By now you've probably heard the news on NT7, the infamous asteroid that may hit Earth just shy of Groundhog Day 2019. So what's the real story on NT7? Basically, it's just another celestial mountain in a chaotic clockwork dance with our fair planet. Can we do anything about it? You bet we can...

Learn to play the banjo. Take peppermint Rye-Kee Shee-At-Zoo relaxation therapy and oodles of Ag-nasial I&I-drop suppliments, eat no kind of frozen portion, and floss. Good planets are real hard to find, so enjoy the one you got while it's here. Call your ma. Do an anonymous kindness for your better half, another for a total stranger. Having all the best toys is useless when they all spontaneously combust from a global Wormwood shockwave. You should be diggin' it while it's happenin'

One thing you will just have to get used to is hearing news of a possible collision; we have only started funding the projects to look for these things since Hollywood took an interest with Armageddon, and we have only just recently turned on a bunch of new toys to do automated sky surveys. There are also some new (and very clever) amateur projects co-ordinating multiple telescopes to detect these criters, one of which plans to network dozens of ground based machines around the world. You may remember a few years back the 2028 doomsday story -- consider them good ghost stories, then go back to work.

I've seen data that shows 1200 rocks (TV-set sized and smaller) crashing into the Ottawa skies every single night, and that's just the background noise. Plots of that data show us passing through hundreds of 'tubes' of debris, each indicative of some other larger something out there, only a small handful of which have been discovered. This is without even considering the one's headed this way out of the Oort for their First Big Trip.

2000 years ago, one of them the size of a parking lot just ever so slightly grazed us and left a scars 400km long in the side of Argentina before it scooted out into space. First nations people would have been there then, and it seriously ruined their day. Orbital elements tell us that our modern technology would have perhaps given us 90-min advance warning.

The near-miss earlier this month wasn't seen until it was already past us; we can't detect rocks on their trip behind the Sun, and when they come out slingshot to relativistic speeds, well, it's just too darn late to do much of anything about it. On the inbound trip, even at their max full-moon angle, these things are most often magnitude 16 or way worse, which is many magnitudes fainter than what you see in the deepest dark-skies; no one thought to paint them shiny and white. They day before it "hits" my software says NT7 will be magnitude 14 -- it's easier to see the space station.

What's worse, the Sun is not a smooth hard spheric marble, it's a twisted gelatinous hunk o' hunk o' burnin' love, so the precise warp curve of space right near it's backside is (ahem) somewhat problematic to compute precisely. It's also spewing considerable plasma flux in all directions, and then there's all these other big gelatinous roaming globs (Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune) and some significant roaming rubble (us), and damn it, they are all spinning too, and most of them have a magnetosphere!

Shit. Forget it.

Like, just live your life like there's no tomorrow, ok? Don't bank on being able to redeem yourself later. Yeah, sure, Osama could whack you with some nail-coated fuel-air bombs, heck a mis-informed TopGun could do it too, but the Good Lord could do it too, with pure, clean and galactically EnviroFriendly kinetic energy, and He don't stand in line for no Airport Security Check. Hell, fire and brimstone are classically given in the reverse order; best to be on the impact side of the planet.

Learn to stop worrying and love the Rock. Besides, the rats and cockroaches will survive, and they already know how to kickstart evolution right back into Enrons, WorldComs and Calcuttas. They even have all our wiring and plumbing diagrams and half of our socks.

Are we going to get hit? Yup.

When? Every 65 million years and, oh my lord, will you look at the time!

Where/what/when? Space is pretty big. Take the largest thing you can imagine, double it, and add 10%: That is just the local pancake region between us and the Sun. There's the whole rest of the disk of the ecliptic and, which is where the NT7 observation came from, it has only recently occurred to the meteor hunters to "look up" (or down); almost the first shot looking out of the ecliptic disk, and hoo-whee there's this big sucker on an "11 tries for a dollar" close encounter of the smack-em-good kind.

This is what I love about astrophysics: we have theories as good as anyone else (way better than psychology), and we debate and argue and expound and conference and bellow and blurt about them, but every time we turn on some new kind of robot sensor device to actually look at Reality, well she slaps us right in the face and says in her best Mae West "Guess again, boys" -- no other science gets that chance (ok, maybe some do) and there is nothing, nothing more worthless than last semester's astronomy text.