> With this in mind, we can view our future with some certainty. Something big is going to smash into us, sooner or later, and probably sooner.
I started reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan a week ago and he discusses the Tunguska event for several pages. It's an amazing book that I wish I had studied long ago. Had I not read that book, this statement would have instilled an impending sense of doom into me, which does nothing but demoralize me. Now that I've read that book, I can now tell with certainty that this prophecy is utter crap. As this article mentions, the asteroids are being tracked, so, we most likely will know it before hand.
> Before you freak out, there's no chance that the asteroid is going to smash into us. The space agency is still determining its exact trajectory, but at the closest estimate, it'll be 18,000 km (11,000 miles) away as it passes us by - which would make it easily viewable with the help of a telescope. To put that into perspective, that's roughly one-twentieth the distance from Earth to the Moon. Alternatively, the asteroid could travel further afield, and pass us at a distance of around 14 million km (9 million miles).
> The reason for the big difference in these two estimates is that NASA only discovered this asteroid three years ago - hence the very-catchy name, asteroid 2013 TX68 - and haven't had much time to observe it just yet.