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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, the asteroids that could smite us in an "end of dinosaurs" event are very rare. Most of them have been cleared out of their orbits by either Earth or other planets billions of years ago.

It is still worthwhile to watch the sky for them, but the risk per year seems to be lower than any man-made disaster I can think of.

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Hm. When thinking about how pock marked earth is, I'm not so certain. Also space is dynamic. As I understand it, we only have a vague understanding of what happens in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hills_cloud & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud and how the trajectories of objects therrin could be perturbed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet s and the movements of our nearest solar neighbours which probably have similar 'clouds' of objects around them.

And it wouldn't need to be as big as Dino-Ex, either.

Imagine what would happen if something like this impacted or air-bursted with the population density and fragile logistic dependencies of today:

https://phys.org/news/2008-03-cuneiform-clay-tablet.html

Also in that region, just a few thousand years earlier:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60867-w

Suspected as a possible cause for the onset of the Younger Dryas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_struct...

Sort for age, look at diameter of crater in kilometers for the first dozen youngest and think about what that would do for any contemporary agglomeration.

I'm also concerned about asteroids that are not big enough to wipe out the dinosaurs, but big enough to kill a few million people. Those are a lot harder to detect.

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