Tens of thousands of interplanetary objects that have been circling the sun for four billion years will finally slam into the Earth at enormous velocity in August. No corner of  the globe is immune as the planet inexorably rotates to expose every continent, every square mile, every human being to this enormous interplanetary cloud of debris that will fall onto us like a hard crimson rain. Is this the end of humanity? Of all life on earth?

No, it's the annual Perseid meteor showers.

I've always wanted to write a dramatic “It was a dark and stormy night” lead.

Even though the meteors will hit the Earth at 133,200mph, they're guaranteed to burn up in the atmosphere, generating no more terrified reactions than pleased “oohs” and “aahs” and, inevitably, “That was a good one!”

But that isn't always the case. Some meteors survive their furious passage through our atmosphere to smash into the ground, and then scientists call them “meteorites” because everybody wants their own jargon so that their jobs sound complicated and difficult. Here in Arizona we've got a cool impact crater (it's privately owned and you have to pay to go see it) over half a mile across and 180 feet deep, gouged out by a 45-foot wide meteor that hit the ground while poking along at a paltry 25,000mph. That was about 50,000 years ago, though, so no one was around to hear it. Did it make a noise?

One impact that did make a helluva noise, heard nearly 700 miles away, was in Russia's Stony Tunguska River Valley almost exactly 100 years ago, on June 30, 1908. Actually, whatever it was (a comet? a spaceship? Elvis?) detonated before reaching the ground, flattening trees in a 20-mile radius and leaving no crater. The explosion had the force of a10 to 20 megaton nuke and the atmospheric shock wave circled the earth – twice. Experts figure it was a 100-yard wide asteroid or comet.

Think about a comet, a leftover piece of planet-building material, circling the sun for four billion years while the Earth condensed, cooled, developed plants and an atmosphere, evolved animal life. All the while the orbits of Earth and the comet are intersecting over and over again at different times and places until finally the two bodies try to occupy the same space at the same time. Over that span of time and distance, what are the mathematical probabilities that the earth's rotation would be such that, when they collided, the comet would strike an uninhabited area of our planet instead of, say Dallas? Which, I suppose, would have been appropriate to the myth that everything is bigger in Texas.

Climbing into our Wayback machine, we find the biggest meteor event on the planet, which killed off the dinosaurs and left the unpronounceable Chicxulub crater  at the bottom of the sea off the Yucatan peninsula. Actually, the dinosaur-killing thing is still somewhat debatable, but it's probably not a coincidence that the last of 'em died out 65 million years ago at the same time a six-mile wide rock smacked into our planet at 25,000mph. Wrap your mind around this: The impact generated 2,000-foot high tidal waves that temporarily emptied the Gulf of Mexico; it threw so many billions of tons of dirt into the air that it caused months of darkness and instant global cooling, exterminating countless species worldwide, including the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs conveniently died in enormous piles and were covered with dirt and that's where oil comes from.

These meteor impacts are not totally unlike the effect of The Meteors, the original British psychobilly band, who play frenzied melodies about horror, death, burying the living and general mayhem. You can download some samples of their wares at http://www.kingsofpsychobilly.com/, including songs from their album “The F Word,” apparently named for the only adjective the band seems to have in its repertoire. If you'd like to attempt an impact crater in your own home town, you can book The Meteors by emailing them at  This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it . If you're one of those people who insist that email prefixes make some kind of sense, the prefix in this address is their crazed fans' mantra, “Only The Meteors Are Pure Psychobilly.”

But the annual Perseid meteor showers (so-named because they appear to originate from that constellation) are benign and beautiful and won't have anything more than an ethereal impact, as these cute little fellers never reach the ground. They're essentially grains of sand, the wake left behind the comet Swift-Tuttle, which passes through these parts and, like a good visiting mother-in-law, doesn't come back for 130 years. Once each year the earth passes through this wake and the cometary sand grains immolate themselves for our pleasure from the friction generated when they hit the atmosphere at roughly Mach 266.

What's really cool is that we can expect to see 100 meteors every hour on the best night, which experts say is late Aug. 12 to dawn on Aug. 13, when the moon is new. Viewing is always better when the moon isn't lighting the night sky; same goes for city lights, so go find a dark spot. About an hour after sunset is a good time to see occasional “earthgrazer” meteors skim along the horizon in longer, more colorful streaks. When you get bored with that, go inside and watch “Night of the Triffids.”

Viewing should be pretty good on Saturday night, Aug. 11, too, and the four-billion-year coincidence is mind boggling. What are the mathematical probabilities of our planet passing through a comet's wake on a Saturday night when I'm camping in the desert with a lawn chair, a cooler of beer and a couple of friends?

Pretty high, actually.