We Can Survive Killer Asteroids — But It Won’t Be Easy
The chances that your tombstone will read Killed by Asteroid are about the same as theyd be for Killed in Airplane Crash.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Solar System debris rains down on Earth in vast quantities more than a hundred tons of it a day. Most of it vaporizes in our atmosphere, leaving stunning trails of light we call shooting stars. More hazardous are the billions, likely trillions, of leftover rocks comets and asteroids that wander interplanetary space in search of targets.
Most asteroids are made of rock. The rest are metal, mostly iron. Some are rubble piles gravitationally bound collections of bits and pieces. Most live between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and will never come near Earth.
But some do. Some will. More than a thousand known asteroids are classed as potentially hazardous, based on size and trajectory. Currently, it looks doable to develop an early-warning and defense system that could protect the human species from impactors larger than a kilometer wide. Smaller ones, which reflect much less light and are therefore much harder to detect at great distances, carry enough energy to incinerate entire nations, but they dont put the human species at risk of extinction.
Every few decades, on average, house-sized impactors collide with Earth. Typically they explode in the atmosphere, leaving no trace of a crater. Once in about a hundred million years, though, Earth is visited by an impactor capable of annihilating all life-forms bigger than a carry-on suitcase.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/opinion-tyson-killer-asteroids/?
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One of the smartest scientists and easiest to understand on the planet.......
Turbineguy
(37,360 posts)looking for ways to make a profit on the extinction of the human species.
Response to MindMover (Original post)
Tesha This message was self-deleted by its author.
arcane1
(38,613 posts)longship
(40,416 posts)is that they never developed a space program. Had they done that, they might have been able to divert the asteroid that hit in the Yucatan which resulted in their extinction, along with a plurality of other living things.
It was either Tyson, Phil Plait, or Seth Shstak that came up with that one. Can't recall who. But it's a good one.
But we still have the birds, direct descendants of the theropod dinosaurs. Ain't that tweet?
muriel_volestrangler
(101,345 posts)Deaths in commercial jet accidents run at around 500 a year, worldwide (http://www.boeing.com/news/techissues/pdf/statsum.pdf - 556 in 2010, 5,005 from 2001-2010, including those on the ground). That doesn't include small private planes.
At that rate, in the 100 million years between major asteroid collisions, that would be 50,000 million - 7 times the world population. So, really, the chances of dying from a whole-earth-threatening asteroid are about a 10th of dying in a place crash. But we don't have evidence for slightly less lethal asteroid impacts killing significant numbers of people either.
Here's one estimate - 91 deaths from asteroids per year, averaged out, for the world. So, under a fifth of the deaths from airplanes. Or another estimate - lifetime odds of being killed by an asteroid impact are about 1 in 700,000. 500 per year for a population of 7 billion is 1 in 14 million; over 70 years, that's 1 in 200,000 - so that would be more that 3 times as likely to die in an air crash as from an asteroid.