Learning Artifact 10

This week what surprised me the most was that catastrophic asteroid impacts aren’t that rare. An impact like the one that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago happens about every 100 million years, which in and of itself isn’t that much.

But then an impact that exceeds the power of the world’s entire nuclear arsenal happens more often than every million years, which feels quite often. The scarier things about these statistics is that “every million years” doesn’t mean “every million years, on the million years” — it could be anytime, and we wouldn’t have a great way to see an asteroid approaching Earth until it was too close to do anything about it.