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On June 30, 1908, an explosion with a force equal to 185 Hiroshima bombs went off at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometers and devastated an area of about 2,000 square kilometers around the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia. The explosion flattened 80 million trees, broke windows in a nearby town, caused injuries, and blew some people off their feet. Although there were no official reports of fatalities, rumor has it that the force of the explosion killed a reindeer herder by throwing him against a tree and it definitely killed hundreds of reindeer. The event is believed to have been caused by an asteroid entering the atmosphere and creating a fireball of up to 100 meters wide as it broke apart.

In commemoration of what came to be called the Tunguska Event, June 30th has been designated as Asteroid Day. It is meant to be a reminder that asteroids that routinely cross Earth’s orbit as they travel around the sun still exist. Some of these asteroids are big enough to create a fireball on the scale of the Tunguska Event or, worse, contribute to another mass extinction like the one believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs if they enter Earth’s atmosphere.

While stopping an asteroid on a collision course for Earth is unlikely to look anything like the movie Armegeddon, one thing it gets right is that humanity can’t afford want to wait until the last minute to throw together a cobbled-together plan with a low probability of success if scientists spot one coming our way. Humanity got lucky with the Tunguska Event mostly because it impacted a region of relatively low population. An asteroid large enough to survive a trip through Earth’s atmosphere is likely to cause the equivalent of a nuclear winter of epic proportions

Fortunately, scientists have put together a few tentative plans to divert a dangerous asteroid, as outlined in the video below.

It may be easy to say that a robust space program is a luxury, but keep events like the Tunguska Event and the possibility of a seemingly endless winter in front of your eyeballs if you ever start thinking this way. Yes, society has problems, but it is also very hard for society to have problems if everybody is dead because everybody was intent on ignoring the asteroid problem. Asteroid Day is a good day to remind the public that potentially dangerous asteroids do exist and can cause disasters ranging from the Tunguska Event to another mass-extinction level event.