What are your chances?
A NASA Spaceguard census of “near-Earth objects” – asteroids with orbits that could cross ours around the sun – identifies some fair sized rocks that could conceivably hit Earth, causing global devastation.
11 February 2009
Should we be worried, wonders Duncan Miller?
Even if at present we lack the technology to do anything about it, if an asteroid larger than 1 km in diameter is whirring around out there with the potential to hit Earth, we would want to know about it. It would cause global havoc, killing billions of us. The bad news, according to Nature, is that three near-Earth asteroids about 10 km in diameter have been discovered. The good news is that these are the only ones of this size thought to exist. Nevertheless, there are hosts of smaller ones. Of the estimated total of 940 near-Earth objects with diameters of greater than 1 km, 742 have been identified. This doesn’t sound very reassuring, but what is the statistical risk, relative to other life threatening risks, that we will be hit by one?
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