I would more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Well, would Jefferson believe a non-Yankee professor? Despite the incoherent innuendo in Wikipedia, I haven't known Glenn Reynolds to lie yet! And today, the non-Yankee professor links to a report that they're revising the Torino asteroid impact scale:

The devastation potential for an asteroid is assigned a letter based on the impactor’s energy delivery. While the scale is not calibrated at this point, it will be objective, proportional to the calculated kinetic energy of the rock or snowball. Large impactors such as the K-T dinosaur killer (to prevent the A-ha! emails, I acknowledge that it’s not known whether the K-T impactor was the true “killer” of the dinosaurs, or just another nail in their coffin, but let’s not get distracted by such things for right now) are rated the highest on the scale with a “J”, while comet tail dust, falling to Earth in a constant stream, is assigned an “A”. Other well-known impacts of the past are approximated on the scale.

Islam has been at least as fascinated with stones from heaven. And they were merely following in the foosteps of their pagan predecessors:

Occhigrosso (1996) affirms the moon God association and the astronomical basis of the black stone: "Before Muhammad appeared, the Kaaba was surrounded by 360 idols, and every Arab house had its god. Arabs also believed in jinn (subtle beings), and some vague divinity with many offspring. Among the major deities of the pre-Islamic era were al-Lat ("the Goddess"), worshiped in the shape of a square stone; al-Uzzah ("the Mighty"), a goddess identified with the morning star and worshiped as a thigh-bone-shaped slab of granite between al Talf and Mecca; Manat, the goddess of destiny, worshiped as a black stone on the road between Mecca and Medina; and the moon god, Hubal, whose worship was connected with the Black Stone of the Kaaba. The stones were said to have fallen from the sun, moon, stars, and planets and to represent cosmic forces. The so-called Black Stone (actually the color of burnt umber) that Muslims revere today is the same one that their forebears had worshiped well before Muhammad and that they believed had come from the moon. (No scientific investigation has ever been performed on the stone. In 930, the stone was removed and shattered by an Iraqi sect of Qarmatians, but the pieces were later returned. The pieces, sealed in pitch and held in place by silver wire, measure about 10 inches in diameter altogether and several feet high; they are venerated today in patched-together form.)"

I'd love to know how it started. I'll bet somebody was scared by these things falling to the earth a long time ago, and (with good reason) figured they deserved respect. Actually, Muslims are not alone in their fears:

In November of 1492, a 280-pound meteorite fell in a wheat field near the village of Ensisheim, France. A young boy witnessed it and led the townspeople to a three-foot deep crater where it lay. The people thought the object to be of supernatural origin. After seeing it King Maximilian of Germany declared that it must be a sign of the wrath of God against the French who were in a war with the Holy Roman Empire at that time. Maximilian ordered the rock to be moved to the church of Ensisheim where it could sit as a reminder of God's intervention. It stayed there until the French Revolution when the secular government seized it and moved it to a national museum at Colmar. Ten years later it was returned to the church and eventually moved to the town hall in Ensisheim where it rests today. The meteorite is now less than half of its original weight, the victim of souvenir hunters and scientists who removed samples from it for study while it lay in Colmar.

I'm not knocking walking around them and praying, and I guess ignorance is just as much a human right as denial, but I think it's a much better idea to divert these potential catastrophic impacts if we can.

Or is it sinful to prevent acts of God?

MORE: While some have proposed nuking the heavenly rocks before they damage the planet, here's an account of a plan to nuke one that's been here for years.