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Latest Earth-Crossing Asteroid Passes by Tonight
jc42 writes "Astronomers have been looking at the first images of asteroid 2007 TU24, the 250-meter asteroid that will pass 540,000 km from the Earth at 8:33 UTC (3:30 EST) Tuesday morning. So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches. It might be sobering to consider that it was just discovered last October, and we know about maybe half of the objects like this in Earth-crossing orbits."
The Tunguska event isn't the only warning we've had; we got two more warnings within the past decade alone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitim_event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Mediterranean_Event
The first occurred in rural Russia, just like Tunguska, but the second one was in the Mediterranean, and had about the same power as the Nagasaki bomb (double Hiroshima). It could have easily struck a little to the north and hit highly populated Europe, or to the east and hit India/Pakistan, touching off a nuclear war there.
So far, we're failing the Civilization Intelligence Test in a really big way.