Bill Nye, the popular American science communicator, also known as the 'Science Guy' has revealed that the possibilities of a dreaded asteroid hit that wiped out dinosaurs are not confined to the past.
Bill Nye made these comments while talking at the International Academy of Astronautics'2019 Planetary Defense Conference in College Park, Maryland on May 2, 2019.
"The Earth is going to get hit with another big asteroid. The problem is, we don't know when. It's a very low probability in anyone's lifetime, but it's a very high-consequence event. If it happens, it would be like control-alt-delete for everything," said Nye during the conference, Space.com reports.
Nye also revealed that humans can do something to combat the devastation that could happen in the earth during the time of an asteroid hit. As per Nye, the first step to protect the planet is by finding dangerous space rocks that might be lurking in the solar system. Interestingly, NASA, the United States space agency has already discovered more than 90 per cent of potentially dangerous asteroids, and fortunately, none of them can be considered real civilization enders.
However, Nye believes that there could be numerous undiscovered space rocks on earth, and some of them might be capable of bringing chaos on the planet. Nye also urged space agencies to develop better detection tools to spot dangerous asteroids.
In the meantime, NASA is now busy developing a planetary defense weapon to protect the earth from an asteroid hit in the future.
A few months back, Iain McDonald, a scientist at the Cardiff University's school of earth and ocean sciences had revealed that earth will be inevitably hit by a doomsday asteroid one day or the other. The scientist made this revelation while talking on the BBC's Today program. As per McDonald, catastrophic events like asteroid hits have happened in the past, and it will continue in the future too.
