
Or ....
.... the corridor might narrow until everything apart from the Earth is excluded!
------------> Run to the hills! Run for your lives!
The latest figures from the European Space Agency (ESA) on the trajectory of asteroid 2024 YR4 show a reduction in uncertainty around the object's orbit while the probability of impact remains low. The estimates from ESA's Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre show a marked reduction in close approach uncertainty based on …
they are not " lemon-soaked paper napkins" they are telephone handset sanitation wipes
Back in the 90's I flew across the Atlantic for the first time and spent a couple weeks at my employer's site in Bognor Regis helping get a new production process started up. As a USAian, I had read Adams and laughed about telephone sanitizers but didn't realize that was actually "a thing" [I should have known it was real]. One morning I picked up the phone, and it had a very distinctive scent. I apparently got a funny look on my face that was noticed by one of the local guys I was working with. He smiled and said "Yep, the phone sanitizers where in last night." The phone sanitizers were apparently not the same people as the normal cleaners.
I believe that the astro-boffins have calculated if it impacts the Earth, where it might land:
"The International Asteroid Warning Network put out a list of possible impact locations, which ranges from uninhabited or sparsely populated areas to densely populated areas in the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, parts of Africa, the Arabian Sea and South Asia.
North America was not among the possible impact locations."
From: https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/state/2025/02/15/asteroid-earth-2024-yr4-odds-potential-locations-2032-nasa/78627463007/#:~:text=The%20International%20Asteroid%20Warning%20Network,Arabian%20Sea%20and%20South%20Asia.
Aslo see: https://www.space.com/asteroid-2024yt4-image-feb7
The launch opportunities for a diversion mission are in 2028.
So hopefully India will save us.
the probability of impact will likely eventually decrease and reach zero
What actually happens is that the probability increases as the corridor is narrowed, because more of the possible corridor includes Earth.
Then it suddenly drops to (nearly) zero if Earth is excluded.
tl;dr is that this thing won't end civilisation (the projected explosion is comparable to thermonuclear tests the US did in the early 50s and much smaller than the largest bomb ever exploded by the Soviets) but it could still be disastrous- on the level of wiping out a major city- if it hit in the wrong place.
To go into more detail...
This thing is expected to be comparable to an 8000 kiloton nuclear bomb. While that's *massively* larger than the bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki (15 and 21 kilotons, tiny compared to almost everything that followed), and still several times larger than the largest bomb currently in the US arsenal (around 1200 kilotons), it's no larger than the Castle Bravo and Ivy Mike tests carried out in the open by the US in the 1950s. And it's still nowhere near the size of the largest bomb ever exploded, the early-60s Soviet Tsar Bomba which was a ludicrous 50,000 kilotons and broke windows almost 500 miles away.
From that point of view, then, we've had explosions of that size and larger before so, as I said, this one would be very unlikely to be civilisation ending.
On the other hand, 8000 kilotons is still massive and- according to Nukemap- if one were to hit (say) central London, it would pretty much destroy everything within a 6 to 9 mile radius and cause damage across an area the size of Greater London.
London isn't anywhere near the expected impact path, but there *are* still several major cities in South America, Africa and south-east Asia which certainly are.
" Won't end civilisation, but still has potential to be catastrophic if it hit near a major city"
That depends on who is in that city when it hits. We could do worse than figuring out what city it's going to be and then organizing a political summit there with selected invitees. Or perhaps we can make suri it hits, oh, I don't know, Washington DC, maybe?
As an air burst in the desert, sure, it's fine. But that would be very much the best case.
Isn't there a rather large risk that it'll hit the ocean, causing rather a lot of issues for anyone within range of the massive tsunami waves? And killing every fish for a thousand miles from the concussion?
Its a similar size to the Tunguska asteroid which is thought to have been up to 60m wide, though obviously could have a different composition and trajectory. That event exploded about 10 km in the air with force of up to 50 megatons. It flattened trees over a 2,000 sq km area.
So it is it an extinction event, no. Could it cause significant damage and loss of life, yet.