Eating dinner through the end of the world
2022 commenced with boom when a meteor likely exploded over Pittsburgh
Welcome to a new edition of wordcloud, a newsletter by Nicole Fallert about the space between reality and ideas. If you enjoy this content, please consider sharing and subscribing.
I was eating dinner with my parents at their house on Jan. 1 when I saw a tweet that Allegheny County had received multiple 911 calls reporting “a loud boom” and “shaking” in the Pittsburgh area. Officials said there was “no explanation” for the apparent calamity. The county followed up with a meme that sarcastically asked if anyone would like to update their 2022 for new available version. Um, yes please.
Residents immediately replied to the thread with footage of the boom from digital doorbell cameras or cell phone video that happened to capture the sonic clap that morning.
Nothing to wake you up from a New Year’s Even hangover like an explosion no one can seem to find — I thought hundreds of hungover people looking to chase brunch with COVID tests on a Saturday morning was enough for 2022’s start, but I guess not.
People filled the internet with their theories for the boom: a dryer falling in their home, a tree collapsed on their roof, a stash of contraband fireworks, local police detonating ammunition and explosives, a plane crash, thunder, an earthquake, a massive fart.
My favorite string of responses involved the idea that birds knew the event was coming and provided a forewarning by acting unusual that morning, chirping and cawing up a storm to alert residents of the impending boom. Click here if you’re not familiar with the Birds Aren’t Real conspiracy, but the thought is especially popular among the Pittsburgh psyche. And the theory would explain why “birds” (a.k.a drone replicas that spy on Americans) would have known a meteor event was coming and provided a warning call.
Theses social media theories really reveal where Pittsburghers’ brains go when disaster strikes, illuminating the general distrust of police held by a liberal city that’s not afraid to smuggle fireworks yet enjoys union-approved days off for holidays and is a valley permanently scarred by the threat of a plane attack post-9/11.
But shortly after the county’s first tweet, the National Weather Service Pittsburgh confirmed a suspected meteor explosion, citing a flash “not associated with lightning” that illuminated the area at the suspected time. NASA Meteor Watch then reported “the data enabled an estimate of the energy at 30 tons of TNT. If we make a reasonable assumption as to the meteor’s speed (45,000 miles per hour), we can ballpark the object’s size at about a yard in diameter, with a mass close to half a ton.”
NASA’s post went on to say the supposed fireball is estimated to have been 100 times brighter than the full moon and would have been visible to people had the city not been so cloudy (if only Pittsburgh weren’t grey 24/7 post December.)
Upon hearing the official theory of the meteor, my mind immediately went to Don’t Look Up - a Netflix climate change dramedy about two scientists who attempt to warn the world a comet is going to hit Earth and destroy all humanity. Humans don’t heed the scientists’ warning and in the end Earth as we know it ceases to exist.
[spoiler alert coming stop reading if you must]
In the final scene of the movie, the comet is tearing toward Earth while the main characters hold a “we’re all going to die” dinner party. The comet hits; The government and all other avenues of escape have failed. As the dinner table starts to rumble with tremors caused by the comet’s hit, the family in the movie holds a strained debate about store-bought vs. homemade apple pie. Their voices treble and water lilts in glasses as the conversation strains to stay alive amid fear. Windows fracture and an aerial view shows a torrent of lava razing the Michigan neighborhood where the party sits drinking wine and eating fresh salmon.
In an instant, the lava torrent spills into the house and the scene goes black. The end.
Not gonna lie, this scene really shook me up. For the ensuing day after watching the movie I couldn’t help but think what I would do if I knew the world was going to end. Would I go on a shopping spree? Hold a dinner party? Fight my enemies in hand-to-hand combat? Rob a bank? All of the above, by the way.
And then in the midst of this hand wringing, a meteor presumably struck my hometown and I learned about it that day while eating dinner with my family.
Amid rising omicron cases, wildfires, tension at the Ukraine border and the loss of Betty White, my brain has already been on overdrive about the end of the world. Did we really need a supposed meteor strike on top of this, God?
Scientists have confirmed the meteor is only a theory for now, but it’s a pretty likely one given their data. But what surprised me is how similar the course of action for something like this is to the seemingly preposterous solutions to the comet discussed in Don’t Look Up — sending rockets armed with nukes or armed drones to blast up and divert the comet.
Diana Turnshek, an astronomer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, told The New York Times if a large body was incoming to our planet the plan would be to “send a rocket to sit next to it, and the gravitational pull of the rocket will pull it off course.”
Um, what.
I’ll close with a story I heard recently during a reporting trip. A father was hiking with his two elementary-aged children. He told them what they would do if they saw a bear. It was mid-sentence of him saying “we’ll put our hands up and look big” to two small children that the father realized how unsettling this so-called plan was.
The kids looked at the father like, “That’s it? That’s the plan if we see a massive flesh-eating animal? To look big?”
If the meteor were like a bear, I’m pretty sure that our attempt at looking big would only work to an extent. At some point, our humanness is just so obvious in the hierarchy of the universe. We can only be so big until we have to realize what’s bigger. The sky, atmosphere, stars, bears — these will always be more powerful than us.
Perhaps the birds have known this all along.
Please check out some of my favorite 2021 reporting:
Meet The Women Behind The TikTok "Bridgerton" Musical Who’ve Now Made Grammy History
Ohio Lawmakers Have Introduced An Abortion Ban That Goes Even Further Than The Texas Law
A Missing Teenager Used A Hand Gesture She'd Seen On TikTok To Alert A Driver To Call 911
A Dog Attack Disfigured Her Face But Didn’t Stop This Skateboarding Influencer
Josh Duggar Has Been Found Guilty Of Downloading And Possessing Child Sexual Abuse Materials