NASA says 'City killer' asteroid now has 3.1% chance of hitting Earth
france24.com
france24.com
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_scale ("A rating of 0 means the hazard is equivalent to the background hazard (defined as the average risk posed by objects of the same size or larger over the years until the date of the potential impact).")
I wonder when can we have a good estimation? Like 95% confidence on a radius of 1,000kms.
Call it the You Probably Want To Move app.
And a pay version so I don't have to see pop-up Realtor ads.
We know at what point it will intersect Earth’s orbit to a high degree. We don’t know what time it will do so. If it passes by sooner or later than the critical window, it will miss. If it passes by while Earth is in the way, the location will be determined by Earth’s rotation and exact position in orbit.
That last part is the uncertain bit.
Much of it is sparsely populated, but the Mumbai conurbation is 23 million. Much humans.
Some other odds:
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
People don't worry about this statistic enough. That's huge.
Still, I like space funding. I think given 4 or 5 years and a butt load of cash a mitigation scheme can be developed. The spin offs would be tremendous. The potential impact locations could be better placed though.
I'm not saying bring it on but ...
Interesting war gaming
I strongly doubt that Iran's military capability can be destroyed by a single untargeted 8 megatonne airburst.
China's _obviously_ cannot.
The absolute worst case here is it goes off directly over a city (though, naturally, this is extremely unlikely, most of the world's surface not being covered in city). It's not a country-ending thing.
We know where it may hit within a relatively narrow band. But we don't know where within that band. Because the Earth and the asteroid are moving so fast, we need to have the timing precise to minutes or less to have an idea of where it will hit (if at all).
The more interesting question in pertinent scenario is whether countries will prevent asteroid deflection if it increases chance of randomly shifting impact to them by some %. I surmise no one will do anything to save someone elses ass, only their own, i.e. US saving India's ass but fragments end up over PRC and kills someone... congrats, just started WW3. Countries powerful enough to deflect, will risk fallout to avoid impact on itself... since weak suffer what they must.
I guess we'll see if Sticks are still a thing we can fight with for WW4, but stones was definitely a solid prediction.
Maybe not this one, but blowing up a planet-killer would be a terrible idea. And given the political climate, you and I both know exactly which party would ignore the data and do it anyway for the spectacle.
Gently towing it out of danger gravitationally is for a lot of scenarios the best solution, but it’s boring and if it works the political opposition can just claim it was never going to hit anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_prediction#Imp...
We should compute that probability.
Wonder how big the tsunami would be?
https://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2025/02/04/asteroid-2024...
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/18/2304478/-Update-o...
But with enough repeats over time, it eventually becomes inevitable.
Up until the earth is outside that zone and the chance drops to zero. So expect the "percentage chance" to keep rising until they have enough to data to rule it out entirely.
Why can't astronomy be a more exact science? Well, how much are you willing to contribute to launching more space telescopes for this? And is the budget for NASA currently increasing or not? ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43090862 )
Only if your definition of negligible is <= 3.1%. In many context, those are unacceptable odds.
Your comment reminds me of: https://bash-org-archive.com/?2999
It's more than half the probability of getting a critical in D&D, which is something that happens all the time.
If during a particular day you judge that you have a 3.1% chance of running into another car due to winter weather and no winter tyres, you leave the car home that day.
We also must consider that the likelihood for this specific event has been increasing, no one says this is as high as it goes.
As the measurement of the asteroid's position and velocity becomes more accurate, it's going to increase (still possible with smaller error bars on the measurement) or be set to zero.
3.1/100 sounds negligible at first, doesn't it? But now think about if every 3 words per 100 in a book were misspelt.
Think about how much more critical this would be in safety situations. What about 3 of every 100 cars getting in an accident on the nearest interstate highway by your home? Surely in one day that would be a historical amount in any major metro. It would be national news.
I don't think you understand statistics.
This seems like it's more of a data anomaly then a real chance. I'm personally not worried because what is worrying gonna do. If this thing is really on a collision course with Earth and will strike and wipe us all out then I guess that's how we all go out. I'm honestly curious though if something like this is a "city killer" or a "world killer".
Definitely not a world killer, right?
And 90% of the planet is sparsely populated.
From what I've read it's estimated at 8MT or so. A large nuke.
> This is not the dinosaur killer. This is not the planet killer. This is at most dangerous for a city
8 megatonnes sounds like a lot, but it's smaller than many actual nuclear weapons, and unlike nuclear weapons, asteroid airbursts are rarely ideally located over cities.
Smaller-scale events in the tens of kiloton (ie ~Hiroshima) range happen quite regularly, without anyone really noticing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_air_burst#Events