We should probably get ready for this (Picture: Shutterstock)

We’re sorry to spoil your weekend, but Earth is overdue a massive asteroid strike and ‘there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it’.

The jolly outlook has come from a Nasa scientist, who warned that humans don’t have a defence for an ‘extinction level event’.

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Dr Joseph Nuth explained that such disasters tend to take place about 50 to 60 million years apart, according to The Guardian.

And it’s a bit of a concern because the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite 66 million years ago.


Dr Nuth said: ‘The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment.

‘We’re due’, apparently (Picture: Shutterstock)

‘The extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially.



‘You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.’

Thankfully, humongous, species-eradicating space debris is extremely rare.

But we had ‘close encounters’ in 1996 and 2014 – in the latter case, the comet was only discovered 22 months before, which is not enough time to launch a deflection mission.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, because we have the technology to deflect an Earth-bound meteor in an Armageddon scenario.

Scientist Dr Cathy Plesko said this could be fone via a nuclear warhead or a ‘kinetic impactor, which is basically a giant cannonball’.