Could A Giant Meteor Hit Earth?

Short Answer: Yes. Long Answer: Yes, but not for at least another 100 years. According to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) aka "Intruder Alert!"

As recently as two weeks ago, NASA's Intruder Alert system identified an asteroid that would swing very, very close to Earth, only 310,000 miles away, to be exact. By comparison, the moon is only 230,000 miles away. They first identified it on October 25th, and anticipated a fly-by by October 30th. A five day window is certainly not enough time to mobilize our Bruce Willises and Ben Afflecks into space to blow it up with a nuke, but luckily it didn't come to that, so there's an Aerosmith ballad we'll never get to hear. Thanks a lot, asteroid!

So far NASA has identified north of 15,000 space objects that are classified as NEOs, many of which have been determined to pose no threat to Earth, even if they pass close by. There's a lot of space math involved, involving cosmological rotation, gravitational effect on everything from the asteroid to the Milky Way, all of it, to determine the asteroids won't hit. So as of right now, we're good for a while. But given Earth's history of being used for interstellar target practice, it's not out of the realm of possibility we'll end up on the receiving end of a hail of asteroids sooner or later.

Luckily, NASA and FEMA are running drills of disaster preparedness in the event of an NEO careening toward us with no way to send a rag-tag group of oil drillers into space to stop it. The training exercises involve NASA identifying a potentially deadly impact, then reaching 100% certainty of deadly impact, and what FEMA can do to protect and save as much of humanity as possible. Basically it will be more Deep Impact than Armageddon.

But hopefully we'll still get a sweet Aerosmith ballad. Just send them into the studio to record a few, call it the "In Case of Asteroid" EP and we should be good for a few hundred years.

I guess you could consider this our official endorsement for #GiantMeteor2016. Or 2020. Or 2116.