NASA Predicts Asteroid With Force of 22 Atomic Bombs May Hit

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https://www.ndtv.com/science/nasa-predicts-asteroid-with-force-of-22-atomic-bombs-might-hit-earth-in-4449174

It could hit Earth by the year 2182?

The current inhabitants of the planet will be dead by then.

its says a "one in 2700 chance".

And we pretty much already have the capability to combine space travel with nuclear weaponry to deal with it (deflect it away from the earth, or pulverize it, or whatever).

A hundred and fifty years from now we should be better at that (if we havent done ourselves in by that time).

You know how it is with some people; a 0.04% chance means "Absolute Certainty" to them, especially when there is no way for anyone alive today to know whether or not the asteroid actually hits Earth, so the doomsayers can sit back and smugly declare death and destruction for the entire human species without ever having to suffer the embarrassment of being proven wrong.

2182 is only 159 years away. With advancements in medical technology, there is a possibility that some people alive now will still be alive in 159 years...

I hope you are also not one to conflate "possibility" with "certainty".

IF humanity survives the next few decades, medical science MIGHT double its average lifespan.

I'm not expecting it to happen in our lifetimes anyway, if it ever happens at all.

It's not a certainty, but I do recall reading that someone born recently is likely to be the first to live to hundreds of years old. Something like that. Could be wishful thinking sci-fi stuff still, but it does make sense that with the Possibility of being able to grow replacement organs from stem cells and all that jazz that someone with deep enough pockets could keep techno-regenerating their worn out bits and live on.

Then there's the far out there nerd stuff like maybe some nerd figures out how to read every bit of binary in DNA and finds the 0's & 1's that shortens telomeres and flips it off, potentially resulting in cells that can divide forever without ageing or dying.

Then there are the far out types that believe we're meant to merge with machine and live on like that.

And other possibilities. I'd bet $1 that someone alive today is still alive via medical technology 159 years from now.

But yeah, it's gonna be rough thanks to e v e r y t h i n g we collectively f****d up with the Earth's natural resources. Whoopsiedoodle..

My guess as to the odds(most likely to least likely) as to events alluded to in the thread so far.

1) We humans strip mining the asteroid and totally dismantling to get its mineral resources. And then later lamenting that we..."didnt conserve our near earth asteroids when we had the chance" and forgetting all about the fact that we were once afraid of the thing.

2) It does indeed start heading our way, but we nuke it first (pulverize it, or send it careening into the sun, and away from us).

3) It heads our way and we fail to deflect or destroy it and it does hit earth and kills much of posterity but not anyone alive today.

4) That significant numbers of folks alive today will still be alive then.

The last is the least likely.

Human lifespan has pretty much topped out in the usual sense. Better nutrition health hygene allow us to near or surpass a 100 but not much can be done to go beyond that...unless things get weird. Some rich billionaire might go the cyborg route, and might use transplanted human or robot body parts or both to keep going to two hundred plus. But even if that becomes feasible only a few egocentric Elon Musk types, dictators, and Arab sheiks, will be able to afford to do that.

And even if you could do that...constantly replace body parts...you would become like "the ship of Theseus". After a while you wouldnt be you anymore.

NASA has already succeeded in doing a dry run of deflecting an asteroid with a nuke. Were toddlers in space and we are already proving proficient at deflecting asteroids. A century from now we should be really good at it.

And our rapacious civilization's need for industrial resources may force us into asteroid mining sooner than we think. The asteroids we fear now may be turned into consumer goods that fill our landfills tomorrow.