BBC:

A new telescope facility in Hawaii designed to search for asteroids and comets which could threaten Earth has been made operational.

The Pan-STARRS 1 telescope will map large portions of the sky each night to track not only close space objects, but also exploding stars (supernovae).

The telescope has been taking science data for six months but is now operating from dusk-dawn each night.

We can forgive the dinosaurs. How were they to know what the fuck that bright flash in the sky was? How were they to know that their end was about to crash in the Gulf of Mexico? We can forgive them for chewing tough leaves as the ball of fire blazed through the atmosphere at "about 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet." We can forgive them for making those dumb noises just moments before the terrific boom that dispatched all of them to an eternity of nothingness. They had a good run—a 150 million years of being big and noisy. Millions and millions of years of chasing this, or fleeing that. And then one day: BOOM.

But those monsters were not supposed to be here in the first place. They only came into this corner of the cosmos because of another catastrophe, the Permian extinction. That catastrophe removed mammals from the main stage of life (complex life) and kept us on the sidelines, hidden by the leaves of trees, waiting, hoping, watching the monsters like those modern things in Bjork's tune. And then one day: BOOM. We humans owe our very existence to that killer asteroid.

The animal that can't be forgiven the sin of ignorance is the human animal. We actually know the depths and dangers of space. We even know about the Oort Cloud—a surrounding region of ice and rocks that failed to become a part of the solar system during its formation. A passing star or some other cosmic happening can dislodge one of these cold (and resentful) objects and hurl it toward the core, toward the only planet with complex life on it. Because we actually know of these and other dangers in deep space, there is no forgiving the sin inaction.

Jupiter can't always be there for us—without Jupiter (and Saturn), it's estimated that our already rare planet would be hit by a comet or asteroid once every million or so years. And this is not a good thing because it shortens the very god of life, the god of all complexity, the god who gave us the paleontologist Peter Ward, the god Darwin and his century discovered. That God is lots and lots of undisturbed time.