Reminder: You Could Be Annihilated by an Asteroid at Any Point

While indulging in my favorite hourly actively—scrolling through the ‘net and reading some kickass headlines—I stumbled upon a recent BuzzFeed article titled, “A ‘Sneaky’ Asteroid Narrowly Missed Earth This Summer. Internal Emails Show How NASA Scientists Totally Missed It.” One of my co-workers shared it with the group, too, and it became a short conversation about how cool it is that we all almost died again. And guess what? We (not the royal we, here, but literally all beings on Earth, or at least, one major city’s worth of people meat) totally almost died again. And the worst part is, scientists didn’t even freakin’ know about it to evacuate the area! Let this be a reminder to you: your life is trivial and meaningless, so do whatever you want. You could be dead right now after getting crushed by a massive space rock. The end is nigh; let’s fucking party.

According to the article, a “football-field-sized asteroid, dubbed ‘2019 OK,’” zoomed “just 40,400 miles over Earth, the largest space rock to come so close in a century” in July of this year. If that means mostly nothing to you as it does to me, here’s another sentence: “The flyby came five times closer to Earth than the distance to the moon—a close shave by astronomical standards.” It could’ve “created localized devastation to an area roughly 50 miles across.” That’s a lot of land. Land you could’ve been on. And then been completely annihilated on.

Bleak, right? Sucks, huh? Let’s all go eat some ice cream and trade our Juuls for analog cigarettes again, it’s time to do what makes us happy before the sun hurtles into us next, or something.