SoylentNews

Anonymous Coward writes:

As major disasters go, asteroid impacts are one of the few, which are theoretically preventable, provided we had enough advance notice. Some schemes call for merely painting the asteroid white, and relying on radiation pressure from the sun, to change its' orbit enough to miss us.

Step zero, is to see the asteroid first, so I was thrilled to see, some recent progress on this front.

"Based on the geologic record and what we know about the NEO (near earth orbit) population, the probability of a catastrophic event is quite low. A Tunguska-scale event might occur once every few centuries. Impactors as large as the 10-km-diameter object that finished off the dinosaurs very rarely collide with Earth, just once every 100 million years or so.

But of course, these are just average rates. The next asteroid with the potential to level a city might not hit Earth for hundreds of years; it could also arrive tomorrow. The only thing we can say with certainty is that there will be more collisions in our future."