Unidentified Falling Objects

If you have seen me recently around town wearing a bicycle helmet you may have jumped to the conclusion that I have taken up bike riding. As usual, you are wrong!

The real reason for the helmet is that I am worried about things falling out of the sky. The planet we live on (Earth) is constantly being bombarded by the debris of outer space. I once believed that space was mostly empty and that was the reason why they called it '˜space'. But it turns out that space is chock full of junk.

If you know me at all, you know that I almost never get hit by falling space debris. I wasn't hit by a single meteor last autumn during the night of the Leonid Meteors (that's Russian for Lenny's Space Rocks). Still, I am not taking any chances.

Some things that could fall on us include rocks, meteors, asteroids, and dark matter. There is another category of things that drop out of the sky and that's things people made and put up there in the first place. The Russians even put a dog up there named Yuri, or Sputnik, I think. He might still be up there happily howling at the moon. But more likely he came back down. Americans put a dog up there once called Sky Lab (some sort of Retriever I guess). He came back down. You know the old saying: what goes up must come screaming back down to land on somebody's head.

Here are a few tips I use to avoid getting hit by falling objects:

1) Stand next to people taller than you.

2) If you see an object coming your way, fake a move to the right, but then quickly jump leftward. Visa-versa works too. I've tried both.

3) Do not taunt outer space.

4) If you simply must get hit by a meteor, try to get hit by a radioactive meteor. It may give you cool super-powers.