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    An asteroid discovered days ago will narrowly miss Earth
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    An asteroid discovered days ago will narrowly miss Earth

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    31 Comments

    2. TheOriginalBroCone on

      Why are redditors so weird about wanting people to die from asteroid strikes? 

    4. Da_Spooky_Ghost on

      School bus sized asteroid, so would not have ended the world to the dismay of Redditor’s comments here.

      Missed us by 57,000 miles, sounds like a lot but that’s 1/4 the distance the moon is from Earth.

    7. butcher99 on

      A meteor about 20 metres across exploded over Russia at ~30 km altitude
      Released energy equivalent to about 30 Hiroshima bombs
      The shockwave blew out windows across a wide area, injuring around 1,500 people — mostly from flying glass
      No crater, nothing hit the ground

      So not completely harmless

    8. Substantial_Milk8170 on

      The fact that we only discovered it ‘days ago’ is way more terrifying than the actual near-miss.

    9. orangelity on

      Am I to understand that our entire planet’s radar capabilities to provide us with radar information on these types of objects were dependent on only one telescope (which collapsed 6 years ago) and one antenna (which is currently down for extended maintenance)?

    11. RandomPantsAppear on

      Getting hit by an asteroid feels like it would fit right in with the 2020s itinerary. 

    13. Bikewer on

      Many years ago, during the height of the Cold War, Arthur C. Clarke cautioned that an asteroid impact on or near a large city might be interpreted as a nuclear strike and precipitate WWIII.
      At the time, both the US and the USSR were on a “launch on detection” status and Clarke figured there would simply not be time to analyze the impact.

      I believe our observation capabilities are more advanced now, but it’s still worrisome.

    17. NetFu on

      Makes you wonder how many times this has happened in the past and we never even noticed.

    19. MyNameIsCaulfield on

      “An object at least 10 times bigger than 2026JH2, called Apophis, will pass much closer to Earth, at a projected 32,000 kilometers (19,883 miles), on April 13, 2029”

      Yikes?

    21. Kflynn1337 on

      Not enough to destroy the Earth, but if that hit it’d be enough to wipe out a fair chunk of a city.

      Pretty good argument for NASA funding new telescopes.

    23. Dense-Muffin-3809 on

      It’s quite funny and to think that we are truly one asteroid away to be completely destroyed. Millions of years , and we still remain pretty lucky.

    24. Thin-Discipline1673 on

      Well Ebola it is then. Couldn’t have a quick death, oh no gotta have blood spurting out all my orifices. Fuckin hell!

    25. AlwaysUpvotesScience on

      I think “narrowly” is used appropriately here. 56,913 miles is nothing.

    26. Jebediah_Johnson on

      That’s 7.2 earths away. That’s close as fuck in astronomical terms.

    27. Remcin on

      My biggest takeaway from these stories is that we still have no real control over our planetary fate. If the universal dice roll against us, we’re not going to stop it. Best we can do is a Greenland (2020) situation and hope some of us ride it out in a hole somewhere.

    28. Rynowash on

      I feel like an asteroid to the chin would be a perfect upgrade from the current state of things. Send it.

    29. DopBopDeeBeep on

      The Chelyabinsk meteor over Russia was ~20 meters, bit bigger than this, and it still didn’t reach the ground intact.

    30. noots-to-you on

      I’m calmed by the idea that we may all be killed by an asteroid with like an hour of warning.