Huge asteroid headed for close encounter with Earth

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Chixulub blew a hole 120 miles in diameter. Your odds of feeling the resulting blast were rather high.

[mistermack]

Chixulub blew a hole 120 miles in diameter. Your odds of feeling the resulting blast were rather high.

Yes. It's likely that that caused a major extinction. Hackenslash is talking about a major extinction event, if he says the odds are on you dying.
There have been FIVE major extinction events in the last 450 million years.
Not all can be linked to impacts. Chixulub is the only one that has good evidence.
No impact crater has been positively linked to the others. It could have been any of many causes.

But being generous, and allocating ALL of them to asteroid impacts, your odds of being alive when one hits are still less than one in a million.

If any of the unknown causes turn out to be volcanic, or environmental warming or cooling, or clathrate releases, then the odds are even more tiny.

And of course, Chixulub could have been a comet, not an asteroid.
It's highly possible NONE of the extinctions is down to an asteroid.

[Calilasseia]

At that size, it doesn't really make too much difference whether you're dealing with a comet or an asteroid. You're still dealing with something the size of Manhattan hitting the planet at very high speed. In the case of comets, you have less mass, because they're mostly made up of assorted frozen substances rather than rock, but they travel at higher speeds - as much as 70 Km s-1. Don't forget that the killer here is kinetic energy, which in an elementary analysis equals ½mv2. So even though the mass of the impacting entity may be reduced by a factor of 8 because of the difference in density between nickel-iron mixtures and assorted ices, that shortfall can be made up by the fact that increasing the speed by a factor of 3 increases the kinetic energy by a factor of 9. You're still going to end up with a lot of energy being dumped as heat into the core material, followed by hypersonic expansion of the resulting plasma, and all the other delightful effects of a bolide impact.

[JimC]

Fatalism is my refuge...

That, and gin...

[Schneibster]

Well, like I said you don't have to worry about it within any of our lifetimes. They did a survey and identified anything that was a serious threat out a thousand years or more. We could get hit by a city-smasher, but nothing larger; we'd already know it was coming. We checked. The US Air Force checked and made the data freely available for everyone through NASA. It's a security concern. They do that.

[mistermack]

Well, like I said you don't have to worry about it within any of our lifetimes. They did a survey and identified anything that was a serious threat out a thousand years or more. We could get hit by a city-smasher, but nothing larger; we'd already know it was coming. We checked. The US Air Force checked and made the data freely available for everyone through NASA. It's a security concern. They do that.

Don't be ridiculous. This isn't rocket science ! Seven billion other people affect your chances. By being part of the fucking sample set by which statistics and probabilities are measured!
A wise man told me.

[Schneibster]

Well, like I said you don't have to worry about it within any of our lifetimes. They did a survey and identified anything that was a serious threat out a thousand years or more. We could get hit by a city-smasher, but nothing larger; we'd already know it was coming. We checked. The US Air Force checked and made the data freely available for everyone through NASA. It's a security concern. They do that.

Don't be ridiculous. This isn't rocket science ! Seven billion other people affect your chances. By being part of the fucking sample set by which statistics and probabilities are measured!
A wise man told me.

You still don't understand what hack said, do you?

[mistermack]

Well, like I said you don't have to worry about it within any of our lifetimes. They did a survey and identified anything that was a serious threat out a thousand years or more. We could get hit by a city-smasher, but nothing larger; we'd already know it was coming. We checked. The US Air Force checked and made the data freely available for everyone through NASA. It's a security concern. They do that.

Don't be ridiculous. This isn't rocket science ! Seven billion other people affect your chances. By being part of the fucking sample set by which statistics and probabilities are measured!
A wise man told me.

You still don't understand what hack said, do you?

Sure do. And I pointed out that it didn't apply to the question. You didn't read.

[Schneibster]

So testicular cancer is topical on the asteroid thread?

How droll.

[mistermack]

So testicular cancer is topical on the asteroid thread?

How droll.

What the fuck's wrong with you? Devogue mentioned bollocks a couple of posts previous.
Take it up with him!

[Schneibster]

I did.

[devogue]

So testicular cancer is topical on the asteroid thread?

How droll.

Well, an asteroid would take one's mind off the old bollock rot for a while.

[Schneibster]

Sounds like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The size of the planet affects your chances of being hit, but not the number of people on it. It's not being guided, "Go hit somebody on Earth", you know. So we're not looking at a pool of 7,000,000,000 potential victims and figuring your odds of being the one chosen. We're rather looking at a football field, and you are standing on one square meter of it when a bowling ball gets dropped out of a blimp. What are the odds that the square you're standing on will be hit by the bowling ball?

[devogue]

Sounds like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop.

But with less Morgan Freeman.