coincide with the found object.  It wasn't until the late 1600's that scientists from the Royal Society of London or the Société Royale decided that uncivilized hicks might have something to offer.  As science developed, our world view changed and more data came in about meteorites so that by 1759 the French Academy could editorialize that, "these meteors are not rare," which says a lot about how much danger we might be in.  While it suggests that meteor impacts happen often, it also suggests that they aren't extraordinarily catastrophic since the world didn't end over and over again. 

The first solid evidence for meteorites extraterrestrial origin came in 1800 and 1801 when E.C. Howard found chemical similarities in the compositions of meteors that were markedly different from local rocks.  This difference in chemical makeup is the first indicator that meteors were, in fact, meteors and not random terrestrial rocks.  France took slightly longer to confirm Howard's discoveries.  It wasn't until 1803 that Antione-François de Fourcroy performed similar research to reach the same conclusion before commenting on the value of eye-witness accounts.  He said, "I could distrust the imagination of a learned man, but I would place all my faith in the testimony of an ignorant person, because, by nature, the ignorant person has no imagination."  Which is a rather back-handed compliment if you ask me.  The book then continues into how people were unable to process the idea that rocks fell from the sky, so they simply ignored it. 

Now we finally get to some good interesting info about the meteorites themselves.  The book describes three types of meteors, Irons, Stones, and Stony-Irons (basically chocolate, vanilla, and swirl).  With the Irons being able to easily pass through the atmosphere and the Stones usually having quite a bit more trouble. 

There was a push against the idea that craters could be the result of the impacts of such bodies because hundreds of years earlier geologists had come to the conclusion that because Earth was so old catastrophic events would have no effect and have never happened.  These impact craters would blow massive holes in a defining theory of geology and so many educated people resisted the idea, but when, in the early to mid 1900's the evidence became irrefutable, many more craters were found all over the world. 

And I have finally found where the book begins to talk about how asteroid/meteorite impacts work!

Rain of Iron and Ice by John S. Lewis #1

Rain of Iron and Ice by John S. Lewis is a book about the history of asteroid and comet impacts on Earth and the dangers they present.  The book opens with a recreation of "events in Constantinople, A.D. 472" (1).  It describes what people would have seen and their likely reactions to a fiery explosion, thinking that the world would end.  The book continues by describing the early history of recording asteroid impacts.  This was especially difficult in Europe because the people most likely to observe asteroid impacts were 'lowly uneducated peasants' and they're claims weren't taken seriously by 'educated' people from the Church or a university.  Therefore most data about asteroid impacts during the Middle Ages and earlier come from the eastern societies like China or the Middle East.  It wasn't until after the plague that a schism appeared in Europe between Science and the Church which allowed ideas based on observation instead of theology to prosper.

All the info about why there isn't much data about asteroid impacts is interesting, but because I chose this book hoping it had relevant info for my Marketplace of Ideas project, it is at this point proving somewhat disappointing.  However I am certain (based on the cover) that after Lewis covers the basic history he will progress into the effects of asteroid impacts etc.

Marketplace of Ideas

     Started working on my Marketplace of Ideas project.  I was basically inspired to do something with defending Earth from collisions with near Earth objects (asteroids, meteors, etc) after watching astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil DeGrasse Tyson talk about the asteroid Apophis which is a large asteroid projected to come extremely close to Earth on 4/13/2029 (coincidentally a Friday) and depending on its path at that time, it may hit Earth seven years later.  I think this also ties in nicely to the recent meteor explosion over Russia back in February. 

     I've got a cool game planned that I think aptly shows how unequipped we (the people of Earth) are to defend ourselves in the case of a potential asteroid impact.  In the first scenario the player would have to try to fit a square block into a round hole.  Naturally this is impossible and represents what we could do if we were in danger of being impacted by an asteroid.  Then the player would have to opportunity to try and fit a block of clay into a round hole.  Something they'd be able to do with the tools I'd provide, representing what we could do (survive/not be impacted) should we find ourselves in danger of being impacted.