Asteroid watch!

An asteroid worth 3 trillion pounds is passing by the Earth today at around a million miles away! Conspiracy theorists are quick at work saying that it will hit the Earth, which probably won’t happen, unless the rumors I heard about some company sending a spacecraft to mine it is true, and something utterly wrong happens and the asteroid is careened into a trajectory that marks impeding doom for us down here! I personally wouldn’t worry more about this than incompetent politicians making rash decisions quickly.

Update: Yeah asteroid miners are looking to mine the asteroid, but not in the near future. Something about not having enough technical know-how. So, we are not doomed after all. With the amount of conspiracy theories out there, I wouldn’t be surprised if impeding doom has been predicted more than a billion times before, and that’s the lowest number I can think of.

Nonetheless, the asteroid is less than a kilometer in size. Even such asteroids have the capability to do tremendous amounts of damage on the surface of the Earth, and that’s excluding the place it hits. An asteroid collision spews out tons of debris into the Earth’s atmosphere, triggering conditions for a nuclear winter. A nuclear winter is basically the drastic fall in temperatures, because the sun has been blocked by some thick layer of gases.

So, even though we won’t die because of this asteroid, there’s always a chance an undiscovered monster might be on a collision course with our beloved planet in the not-so-distant near future.