Seven Years To Impact?

 

By Miss Kubelik

Got plans for Christmas in 2032? Maybe, but maybe not. As it turns out, there's an asteroid called YR4 that has a 1.3 percent chance of hitting Earth during the holiday season that year.

Whoops — no, we take that back. The European Space Agency, just a week after the previous estimate, has almost doubled the odds of a strike, to 2.2 percent. "The probability of the asteroid hitting Earth will either increase to 100 percent, drop to zero percent, or increase for a while, then reduce to zero as more measurements come in," a representative from the ESA Planetary Defence Office said.

Eek.

It's easy to be of two minds about this. One, the Trumpsters are way too incompetent to plan for the possibility of When Worlds Collide. Two, considering the horrors of first two weeks of Donald Redux, an asteroid might sound like an attractive alternative. Better to go out with a bang than to watch the slow strangulation of democracy or have the planet die a lingering death from climate change, right?

Let's all hope that Trump hasn't frozen the budgets of the government professionals who are supposed to keep an eye on such things. Meanwhile, we have a question: Why is it that Hollywood movies always have asteroids destroy wonderful places like Paris? If YR4 does hit, we vote for Moscow. We cats PURR.