Quote from: OgNasty on March 11, 2020, 10:28:29 PM

Quote from: odolvlobo on March 11, 2020, 07:40:07 PM

Quote from: OgNasty on March 11, 2020, 07:43:57 AM

While everyone is busy buying toilet paper and masks to hide from the flu, why is nobody talking about NASAs warning of a potential extinction level event?

because:

Quote

During its approach, it will be ... roughly 4 million miles from the planets center.

That's 16 times the distance to the moon.

A fair point. I'm still far more afraid of this asteroid than the Coronavirus, but perhaps that is because I'm not elderly and don't have a compromised immune system so it literally cannot cause me any harm outside of my IRA. I guess my follow-up question would be, how close would scientists have to estimate an end of the world threat in order for people to discuss it and how certain are you that their models take into account all of the anomalies in space that could cause unforeseen changes in an asteroid's flight path?

I would be more worried about coronavirus. You are much more likely to die from that than from any asteroid impact, even if you are young and in good health.

The paths of asteroids can be predicted very accurately. There aren't many "anomalies" in space that would affect their orbits. It's the ones that we don't know about that will kill us.