ANOTHER DEVASTATING Chelyabinsk METEOR STRIKE ‘7x as likely’ as thought
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/06/chelyabinsksized_meteors_impacts_seven_times_more_common_than_first_thought/
I think that we (as a species) have been very lucky over the last few thousand years. Just a few large volcanoes (not ‘huge’, merely ‘large’), no massive tsunamis (the one in Japan a couple of years ago and the one in the Indian Ocean back in ’04 are nowhere close to ‘massive’) and essentially no significant asteroid/comet impacts. The Tunguska event is the largest we have had in known history (which only goes back a few thousand years) and we got really lucky it hit in the middle of nowhere. (Detroit, for instance, is around 300 square kilometers, the Tunguska event devastated 2,150 square kilometers, or 7 Detroits.) One of these days (no way to predict, for the most part) we are going to get a very major ‘normal’ event such as a meteor/comet impact that hits a populous area and the results will make the quarter million dead/missing from the Indian Ocean tsunami look like an average day of highway deaths.
It could be happening as I type this, or it could be 10’s of thousands of years in the future. One thing is totally clear, these sorts of events are totally inevitable and we have been fairly lucky up to this point, 7 times luckier, it seems, than we earlier thought.
