| There's a theory that dinosaurs were wiped out because a large meteorite hit the earth. A comet hit Jupiter not so long ago (but Jupiter's huge). So I believe there are people out there who look out for meteorites and large chunks of matter (hard to see because they don't shine), and so on, mapping their trajectories in case they are going to hit the earth. There was a scare not so long ago that that was going to happen, but it didn't. I read a book years ago that talked about inter-planetary collisions having happened in the past. So, overall, while I'm not worried (because we're a tiny dot in the universe, relatively speaking), I think we could be hit sooner than billions of years. That won't affect you or me, unless you believe in reincarnation, but I doubt there's much that could be done about it. I saw a good film a couple of years ago with Morgan Freeman as the American President faced with this. They got worldwide collaboration and chucked all the nuclear weapons they could at it, but just split it in two. Only those who climbed high mountains survived the resulting tsunamis, and civilisation had to be rebuilt. |
