Sept. 2 — Astronomers reported Tuesday that a kilometer-wide asteroid could hit Earth in 2014 — but don’t panic just yet: The chances of a catastrophic collision are currently about 1 in a million, and the risk is likely to drop to zero as more observations are made.


Source: www.msn.com


Will this asteroid really hit Earth?!?! Oh man! Now I'm really worried right now.

I hope this asteroid misses, I don't wanna die to some asteroid!

p.s. sorry if I'm sounding like a coward but, this is unbelievable!

If it's the one I read about then it's a 'small' one. A few yards across. Should only get about 40-60% of life forms, and mostly if you live near a coast. Nothing to worry about.

http://smilies.sofrayt.com/%5E/a0/biggrintongue.gif

Good thing I live in Minnesota then (Moving to Michigan later)!

Relax, death rules, it's like eternal rest, and heck, if I want to do something, it's resting :D

oh come on it's 11 years... we'll just have to party a bit harder until the end...

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What is the problem? Return of the King will be out on DVD by then also all of the Star Wars series. So what is the problem? Do you want to live forever? Also Michigan is a bad idea. It will bring you closer the the great lakes and if the astroid hits an ocean it will raise the water levels which will cause the great lakes to flood also. The big problem is if it hits land. Nuclear winter as on Narn could be a bad thing. But we will just have to wait and sea.

Granamere

That's very true, but waking up the next morning is also high on my priority list. :D

rather than worrying about a known asteroid that only has a one in a million chance to hit us in eleven years, you should worry about some two thousand 'global killers' (kilometer and more in diameter) out there that we know absolutely nothing about (only about two hundred such bodies have so far been identified and their orbits analyzed). as many asteroid hunters would warn, there's currently a good chance that we would only notice an impacting body as it was rushing through our atmosphere, gradually becoming brighter and brighter, dwarfing even the sun moments before it wiped out most life on the planet. those that died immediately upon impact would probably be considered lucky...

[ 09-02-2003, 04:57 PM: Message edited by: frudi_x ]

The thing is, the predicted orbit of anything we havent been observing for months is not a line, its a cone, with the extremeties of the cone describing orbits given by the data we have with the maximum amount of error applied. Earth is in the cone for this asteroid, therefore it is possible given the data we have that it could strike us.

As we observe it for longer, we can get more accurate information, the cone gets narrower, and in all probability the rock wont end up coming closer than a few million kilometers.

Did you know that an all-absorbing black hole is normally no bigger than a tennis-ball and that it probably warps everything to another part of the galaxy?