Striking photos of human scars on Earth

The earth photos of the space on the cover page of the parade magazine are truly eye-catching. But such images are very powerful, but we can not ignore the key insights that colleagues like Keltner, Haidt, Piff etc provide.

The nearest asteroid observed on the Earth is obviously small - the danger of hitting the Earth with an asteroid less than 10 meters - 100 meters is devastating. We know that the impact of such asteroids (Tunguska and above) is relatively common and happens somewhere on the earth every few hundred years. Attacks on the ocean and uninhabited land (such as the majority of Russia and Canada) have little effect on humans, but the destructive power of this effect can not be denied. Thousands of years ago the city was only a small part of the surface of the earth, but almost all asteroids were guaranteed to occur in almost uninhabited areas. Today, urban areas account for over 3% of the earth's land. In other words, about 1 impact of 100 asteroids on our planet will attack the city. If the asteroid is about 100 meters or more, its effect will be disastrous.

As an enthusiastic fan of paleontologists and disaster enthusiasts, I sometimes spend time thinking about the possibility of the earth experiencing massive large-scale planetary attacks in my life. Generally, an asteroid with a diameter of 10 kilometers (about 6 mi) collides with the earth once every 500 to 100 million years. The last attack of this size was the result of extinction of non-bird dinosaurs that occurred about 66 million years ago. In theory, this puts us in a golden window that predicts extinction level extinction, but that does not mean that it will not appear only to keep the schedule.