ON Sunday, July 11, Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin commercial empire, took a ride on a suborbital spaceplane built by one of his companies, Virgin Galactic. The global news media, using completely inappropriate superlatives such as 'historic' and 'record-breaking' has subsequently spent every day since cramming the story down everyone's throats, and I suspect most people are tired of it. I know I am.

Nevertheless, Richard Branson and his little 'spaceship' are an interesting case study in why the world probably deserves an extinction-level meteor impact, and so, the topic is worth a little more examination.