Asteroids have struck the Earth before.
Just ask the dinosaurs. (Wait, too soon?)
The belief is a massive comet or asteroid wiped out 75% of all life on Earth, including all of the larger reptiles. Let’s think about that for a moment. Something dinosaurs have no control over just happened to slam into our planet and eliminate them from existence. All of them. Now we don’t know if it happened all at once or if the resulting catastrophic conditions slowly decimated the next few generations until there were no more, but the end result is the same from our perspective. No T-Rex or Stegosaurus to compete with.
As humans have progressed, we’ve considered this event and extrapolated it to how humans would fare if another similarly sized rock–or larger–happened to take another shot. Would we do better than the dinosaurs, or would we too eventually die out and give another species a turn to rule the Earth?
Yeah, this is the stuff of riveting science fiction stories, but it’s also a possible future we’d be foolish not to take into consideration. The good news is, NASA is taking it seriously, and are soon to launch humanity’s first asteroid deflecting aircraft called DART, short for “Double Asteroid Redirection Test.”
This is just the beginning of a Terran defense system to protect our planet from wayward asteroids, but it’s comforting to see we’re taking this seriously. DART will actually launch itself into the approaching asteroid with the intention of deflecting it away from Earth, and as they say, a miss is as good as a mile. The odds of this event are pretty high otherwise we’d have been struck again since the dinosaurs were wiped out, but who knows when the next strike will occur. All we can say is it’s a when, not an if, that it will happen.
Hopefully, by then we’ll be ready.
Are you worried? Comment below!
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