The answer is yes?but not for about a hundred years: on
May 4, 2102 to be exact, when the asteroid known as 2004
VD17 is scheduled to come close to earth. By then, NASA
may be able to fight it off by firing a spacecraft into it to
deflect it from crashing into the earth. Despite the fact that
an asteroid impact wiped out an entire species (the
dinosaurs) around 65 million years ago, the odds are that
something else, like
global
warming, will get us first.
Small asteroids hit the Earth every few hundred years, but
their effects can be deadly, as happened in the case of the
dinosaurs. An asteroid that hit Siberia in 1908 had the force
of 1,000 atomic bombs. The area it hit was unpopulated.
The leading causes of death in the US are heart disease,
cancer, stroke, respiratory diseases and accidents. Disasters
like tsunamis are so rare, they are statistically negligible.
Asteroid impacts aren?t even on the list, probably because no
one would be around to compile the data after one hit.
Art credit: ESA
It kind of makes you wonder what happened
before the
pharaohs. Speaking of "before" and "after," what was your
day like before you discovered unknowncountry.com??A lot
duller, we suspect.
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