Will An Asteroid Ever Hit Earth

Yes, asteroids have hit Earth over the course of its history and it'll occur again. But the possibility isn't significant in our continuances maybe 1 in 10,000 but over thousands or millions of generations, major impacts grow fairly likely. Ancient craters on Earth's surface prove that large objects have hit Earth in the history, and there is no reason to suppose this will not continue in the future. 

We’re living in what's maybe the most peaceful time in our solar system's history. It’s hard to imagine the period roughly 4 billion years ago when our world was being bombarded by huge asteroids and comets, an event scientists suppose brought water and carbon-rich materials to Earth and helped kick start life soon after. 

After this period, the solar system got calmer. Today most of what hits Earth’s atmosphere is small enough dust, boulder sized that it rapidly vaporizes in our atmosphere. But there are still asteroids and comets that have courses that pass near Earth. These are called near-Earth objects, or NEOs. The chances of large impacts from NEOs able of causing wide-ranging damage at any given time are small but they aren't zero.

The chance of an impact depends on the size of the object. The bigger the comet or asteroid, the lower the chance, since there are many more small objects out there than large ones. Tons of debris, much of it in pieces smaller than bits of sand, strike Earth's atmosphere and combust up every day. These are the "shooting stars" usually seen at night. Some larger rocks survive their fiery dive to the surface; you can see some of these "meteorites" displayed in museums.

Asteroids with a 1 km (0.62 mi) diameter strike Earth every 500,000 years on average. Large collisions with 5 km (3 mi) objects befall roughly once every twenty million years. Numerous scientists believe an extremely large asteroid (about six miles in diameter) struck Earth 65 million years ago near the present- day Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. The impact caused disastrous conditions across the entire globe, including thick clouds of dust and ash that caused global temperatures to dive, causing the extermination of the dinosaurs and the rest of life on Earth.

Unlike the dinosaurs, we can find and track dangerous NEOs and calculate the likelihood of them impacting Earth years, decades and indeed centuries before they do, giving us time to divert them. We call this trouble to save our planet from major impacts “planetary defense.” It's the reason there isn’t a need to panic about an asteroid strike. Clickbaity media headings about small asteroids flying past Earth or entering our atmosphere make the problem sound more intimidating than it is.

Still, you can rest assured that NASA and other similar space associations widely will be dispatching out press releases and issuing ongoing updates on all their channels, if and when we learn that a large asteroid will strike Earth for real. That being said, the need to plan and prepare to avoid coming asteroid strikes is right now, and we’re already lagging behind.