A large asteroid recently flew close to Earth

Re:A large asteroid recently flew close to Earth by tvmalsv on Monday January 09, 2017 @06:59PM (#13361192)

The space.com article mentions "The good news is that the vast majority of the behemoths — the ones capable of causing damage on a global scale if they were to hit Earth — have been discovered", so they think a small minority are still undiscovered.

Of course, that's the problem with not knowing what we don't know. If there are any undiscovered, then we really don't know what percentage we know about. The fields of statistics and probabilities can probably prove me wrong, but I'm used to that.

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Re:A large asteroid recently flew close to Earth by jessriedel on Monday January 09, 2017 @10:20PM (#13362284)

> The space.com article mentions "The good news is that the vast majority of the behemoths — the ones capable of causing damage on a global scale if they were to hit Earth — have been discovered", so they think a small minority are still undiscovered.

Note that this is if they were to hit Earth. However, the vast majority of objects that size cannot intercept Earth from their current orbit. Please provide data if you have it, but my understanding is that it's considered extremely unlikely for there to be an Earth-crossing asteroid of sufficient size (> 1 km or so).

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