02-December-2008, 11:12 PM
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Order of Kilopi
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 13,453
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California Literary Review: Dr. Philip Plait, The Bad Astronomer, on What If a Large Asteroid Was Heading for Earth?
Quote:
Do we know what he odds are of an asteroid hitting earth – one that is capable of doing serious damage to the planet?
Right now the chances are really low. Your personal odds of dying in an asteroid impact over your lifetime are about 1 in 700,000 – you’re just about as likely to die in an amusement park accident. And we know there are no dinosaur-killers out there liable to hit in the next few centuries at least.
[...]
How much warning would we have?
In general we’d have years of warning. An asteroid big enough to do global damage would be big enough and bright enough to spot a long time in advance. [...] And a small asteroid, one say 200 yards across (enough to take out a city but not the planet) would be tough to spot until just before it hit us… and we might never notice it before impact. We wouldn’t have any warning at all, except the flash of light in the sky as it came in.
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(Cited in BA Blog: What if a large asteroid were on its way in?)
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