In what first appears like a rather morbid game of “which would you rather?”, researchers have released a new study that games out how likely the average person is to die should one of various mishaps like car crashes, carbon monoxide poisoning, and lightning strikes, occur—or because a giant asteroid destroys the Earth.
The probability of a planet-annihilating asteroid crashing into Earth is low, but it’s not zero. In fact, Earth had a recent close call when a newly discovered asteroid was calculated to have a 1-in-63 chance of impacting our planet in 2032. Thankfully, scientists later revised the chances of that happening to nearly zero, but nonetheless, asteroid 2024 YR4 reminded us how vulnerable we really are.
In the new study, researchers set out to calculate just how likely it is that an asteroid could hit Earth during the average human lifetime, and the chances that the impact would kill us, and then compared that to the odds of other potentially fatal things happening to people during their lifetime, and how likely they are to meet their end.
In a surprising finding, the researchers found that if an asteroid impact occurs, it is more likely to kill you than if you contracted rabies, according to the study, which was published on the preprint website arXiv. They also found that the chance of an asteroid hitting the Earth is more likely than the chance of a person being struck by lightning, but if you are struck by lightning, it is far more likely to be fatal.
Calculating the odds of an asteroid impact is tricky. In order to come up with an estimate, the researchers analyzed data on the population of Near-Earth objects, as well as previous risk assessments of potentially hazardous asteroids and other space rocks that are more than 460 feet (140 meters) wide. They then calculated the frequency of impacts by these objects, and compared that to data about other grisly ways to die and the chances of these happening to an average human during their lifetime.
Of course, no human has ever died from an asteroid impact hitting Earth, whereas 13 people died from lightning in 2024 in the U.S. alone. But still, the study “places an event that would affect the planet (NEO impact) in context with potentially deadly events that can befall individuals,” the researchers wrote. “This serves the purpose of allowing experts and non-experts to place the probability of an NEO impact within a mental framework of events they may have some familiarity with, such as car crashes and animal attack.”
NASA is already planning for such an apocalyptic eventually: In 2022, the agency smacked a spacecraft into an asteroid in a test designed to see if we could deflect any hazardous space rocks heading our way. Known as the DART mission, it was a success, and a follow-up satellite is currently on its way to rendezvous with the same asteroid in order to study the impact up-close.
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