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have smashed into Earth before. What are the chances we'll get hit again? Armed with new defensive technologies, scientists are getting ready for the day, a decade, century from now: the Day of the Asteroid.
When these events involve our planet, the results are profound.
As detailed in the film, there are currently 175 sites throughout the globe where the remnants of asteroid impact are evident. The resulting craters date back millions of years, and produced explosions with a ferocity over 8000 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Not all of these incidents belong to the ancient past:
In the wake of such forceful impact, global chaos and mass extinction ensued.
The common scientific consensus is that
a repeat of the kind of impact that eradicated the dinosaur species
65 million years ago is highly unlikely. But Earth does lie in the
path of many smaller asteroid structures, and their collision with
our planet could spell calamity for sizable portions of our
population.
Each year, their list of possible culprits grows by
thousands, yet they have only accounted for 10% of the asteroids
within Earth's impact range.
Working in collaboration, these two entities
are collecting data and formulating plans for technologies that can
change the path of offending asteroids.
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