75,000 miles.
Another asteroid near-miss.
This happens 2 or 3 times a year. It has fit itself into a nook and cranny of our culture's psyche. An asteroid comes by an astoromical whisker yet a human tonnage from hitting the Earth. The astronomers who spotted it either spotted it just as it was coming by or many months ago, and knew its import. In either case, they told nobody until weeks after it happened. No sense in causing an unnecessary panic over something potentially deadly that nobody has any control over.
In some small fringe sectors of society, it fuels the desire for a "Star Wars" missile defense system. In others, it reinforces the belief that a bureacratic government acts as the goliath police state that it is for no other reason than to compensate for their very real impotence in the realm of security and control. Collision with religious fervor for the apocalypse, and the paranoia runs deep... 'cause buried and bubbling from this psyche is the tale of the Extinction of the Dinosaurs -- the idea of the Rise and Fall of Mighty Bemoath Empires. In the same vein as the thought of the fall of the USA is akin to the fall of Rome, we have the Fall of the Dinosaurs (anthromorphized into a culture) and the Fall of the Humans.
To me the real story is the length of space as measured, by necessity, through comparisons, and their relationship with the world of probabilities. If there's a .002% chance that the next asteroid that looks to fall within the hair-breadth of roughly 75,000 miles will edge out of the margin of error and collide with Earth -- that's a .02% chance.
Which, some would say, is a massive chance. But we're living on the edge anyway. We've the same little / massive room for error in our daily lives... yet just enough so as to not particularly notice. Perhaps we can later contemplate what could have been had the margin of error been impeded on -- but in the meantime it's hardly worth thinking about.
Dangerous tides happen. We adjust. Looking into the religious faith systems, none ever move on forth to the very last survivor's demise. We get to where conditions of life are miserable, and than the continual demise is left open to conjecture.
Maybe we win... as if there were such a thing. When the entire roof falls off, we settle into the rubble and make it a part of us and our culture.