An asteroid the size of the Empire State Building has a slight chance of hitting Earth. You’ll long be dead before that has any chance of happening. At a news conference on Wednesday, NASA scientists said there was a 1-in-1,750 chance that an asteroid named Bennu, which is a bit wider than the Empire State Building is tall, could collide with Earth between now and 2300. That is actually slightly higher than an earlier estimate of 1 in 2,700 over a shorter period, between now and 2200. “It’s not a significant change,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and lead author of a paper published in the journal Icarus.

Source: New York Times August 11, 2021 21:00 UTC