All is well!
> It is now believed to be 53 to 67 meters, roughly the height of a 15-story building.
Good thing we have so much confidence in our leadership and intergovernmental cooperative relationships!
Concerned about in a "it would suck to miss this scientific opportunity" sort of way though... We've gone to great expense to crash things into asteroids much farther away from earth so we can study the impacts... I have to imagine there are many scientists who would love to see a collision between the moon and a large asteroid through the right instruments.
Seveneves was a fun book!
But the moon has handled much bigger collisions without a single fatality!
The comparison would be Orson Scott Card writing Ender's Game to set up the universe of Speaker for the Dead, but instead making Speaker for the Dead a third of its size and calling it the last few chapters of Ender's Game. They should just be different works in the same setting.
I loved them both.
For a couple of meters it works, I can imagine a 3 meter wide asteroid just fine.
But at 50 meters it becomes a distance unit for me and I can’t easily imagine an object with a 50m dimension. I’ve seen actual 15 story buildings though.
(Subway was sued that the "foot longs" were only 11-11.5 inches in length: https://www.startribune.com/subway-to-ensure-footlongs-measu...)