DOWNTOWN — Chances are slim you'd survive if an asteroid were to crash land in Chicago.
One estimate says more than 9.5 million people would probably die.
That's from a report from Insurance Quotes, which looked through NASA data about "near-Earth objects" (things that come close but don't actually hit Earth) and estimated how major cities would be affected if the near-Earth objects actually hit.
An 1,805-foot-wide near-Earth object would kill an estimated 9.5 million people and have a fireball radius of 10.10 miles, according to the report. People as far away as Detroit or St. Louis could get skin burns, and buildings would be demolished in a 31-mile radius around the impact.
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NASA is expecting some near-Earth objects to swing by soon, with 31 coming by Earth in the next week. The biggest of those asteroids has a diameter of 1,312 to 2,953 feet and it's whizzing by Earth at 50,219.22 miles per hour, according to NASA.
That one's expected to miss us by 15,867,334 miles — and most are much smaller, for the worriers out there.
Previous impacts have killed the dinosaurs and forever changed the Earth's climate (that one hit in Mexico) and knocked down 80 million trees and destroyed 800 square miles of forest.
Luckily, according to Insurance Quotes, "the average person has little to worry about from falling space objects."
Comforting thought.
