Happy Tunguska Day!

On this day, in 1908, a remote Siberian forest was hit by a:

• comet
• asteroid
• alien space ship
• piece of string
• black hole
• chunk of neutronium
• an extraterrestrial object containing black goo infused with a malevolent alien intelligence
• some kind of manifestation of Azathoth or Yog-Sothoth
• some kind of opening into hell

...whatever it was, Happy Tunguska Day! How do we celebrate Tunguska Day, you wonder? Why, you can celebrate Tunguska Day simply by continuing to exist! That's right!

That might not seem like much, but think about it: any of those things, even the completely-made-up items on the list, could have destroyed the human race if they'd been bigger or happened somewhere a little more crowded than Siberia. But we're still here! Take that, universe! And if any of those things ever do happen on a larger scale or in some place that draws crowds, like, you know, London or Tokyo or New York City or São Paulo or New Delhi or Beijing--pfft! (and imagine a throat-slitting motion with the hand, please): lots of us, maybe all of us, could be dead. The end! And we're not!

So that's how you celebrate Tunguska Day. By not being one of several million or billion people to die in a:

• fireball
• massive "nuclear winter"-style global cooloff
• alien invasion
• riot/mass suicide triggered by the maddening sound of daemon flautists
• gravitational anomaly that implodes the Earth
• condensate of all terrestrial matter into a Earth-sized goo of strange matter
• temporal flux
• monster's belly

Hooray! Happy Tunguska Day!

(I feel funny soliciting comments, but you can also help celebrate Tunguska Day, if you really want to, by suggesting a Tunguska Event Theory not mentioned in this post, or additional ways in which the entire human race could die of external causes--i.e. not by baking or gassing or nuking ourselves, but something the real or imaginary universe can unexpectedly throw our way!)