Shocking study reveals an asteroid could kill you before rabies and lightning do

Scientists have figured out the odds of a person dying from an asteroid over a human lifetime. In a strange experiment, they compared it with other scenarios that can kill human beings, such as lightning strikes, carbon monoxide poisoning, a car accident, contracted disease and more. They found that a lightning bolt is more likely to kill a person if it strikes them. The more surprising revelations were about asteroids. Simulations and experiments showed that the chances of an asteroid strike killing us are more than rabies causing death. Also, the chance of an asteroid hitting Earth is way higher than a person being struck by lightning. That's odd considering a few people get killed by lightning strikes almost every year, but an asteroid strike has not occurred since the dinosaurs were killed 65 million years ago. However, there have been some other major strikes, like the one in Tunguska, Siberia, on June 30, 1908.

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The study on the probability of a person experiencing a grisly death has been published on the preprint website arXiv. The study authors had a tough task on hand when they set out to understand the likelihood of an asteroid strike and whether or not it would kill a person. For this, they gathered data on all the Near-Earth objects, making a dataset of their numbers and the risk assessment of asteroids that were found to be potentially hazardous. Asteroids that are more than 460 feet wide are categorised as those that can cause devastation in the event that they hit Earth. The frequency of impacts was calculated based on the rest of the data and compared to the number of deaths caused by the other events.

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Chances of an asteroid hitting Earth

Even though there are records of lightning strikes killing humans, and none on an asteroid doing the same, the authors say the aim of the study was "to place the probability of an NEO impact within a mental framework of events they may have some familiarity with, such as car crashes and animal attacks." Experts say that the chances of an asteroid hitting Earth are next to zero, at least for the next few hundred years. However, it can not be said with certainty that it would never happen, as some visitors are known to pose sudden threats. An asteroid caused a scare this year when scientists said that it could hit Earth in 2032. However, now Asteroid 2024 YR4 is likely to hit our Moon.

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DART asteroid mission

There is also Apophis, which many feared could hit Earth in 2029. But the chances of that happening were also later changed to zero. NASA has been preparing to tackle a rogue asteroid on a collision course with our planet. In 2022, the DART mission struck the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, part of the Didymos binary asteroid system. Later studies revealed that it changed the shape of the asteroid, triggering large amounts of debris to be released from it. We might soon even have a Dimorphos meteor shower.