BROOMFIELD — Just across the street from a Double D’s Sourdough Pizza and adjacent to a Benihana restaurant, work is underway to save the world from apocalypse.
At 525 Zang St. here, signs proclaim the presence of One Earth Future, a phrase sure to stir unease among those who fear that dark global conspiracies to erase nations’ borders are being pursued within.
But it is another tenant of the same space, a related foundation, that is putting Broomfield on the map of those intent on keeping the planet intact.
It is at the Secure World Foundation, tucked just south of the commercial bustle of the FlatIron Crossing mall, where work is progressing toward creating a cooperative, coordinated global response to the potential of a “near-Earth object,” such as an asteroid, imperiling this planet’s future.
At a two-day workshop in September hosted there at the request of the International Asteroid Warning Network — and with little outward fanfare — a new tool was developed that could be a key component in planetary preparations for facing the unthinkable. They’ve dubbed it the Broomfield Hazard Scale.
“What’s interesting about that is that it was nobody from this area that suggested that title,” said Michael Simpson, executive director of the Secure World Foundation. “It just emerged.
“The argument was that we’ve named all our (hazard) scales after places, and this conference was in Broomfield, the Secure World Foundation is here, Colorado is a major space state … and that it had a kind of neutral quality to it. It was not the Washington scale, or the Houston scale — it was a scale that represented not only a place, but something the place had facilitated.”
“The Broomfield Scale.” Roll it around on your trembling tongue; somehow, it might lack the gravitas of the Palermo Scale or the Torino Scale, two previous systems scientists have developed over the years for categorizing the impact hazards of an object entering Earth’s orbit and potentially striking our planet.
Simpson, formerly president of the International Space University, has a bearing and delivery that is evocative of 23 years of military service — he retired from the Naval Reserve in 1993 with the rank of commander.
He admitted, “There was a sense of pleasure or pride, when you find all these people from out of the area suggesting and then agreeing to the notion that this would be the Broomfield Scale.”
The proposed Broomfield Scale is a six-step qualitative hazard scale, in tabular form, based on a near-Earth object’s size and potential kinetic energy in tons of TNT equivalency, pairing that with the potential range of destruction that might ensue.
The range depicted extends from the “visible fireball” that would be evident from a “Class-1” object less than 10 meters in diameter with a kinetic energy of less than 50 kilotons, to a “Class 6” intruder more than 600 meters in size, which would threaten “global destruction.”
Near-misses pose profound dangers as well
There are millions of people who weren’t even alive when Hollywood produced “Deep Impact,” the 1998 movie which envisioned earthlings attempting to prepare for — and destroy — a 7-mile-wide comet on a collision course with Earth.
Back in the real world, Feb. 15, 2013, provided a dramatic reminder of the dangers poised by near-Earth visitors, when an orbiting asteroid that had escaped advance notice because of its position in relation to the sun, burst across the sky above Chelyabinsk, Russia. It exploded at a height of roughly 18 miles above the Earth’s surface, fragmenting into many smaller meteorites, and causing a shock wave that damaged more than 7,000 buildings in six cities.
It was the largest known extraterrestrial arrival at Earth since an asteroid or comet exploded over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia on June 30, 1908, with a force estimated in a wide range between 3 and 30 megatons of TNT, leveling roughly 80 million trees over an 830-square-mile area.
“That’s enough to have wiped out Moscow, New York City, or Los Angeles. That would have done great damage to all those places,” Simpson said. “But, one of the things we were the first to point out, or among the earliest to point out, was that there were going to be far more near-misses than there were going to be hits.”
Accordingly, much of the Secure World Foundation’s work is aimed at building a multi-national strategy for confronting the possibility that one nation — perhaps one with nuclear capabilities — might misinterpret a near-miss and overreact with dire consequences.
“Our argument was, let’s put as much effort into finding out how we would, together as a planet, defend ourselves, rather than how individual countries might take individual action,” Simpson said.
Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near Earth Object Program at NASA, was one of the participants at the September meeting during which the Broomfield Scale was developed.
“We already have a couple of different scales, the Palermo scale, the Torino scale, but the viewpoint from those that have more background and expertise in communications with the public is that those scales are too complex,” said Johnson. “They are just not understandable by the general public, and we needed a more simplified tool.”
Johnson said the Broomfield Scale in current form is “suggested,” that it “needs more work” and has yet to be formally adopted by the International Asteroid Awareness Network. It was presented to an IAWN steering committee for consideration at the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences meeting at Tucson, Ariz., in November. It is likely to be taken up again at the International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense Conference at Frascati, Italy, in April.
Johnson said he has a lot of respect for the work being done by the Secure World Foundation, which houses about half its staff of nine at a second office in Washington, D.C.
“I think it’s a very credible group,” Johnson said. “They are certainly actively involved, they do know a lot of and work with a lot of the very credible players in this area.
“They are involved, for instance, with the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and have worked with the intelligence community on this and other space issues — space weather, for instance. Space debris is another big issue of theirs, and how to mitigate space debris.”
Johnson added. “They are not the world’s center of expertise in this area, but they are good about bringing together people who are and leading discussion to try to resolve some of these issues.”
‘Broomfield is not the center of the world’
The Secure World Foundation might not be possible without the success of an ice cream and yogurt company.
Colorado real estate mogul Marcel Arsenault, 67, founded Mountain High Yogurt before selling it in 1983 for $1.3 million and branching into real estate, founding Colorado & Santa Fe Real Estate and Real Capital Solutions. It is now one of the largest owners of commercial real estate in the state.
Oceans Beyond Piracy was one of his first philanthropic ventures. He financed the establishment of the Secure World Foundation in 2002 with his wife, Cynda Collins Arsenault, ensconced as its co-founder, CEO and president. Simpson said the family’s endowment for the foundation is about $12 million.
Cynda Collins Arsenault, 64, who lives with her husband in old town Superior, said “I can talk to a lay audience (on the subject of planetary defense) pretty well, but I don’t go to into the more technical things, because so much of what we do now is in the technical world. But boy, do we have a great staff.”
That staff, she said, has agitated at times to relocate its primary operations entirely to the nation’s capital, rather than basing the operation in the shadows of FlatIron Crossing.
“Part of their argument is, ‘Who knows Broomfield?’ And, it actually used to be in Superior,” Arsenault said. “But the reason we don’t move our headquarters is that we are trying to look at this from a bigger picture.
“We are not U.S.- centric, even though we are a U.S. organization. We’re trying to look very long term. If you are embedded in D.C., or anyplace, you tend to take on the attitude of that place and start to think it’s the center of the world.”
She conceded that “Broomfield is not the center of the world, but by having our headquarters here, the goal is not to make Broomfield the center, but hopefully to have a little more objective and neutral approach to things.”
Dennis Mileti, a retired University of Colorado professor and formerly the director of the university’s Natural Hazards Center, has participated in Secure World Foundation workshops and is familiar with some of its work. A hazards scale that lends itself more readily to communications across cultural and national boundaries, he said, is important.
“One thing we know for sure, it’s very, very difficult to communicate high-consequence, low-probability risk to the public, any public — particularly when you have physical scientists doing it, who know nothing about the social sciences, the pyschology of human beings,” said Mileti, who now lives in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
There’s a need for improved tools around the hazards posed by near-Earth intruders Mileti said, and he noted that it’s not a simple challenge.
“Put on your seatbelt,” he said. “Most Americans don’t understand the difference between a watch and a warning that the National Weather Service uses, for god’s sake.”
Mileti, who lived in Broomfield while securing his graduate degree at CU, said the labeling of a planetary doomsday scale for the town straddling U.S. 36 gave him a chuckle.
“Of course it amuses me,” he said. He said it was worth a “giggle,” that “a global scale is named for a place I had to live in because I couldn’t afford to live in Boulder when I was going to grad school.”
Simpson, the foundation’s executive director, acknowledged that in focusing on confronting the scenario of Earth being imperiled by celestial intruders, he’s working in an area where the practical applications of his current work might very well never be realized in his lifetime.
“It may be that what we’ve really done is reduce the odds that our grandchildren’s grandchildren will have to worry about actually being impacted, but that’s okay,” said Simpson, 65, “because, the nature of time-scales requires us to think generations ahead.
“I’ve made the comment fairly frequently that some of the most incredible space-based applications I get to use were essentially made possible by my grandparents’ tax payments in the early days of the space era, that they never got to see a benefit from.
” So, I’ve got an obligation to be doing something to make sure that my grandkids and my grandkids’ grandkids have those benefits. In effect, pass it forward.”
Charlie Brennan: 303-473-1327, brennanc@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/chasbrennan
