Is Earth on a collision path with a major asteroid?
March 2, 2007 Even if you think the only life in the universe is on Earth, we’re still not alone. In addition to the other planets and moons in our solar system, there are countless tons of space dust, millions of meteors, asteroids, comets and various types and sizes of debris (including the trash we’ve left up there ourselves) flying around at incredible speeds and in all sorts of orbits. Earth gets hit by stuff every day — it just doesn’t show up on the common man’s radar because the impact isn’t newsworthy. Space dust doesn’t hurt us. Most large asteroids that hit Earth are the size of a basketball by the time they make it through the burning conditions of Earth’s atmosphere, and those hit about once a week. It’s pretty much just the astronomers that notice. It would take something massive — space-terms massive — to make the rest of us notice. And the last time the rest of us really noticed was in 1908, when an asteroid about the size of a football field exploded in Earth’s atmo
