These are the asteroids to worry about

this video was sponsored by kiwiko more about them at the end of the show on february 15 2013 over chelyabinsk russia an asteroid heavier than the eiffel tower slammed into the atmosphere and then 30 kilometers above the ground it exploded this violent event was brighter than the sun but so high up that it was silent for a full 90 seconds after the blast which only made the devastation worse so you see all these videos of people looking look at what was that they see the smoke trail in the sky oh that's amazing and then you know just when you think nothing's gonna happen the shock wave hits it blows out the windows thousand people got glass in their face in their eyes because they're looking through the windows the shockwave damaged thousands of buildings and injured 1500 people what makes the chelyabinsk incident kind of embarrassing is that the very same day scientists had predicted that an asteroid would make a close flyby of earth and they were right 16 hours after chelyabinsk a similar sized asteroid known as duende came within 27 000 kilometers of earth's surface that's closer than satellites in geosynchronous orbit but while they correctly predicted this close approach they completely missed the unrelated asteroid that exploded over russia and the truth is this happens all the time we're really not that good at detecting asteroids before they hit us since 1988 over 1200 asteroids bigger than a meter have collided with the earth and of those we detected only five before they hit never with more than a day of warning with all our technology and all the telescopes across the earth not to mention the ones in space why do we struggle to detect dangerous asteroids before they strike what are the chances that a big asteroid will hit wiping out most if not all life on earth and if we saw one coming what could we do about it [Music] asteroids are the leftover debris from when our solar system formed four and a half billion years ago rocks and dust clumped together into molten protoplanets inside heavy elements metals like iron nickel and iridium sank into the core leaving lighter silicate minerals on the surface some of these protoplanets grew into the planets we know today but many more collided with each other breaking into pieces these ...