Close shave on horizon

HUMANITY is set to experience an incredibly close encounter with a 4.8km-wide asteroid today.

Asteroid 1981 ET3, also known as Florence, will zoom by about seven million kilometres away, only 18 times the distance between the Earth and moon.

It hasn’t been this close to Earth since 1890 and the planet will have to wait until 2500 for an equally intimate encounter.

“While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence, all of those were estimated to be smaller,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies.

“Florence is the largest asteroid to pass by our planet this close since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began.”

Luckily for the citizens of the planet, Florence will speed past without incident, but if she did smash into us one day, it would be game over.

Any space rock that is wider than 0.9 kilometres could extinguish life as we know it, according to the calculations by scientists.

NASA does not believe any big rocks are on a collision course with Earth right now.

But humanity can not rest easy just yet because there are several other apocalypse risks on the horizon.

One scientist said we have 20 years to avert a mass extinction that could wipe out our species while another expert believes there is a big chance we will kill ourselves off by the end of the year.

If we somehow manage to survive without being enslaved by killer robots in the future there’s an even bigger problem looming in the very distant future — in about five billion years, the sun will swell to 100 times its size and burn Earth to a crisp. But don’t worry, humanity probably won’t be around to see this grim fate.

By then, Earth may have been “plundered, conquered and colonised” by “marauding” aliens. And, after all this, our home galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with the galaxy Andromeda.

Then, in a very, very long time, the universe will fizzle out into eternal darkness to end up a barren, dark and empty void.