Popular physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has revealed that the world could end due to a gigantic asteroid hit. Tyson, who is now the head of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, made these remarks during a podcast titled 'Cosmic Queries: Asteroids and Comets'.
"It is an intriguing and under-appreciated fact that asteroids and comets may have been the bringers of life, if not the ingredients of life, but perhaps even life itself. And yet, they can also serve as harbingers of doom for the very life that they brought to the planet," Express.co.uk quoted Tyson as saying.
This is not the first time that a top physicist is predicting the end of the world due to a killer asteroid. A few months back, Dr Iain McDonald, a top scientist at the Cardiff University's school of earth and ocean sciences, had suggested that earth will be inevitably hit by a doomsday asteroid one day or the other. According to McDonald, dreaded events like killer asteroid hits have happened in the past and such catastrophic events will occur in the future too.
"There are always rocks flying through space. Inevitably one of these will hit us and it will have pretty dramatic effects," said McDonald.
In the meantime, NASA, the United States space agency, is busy developing a planetary defence weapon to protect the earth from future asteroid hits. Using a planetary defence weapon, NASA is trying to deflect asteroids that are in the collision course towards earth.
Some space experts have also suggested that the best way of protecting the earth from asteroids is by using nuclear weapons on these space bodies. However, sceptics believe that nuking is absolutely a bad idea as earth will be covered with the debris of the shattered space bodies for many years. If it happens, the blue planet will face an apocalyptic situation as sunlight will fail to reach the earth's surface.
