Space Sciences Huge Asteroid to Narrowly Miss Earth Today

This morning more than a thousand people in Russia were injured, two seriously, when thousands of windows were smashed from the shock wave when a meteor exploded in the sky near the city Chelyabinsk just east of the Ural mountains, on the border between Europe and Asia. This coincides with the asteroid expected to pass near the Earth tonight.

More on e.g. BBC:
Meteor strike injures hundreds in central Russia

To put a positive spin on this, maybe it will alert leaders around the world that we have more serious problems that we need to solve together rather than our many earthly squabbles.
 
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Reactions: Tom L.
The meteor footage was freaky to watch!:eek: It's the end of the world, the Mayans must have got the date slightly wrong.
 
wikipedia said that this coming in one(DA14) could have destroyed a city, if it had come in close enough, and over a city.
It is estimated that, if it were to impact Earth, it would enter the atmosphere at a speed of 12.7 km/s, would have a kinetic energy equivalent to 3.5 megatons of TNT,[4] and would produce an air burst with the equivalent of 2.9 megatons of TNT[14] at an altitude of roughly 8.5 kilometers (28,000 ft).[14] The Tunguska event has been estimated at 3−20 megatons.[15] Asteroids of approximately 50 meters in diameter are expected to impact Earth once every 1200 years or so.[16] Such an impact could be a city-killer, as asteroids larger than 35 meters across can pose a threat to a town or city.[17]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_DA14#Risks
 
Indian Summer said:
This morning more than a thousand people in Russia were injured, two seriously, when thousands of windows were smashed from the shock wave when a meteor exploded in the sky near the city Chelyabinsk just east of the Ural mountains, on the border between Europe and Asia. This coincides with the asteroid expected to pass near the Earth tonight.

To put a positive spin on this, maybe it will alert leaders around the world that we have more serious problems that we need to solve together rather than our many earthly squabbles.
Click to expand...
(bold emphasis mine) Hopefully! I heard on the radio that some were wondering if anything else we didn't see would come close at the same time as that football-field-sized asteroid. At least two more big fireballs were seen over other areas of the world- Asia and western Canada, if I remember correctly. Those big meteors and the asteroid can't be a coincidence...

I've also been thinking about the sun... how it sporadically fires off unusually intense bursts of energy that can cause an electromagnetic pulse (about once every 70 years). These were barely noticed back when the most sophisticated electronics we had were telegraph lines getting fried, but a serious spike in solar activity these days would take down the power grid over a large area. There are ways to protect a grid from an EMP caused by either the Sun or a high-altitude nuclear weapon, but most areas haven't done this. I'm not normally a doom-and-gloom kind of guy, but it would appear to be only a matter of time (with the sun, anyway).

"GOOD-ness GRAC-ious... GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!"
 
The whole Russian meteor thing was a plot, you guys.

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I heard on the radio last night that the Russian meteor was very bright, and this caused people to go to their windows to see what was going on. That was how so many people were injured by glass, which was a shame, but had the meteor exploded closer to the ground it would have been FAR worse. There would have been deaths, not emergency-room visits.
 
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