We Could Be Hit By Five Building-sized Asteroids By The End Of The Century - So What Are We Going To Do About It?
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It’s amazing how much one movie can act as a cultural touchpoint for an entire topic - even a topic as serious as defense of a planet. Popular media consistently use the 1998 movie Armageddon as a reference when talking about how we would destroy a civilization-ending asteroid. That’s despite the movie’s glaring scientific flaws, not the last of which is the likely size of the rogue comet that threatens the Earth. Planetary defense researchers at MIT were recently interviewed by the university’s
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We Could Be Hit By Five Building-sized Asteroids By The End Of The Century - So What Are We Going To Do About It? By Andy Tomaswick - March 30, 2026 11:56 AM UTC | Planetary Science It’s amazing how much one movie can act as a cultural touchpoint for an entire topic - even a topic as serious as defense of a planet. Popular media consistently use the 1998 movie Armageddon as a reference when talking about how we would destroy a civilization-ending asteroid. That’s despite the movie’s glaring scientific flaws, not the last of which is the likely size of the rogue comet that threatens the Earth. Planetary defense researchers at MIT were recently interviewed by the university’s media department as part of their “3 Questions” series. One of the most important takeaways is that the size of any likely planetary impactor in our lifetime is going to be much smaller than the kilometer-sized behemoth that did in Bruce Willis’ character. These smaller objects, known as decameter-scale asteroids because they typically have a diameter of 10s of meters, aren’t the civilization-destroying kind—those are typically kilometer scale and above. But they are much more common. The MIT researchers believe they impact the Earth-Moon system roughly every couple of decades, compared to the once in ten million years a larger impactor would hit us. To be clear, these decameter sized objects are bigger than the ones that have been causing a significant amount of fireballs over US cities. For example, the one that burst over my home city of Cleveland a few weeks ago, which was loud enough to shake houses in the area, was only around 2 meters in diameter. One recent example of an asteroid in this size is 2024 YR4, which was discovered a little more than a year ago, and comes in at between 53 and 67 meters - roughly the size of a 15 story building. According to the MIT researchers, this class of objects isn’t likely to cause human casualties. However, if they strike a populated area, they certainly...
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