Expect a major impact on your asteroid in your life

"We have to make sure people understand that it's not Hollywood or movies," he said. "It's ultimately about protecting the only planet we know today to house life, it's the planet Earth."

Bridenstine acknowledged that a large asteroid colliding with the Earth was encountering some kind of "laughter factor," a false sense of security brought on by countless Hollywood movies that may have made us unresponsive to the carnage that would cause. But you do not have to look far to see the type of damage caused by an asteroid collision.

In 2013, a 20-meter meteor (65 feet) exploded above the city of Chelyabinsk. Traveling at more than 18 kilometers per second (11 miles per second), the meteor exploded about 23 kilometers from the Earth's surface, according to NASA. But he still has major ravages. The meteor would have damaged thousands of buildings and sent over 1,500 people to the hospital – most of the debris caused by the shockwave.

"These events are not uncommon. they occur, "noted Bridenstine. And according to one model, we should expect a similar collision every 60 years.

The 20th century was marked by three of these impacts: one in Tunguska (Russia) in 1908 and another in Brazil in 1930. The Tunguska event covered more than 2,000 square kilometers, but did not not made human victims.

But NASA is working on a fix. Currently, the agency's ambitious goal is to track 90% of asteroids 140 meters and more, an asteroid large enough to eliminate a small country. And while meteors lose a significant part of their mass by entering our atmosphere, it should be noted that the rock responsible for the 2013 Russian event was only 20 meters, one-seventh the size of those tracked by NASA.

Maybe Elon Musk and SpaceX can help. NASA recently announced that it had a contract with SpaceX, paying $ 69 million to the company to help solve the problem. In its first joint mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection (DART) test, SpaceX will send a rocket on a collision course with an object near the Earth, an asteroid in this case.

If successful, the rocket will remove the object from the Earth.

It should also be noted that NASA does not seem to know what to think of it. His predictions are incredibly incoherent, his reaction propulsion lab seems to have an opposite view to Bridenstine's:

NASA does not know any asteroid or comet currently colliding with the Earth. The probability of a major collision is therefore very low. In fact, as far as we can judge, no large object will likely hit Earth at one time or another in the next few centuries.

Many of these stories are usually minor warnings that ring the alarm for members of the press who do not understand them in the same way as astronomers. Asteroid 1999 RQ36, for example, hit the headlines after its models showed it could hit 21,822 people. However, NASA says it is still too early to make such predictions about the orbital trajectory of an asteroid.

So, maybe we are waiting for this sequel to Armageddon, just for the moment?

However, if you are really worried about a cataclysmic event, you can check out NASA's "Sentry: Earth's Impact Monitoring" web page to see which of the known asteroids have the highest probability of collision with the Earth. Earth.

Or if you really want to go down into the rabbit hole, here's a training exercise that lets you take a look behind the curtain to find out how NASA would observe and respond to an imminent collision, based on hypothetical simulations. .

If you want to know more about how technology solves some of humanity's most serious problems, check out the Future Generations track at the TNW conference.