By ,
Published May 10, 2017
Now, you probably didn't even know it, but this sort of thing happens a lot.
Astronomers say we're pretty lucky.
A lot of stuff out there just us, sitting like one big fat round target here.
Here's the thing about this beast, though. We only recently discovered it.
NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is essentially a sky-mapping telescope, only detected this asteroid on April 23rd.
And this one was pretty big, about the size of a football field traveling at 31,000 miles per hour. Something that size traveling that fast could do a lot of damage if it were to actually hit us.
HQ124, as it's formally known, was at least 10 times bigger than the asteroid that shook buildings and injured a thousand people last year in Siberia.
Some suspect a series of asteroids, or maybe one really big one, wiped out the dinosaurs.
Who knows.
This much, I know.
We're lucky with this stuff.
But I suspect we won't always be lucky with this stuff.
That's because there's lots of stuff out there. And only one of us on Earth right here.
Yet since this is where we live, we don't think about much else. So we argue and debate over issues that in the great cosmic scheme of things that matter little, especially if we bump into some other matter.
Then forget about climate change. Think permanent change.
So maybe it's a good thing we're too busy to look up.
It's so much easier than worrying about just blowing up.
https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/cavuto-asteroid-came-pretty-close-to-getting-beastly