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Earth's Asteroid Risk Downgraded
xanthines-R-yummy writes "Relax, everyone - the risk of a gigantic asteroid colliding with Earth just got smaller! Nature reports: "A new survey revises down the likelihood of a massive asteroid hitting the Earth by 20-30%. We're only due to collide with rocks larger than one kilometre across roughly once every 600,000 years, it concludes." Whew! What a relief!"
As long as we let Bush and CO run leashless with their energy policies, the likes of Mr. Montgomery Burns (with some help from Homer, of course) will have our cities and towns covered with a nice protective layer of arial pollution that will burn up any meteorid quite nicely.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
"There was a lot of error in our previous estimates," says astronomer Alan Harris of the German space agency, DLR. "It's all because near-Earth asteroids are somewhat brighter than we thought".
lots of errors is a bad thing. what if their estimates are wrong now, and the previous estimates were right. I hope it's not the same people who made the previous calculations. And who exactly did they survey?
What a total crock of steaming bovine fecal matter - we have NO idea how often large asteroids have impacted in the past, there are any number of ways the impact craters can be hidden since most of our planet is under water, and glacials have scrubbed large areas of the land masses. And even if we had a perfect record of our past asteroid hits, that has NO bearing on future encounters. There could be a stream of ten 10-kilometer asteroids bound to hit earth in the next 100 years , put on that trajectory by some random event long ago, or there could be NO chance of a major hit for the remaining lifetime of the earth. One in a million, or 1 in 1, WE DON"T KNOW.