Could an Asteroid Hit Earth in 2032? What Science Actually Says

Good morning, everybody. This is David Vicknair along with my co-host and law partner Brad Scott. And this is Overruled, the podcast brought to you by the Scott Vicknair Law firm. Thank you all for being with us this morning. It’s a great morning in New Orleans and Brad, how are you doing?

I’m doing pretty good. How about yourself? We’re right in the middle of Mardi Gras, so if we can get past this, we’ve survived the Super Bowl. It’s all easy after that, they say.

Yeah, we’ve, definitely excited about Mardi Gras weekend this weekend and the same weekend as we’re shooting this with Endemia and everything coming up. On the flip side, I am ready to be done with the king cake reviews and the king cakes showing up in the office. Invest money and time into this trainer and then the pain I suffered this morning in the gym from 6 to 7. And I feel like I throw it a lot of weight with the piece of Hyde-O Bakery king cake I just ate on my stop.

Well, it’ll be good that King Cake season’s over with. I can restart my 15th diet for the year. It’s a problem. I’ve, self-admitted, I stopped at the kitchen on the way to the podcast studio before shooting this to have that piece of king cake. It’s a mission. Miles is looking at me right now with disdain.

We’re going to burn a lot of calories in this episode talking about the end of the world. So it’s, it’s good that you carbed up. Are you ready? Because we’re all gonna die. There is an asteroid, which, NASA. NASA has. We’re talking about asteroids and depth today, and destruction of the world. And NASA, if you didn’t catch this week ago, which Brad, I think you did. I don’t know if our listeners did. That I, I read a headline and I was like, holy crap. NASA was estimating then 2030 to, I think December of 2032. Is that right? That an asteroid had a three… Which is our election year, by the way.

There we go. Could you even imagine who we are candidates will be in 2032? But, NASA estimated that in December of 2032, there was a 3.1% chance of an asteroid hitting Earth, which they claimed was not enough to end civilization, but would just destroy a major city. Which was very, very self-assuring and a sewage all of my concerns of my immediate death and seven years from now. And but also told us that they don’t believe it’s going to hit North America, Europe, Asia, that it was going to be limited to South America or Africa. And they gave us a list of the eight or nine cities they were projecting that it would destroy.

And what are your thoughts?

Well, first off, we’re dealing with, you know, people in our world today, can’t predict the weather tomorrow, much less next week or where a hurricane’s going to hit. But, you know, I have this amount of confidence them that they can predict an asteroid strike in 2032. And if you’ve been watching the news and kind of keeping up with it, it went like from 1.5% up to like, think of a high like 3.1% and I think that the latest number I saw now, it’s like.0004%. So it’s all over the board. You know, clearly as this thing gets closer, there’ll be more data, they’ll figure these things out. But, you know, it’s not coming here more than likely. But there’s this chance and a great, you know, a good, good story to put out in the media and for us to be talking about it today. You know, what would happen if in seven years we were facing an asteroid strike with the Earth? To give some people some facts about it that maybe they hadn’t seen. They actually named the asteroid. It’s asteroid 2024 YR4. It was discovered in December, a couple months ago as we’re filming this. It’s, 38,000 miles per hour. It’s traveling, which is pretty fast. It’s about the size of a football field. And, comparing that to the, Chicxulub impactor. This is the one that took out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. It’s way smaller than that. So if, if there was an impact, first, you look at the Earth, which is mostly water. And then most of the land on Earth is uninhabited. They’re projecting this size asteroid, at this speed, would probably leave about a one-mile crater. It would do some localized damage, but this is not an end of the world type of event where it’s going to end civilization.

Well, the question, I guess, is not being an astronomer, being a lawyer. Is if it does hit in water, like what, what are the effects of obviously there’s going to be a tsunami from that event, right?

To know where it’s at. Yeah. But they’ll have any impact on land or what not. But you would assume as it gets closer, they’ll be able to predict where it’s going to hit. And then they can take, you know, people can be evacuated and things like that. If this was to happen with the current, 0.0004% chance.

Well, the interesting thing about the variations and percentages and chances. I actually pulled up the most recent article I could find before I walked in here. And it said that NASA had just rerated it to.00017%. And the European Space Agency, did you know that even existed? I didn’t know there was a European Space Agency.

I didn’t know, but it’s interesting to know.

I just asked Miles before we started if, Miles, you knew there was a European Space Agency? He’s like, no. So, you know, you learn something new every day. They have it estimated at.002% and apparently the variation and both NASA and the ESA, I’m going to call it the ESA modeling, is that they use different models, which leads to different percentages. Surprise, American Europe don’t agree on something. And a way to do certain things. And the first thing that jumps to mind is all the crap that we allow ourselves to put in our food products, but Europe refuses to allow. Well, first thing that jumps out to me is the confidence we have even like during hurricane season with the spaghetti models. Seems like the spaghetti models for asteroids now. Also, the European models are different than the American models. Like we can’t ever agree on a model. The possibility to put it in real numbers as of this morning that I looked up, was one in 59,000 possibility of impact, which is a 99.9983% that it will zip past Earth in seven years and not hit us. Was what NASA was saying as of today. However, like you said last week, NASA was saying there was a 3.1% chance of hitting. The ESA was saying 2.8% and so I feel like this is a moving target that we’re going to be watching this asteroid for the next seven years and determining.

It’s moving and we’re the target. So it’s very confident in this. Feeling really great about that 38,000 mile an hour asteroid, the size of a football field, barreling towards us. And also, just to add to that point, right. Now, you know, things that are like less than 1% NASA usually doesn’t even pay attention to it. And apparently there’s like thousands of things with less than 1% chance of colliding with Earth that are floating out there. So right now, although it was a news story, currently, it’s just like any other floating object out there that may be on a crash course with Earth. Well, I saw and I didn’t even know this in researching this, Brad, there was another, asteroid, meteorite, whatever this is called. A big freaking rock barreling at us. All right? Apophis was another one that they had recently discovered and was considered very dangerous. That one is apparently, they have determined definitively, according to NASA, not going to impact Earth. But it is going to come close enough that they could actually get close-up photos in 2029 of it, with spacecraft. So, hopefully, they’re right about that. But here’s my favorite. Reading the article this morning about all these percentages and chances of this 2032 asteroid, asteroid, that you said it is named. Unlike, this is the most complicated name ever. 2024 YR4. And we’re back on that one. Couldn’t they just call it like Bob? What is this deal? Like, jeez.

We should have that system like we do for hurricanes. Give them real names.

Yeah, like give it a name since it’s easier to just identify it. And I’m like, reading out code, Morse code numbers over here to try to identify this darn thing. So, the bottom of the article, talking about the change, which you said, you had a different number of research than this. Than I found one today. And then a week ago, it was like drastically different. They were literally giving cities that were going to be destroyed in freaking Brazil last week. If it hit. That the bottom of the last paragraph, I love this. It said, NASA says the current, I can’t even get it out without laughing. NASA says the current unknowns about asteroid 2024 YR4 or both its size and its orbit speed. And I’m like, well, those would be two pretty good things to actually know before you tell us that it’s going to hit seven or eight specific cities, potentially. Those are the only things that will. It seems the math just a little bit. Now there’s I’m like, okay, so I read all this information and you’ve had me thinking about like, us becoming the dinosaurs in seven years. But now you’re like, oh, don’t worry about it. It’s not going to hit you. But oh, by the way, the only thing we’re very uncertain about is the size and the orbit speed. Oh, great.

Well, another interesting thing that came across that I remember from 2022, NASA had a mission called the DART mission. Double asteroid redirection test. And essentially what they did was they had these two asteroids that were orbiting each other. And they flew a spaceship towards it and basically crashed it into it, and was able to nudge the asteroid and change its trajectory. So, we do have the Armageddon technology from Hollywood to move these things, potentially if we need to. But then the question becomes, if we nudge it, where does it go? If we nudge it, do we redirect it to some other place on Earth? You know, what happens with this? Who has this power, who makes these decisions on how to control this thing and where you send it? And then, you know, unintended consequences. You send it off into space somewhere else and it crashes into something else that puts 15 asteroids heading towards us. You know, you’re really playing with some really big pieces here. You know, in a celestial standpoint. So, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with them crashing things into things and space and moving things around that we shouldn’t be messing with.

I think the first thing we need to worry about is make sure that we identify and locate the number one national treasure, which is Bruce Willis. Make sure he’s not smoking. Make sure he’s not drinking. We need to extend his life expectancy because we need him to be alive if we do have to crash and blow up an asteroid. We got to get Billy Bob back from Landman too, so we can put him in charge of that, as he was in Armageddon. And then you had other, I mean, Hollywood’s been fascinated with asteroids hitting the Earth forever. Other big movies, Deep Impact. That was with Robert Deval. I think he was the astronaut and Morgan Freeman was either the president or the director of NASA on that one. And then one of my least favorite movies of all time was Don’t Look Up with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, which, you know, was contemplating an end of the world situation with an asteroid strike as well.

Miles, I think you want to talk about that, don’t you?

So Brad, all time, all-time least favorite movie. That’s a big Stephen.

Absolute waste of three hours of my time to watch that movie.

Okay. Well, I will say one thing. Yeah. You haven’t seen very many movies. And two, you got to just give it one more chance. The writing is actually pretty good. First time I watched it, I’m relating to you. I did not love it. But the second time the writing, now if you need to watch a movie two times to get the meaning, we can have that conversation later. But it is pretty good.

I don’t think it can convince me to watch it a second time. I think Miles saying I’m relating to you is like his Gen Z way of calling you a boomer.

I’ll take it.

In the DART. In the DART mission that you were researching. So like that’s what I kept thinking about is like, we’re in 2025 now, right? Like, I’m assuming it is happening, but like shouldn’t we have the technology in place now to where, like I hate to say it, like cliché again, I was joking, but maybe we would have Bruce Willis be the actual person on the spaceship that goes. But shouldn’t we have that technology now, right? That like we have a spaceship. Or first watch when was on that craft, do you know if it was manned or unmanned? Like I’m assuming it was.

Basically launched it and it took like a about a year. They just sent it out into space. There was a navigation on it. I don’t recall if they had something that kind of exploded or if it just crashed into it to move it. But it’s just like a satellite basically that they sent out there.

Gotcha. I do appreciate the fact that the people at NASA took the time to come up with the acronym DART. And find a way, you know, you throw in a dart at a target. I love the creativity there.

Well, I gotta just think if we, if we are tracking these things to try to like prepare if an asteroid is going to hit us, which is probably going to happen again, let’s be honest. It’s just a matter of time. It happened 66 million years ago, it happened. So it’s going to happen again. Yeah. Wouldn’t we, for civilization purposes, like perpetuating civilization, want to have a spacecraft or a technology that could go and like in the movie, like blow up the asteroid or hit it to where it goes somewhere else. I can’t believe we don’t have that yet. So, I actually have an answer.

Okay, hold on. Let’s go. So, Brad, I actually have a little bit of an answer. So I was at a wedding the other day and I have a good buddy who I haven’t seen in a while. He works for Blue Origin in Seattle, or Washington State. And we were talking about this. And he goes, I mean, we are trying. It’s so, so if he was saying, they have like a 99.4% accurate. If you send something up there, that means it would miss it by 20 miles. So it’s really, really hard. And that’s another thing, Brad brought up earlier, too. He brought up my friend that if you spread all these around, you have now it’s just up to God, right? You have no idea where these rocks are going. It could it could hit, satellites up there. I mean, the whole out, like outer space is just junk. It’s just old junk. So those are my two answers to that because I actually talked about it.

That’s a good point. I really didn’t think about. I mean, think about how difficult it is to hit an object like that moving, if it is 38,000 miles an hour and earth moving, basically. It’s quite an undertaking. Yeah. But they successfully at least did it once. We know we can check the box that they were able to hit something out there. Hopefully they’re working on this and coming up with other solutions in case there’s something bigger and badder. And we don’t have two weeks like in the movie Armageddon to train the crack staff of oil rig drillers to go out there and blow it up for us. I mean, they were all very good at their jobs, if we’re going to be honest. And entertaining as well. We just lost so many of them. And I don’t know who’s drilling the oil in West, East Texas anymore. So many of them, you know, lost their lives, but, you know, that is what it is. I guess. Any other comments or thoughts that you have, Brad, on the impending doom of Earth and asteroids hitting us?

What I don’t think it’s happening, obviously. But I think it’s a good, a good reset for people because if this was happening in seven years, and we had a clock that we were racing and we couldn’t do anything about it. You know, how would you, what would you do in your life? What would you be doing differently? And if, if you were, going to be doing something differently, why aren’t you doing those things now? Yeah. So, you know, everybody kind of lives under this assumption that we have this deferred life. We’re going to work and do everything we have to do now. And then someday in the future, we’ll get to enjoy all the fruits of our labor. But sometimes those days don’t come. So it’s a good kind of wake up call to kind of reassess things in your life and, you know, use the time that you have in case it’s limited.

Great point. Couldn’t agree more. Hopefully we don’t get hit by a rock. That’s my thoughts.

Strap in. It’ll be fun. I mean, 2025 is been a banger so far. I mean, we, we just keep taking punches, left after, right. I mean, what’s next?

I think we’ve had some good things happen too, though. So I’m not. Eternal optimism in me. It’s been an interesting discussion. I personally think we’re going to have to continue to watch this because I think the fluctuation in this over the next seven years is going to go up and down as the rock gets closer to us. And it’ll be interesting if it does pass close enough to like anything with all this stuff right. NASA, the ESA, they’re learning more and more as they get more advanced tracking systems and learn from this. Everything’s a learning opportunity. Well, if we have to do a trial run on something, let’s do it on a small one like this. You know, it’s an awareness issue and let’s fix our systems if we don’t. See what happens. Let’s learn from it. Small one if it is small because as we know, the two uncertainties are size and speed. Direction, size, speed, location.

I’m like, those are the two most important things. All right. Thank you all for being with us today. And talking about the asteroid, that may hit us in 2032. And if that’s the case, we will be shooting the last episode of Overruled.

Well, come on, coming in. In the end of, end of December, 2032. Thank you all for being with us once again. Brad has been an interesting discussion. Miles, thanks for giving us some of that information. And I’m also hoping that both Blue Origin and, SpaceX contribute to this effort. Now that we have private space companies too, along with the government. And other governmental space companies. This has been an interesting discussion and episode of the Overruled podcast, brought to you by the Scott Vicknair Law firm. Thank you all for listening and being with us today. We will see you next time.

Y’all take care.

Scott Vicknair, injury attorneys. We fight for the win.

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