The End of the World News

NASA is monitoring an asteroid that could collide with Earth on Valentine's Day in 2046. NASA claims it has a “1 in 400” chance of hitting Earth, and even if it did, it would be more likely to strike the ocean than a highly populated land area.

The asteroid in question, 2023 DW, registers as a 1 on the Torino scale; that is, NASA does not consider it dangerous.

2023 DW is between 1/5 of and 1/160 the mass of Dimorphos, which was successfully deflected by a NASA probe last year. Its largest dimension is 154 feet, while Dimorphos was 380 feet by 580 feet. Since NASA has shown it's able to deflect larger objects, it's considered small enough not to pose a hazard. And NASA would have about a decade to basically build a copy of the DART probe and throw it at 2023 DW.

Even if the asteroid did hit Earth, its impact would be equivalent to about 185 megatons of TNT. It would basically be like a gigantic strategic nuke aimed at a random part of the planet; humanity has already detonated nuclear weapons with about 1/3 that power. Further, the atmosphere would slow it down, so it likely wouldn't come in at a high speed.

Bottom line is I’ll probably already be dead by 2046 anyway so who cares? And even if I wasn’t dead, I’d be so old that I’d probably be cheering for an asteroid to hit me anyway. And it’s more likely to miss the Earth than hit it, and even if it did hit it’s more likely to splash into the ocean than slam into land. And even though a land strike would be pretty fucked up, it wouldn't be the literal end of the world.

All the above sounds like something the dinosaur would have said to Chicken Little just before the K/T Extinction Event.