A 'Planet Killer' Asteroid the Size of Everest is Making its Closest Approach to Earth in 125 Years

All About Space Magazine. Getty Images.

I don't know if it's just my imagination. Or whether we simply have too much information now. But it seems to me that we get more dire warnings of impending doom now than at any time in my life. And the latest one, sort of, is just days away:

Source - A giant 'planet killer' asteroid is set to make a 'very close' approach to Earth, which can trigger a dramatic climate change should it impact our planet.

The space rock, 2011 UL21, is about the size of Mount Everest, making it one of the biggest 'potentially hazardous asteroids' to pass our planet in 125 years.

2011 UL21 is scheduled to come within four million miles of Earth on June 27, its closest approach in 110 years - the asteroid orbits the sun approximately every 1,130 days.

But skygazers may be able to spot the space rock with a decent telescope, specifically on June 28 and 29 when it will be its brightest. 

'This asteroid is larger than 99 percent of all known near-Earth objects,' the European Space Agency shared in an announcement.

For starters, as I've mentioned before any time the solar system throws us some inside heat to move us off the plate, I object in the strongest possible terms to measuring these celestial objects in terms of Everest or any other terrestrial object. As the world has known ever since Armageddon and Deep Impact were released at the same time in 1998, killer space rocks are only meant to be measured by how many Texases they are:

That said, it's a little bittersweet to report this particular Himalayan boulder isn't coming any closer than 17 times the distance of us to the moon. First, because the 27th just happens to be the night of the Presidential debate, which would've been a nice wake up call for all of us if the Almighty chose to give us some real chin music with this thing. And a fitting end to our species if, in His divine wisdom, He chose to drill us in the old skull bucket. 

After all, this is a world where we've built nukes, put them in the hands of madmen, allowed Influencers to exist, and created child beauty pageants. At this point, would it really be such a loss if the universe gave us the ultimate Ctrl+Alt+Delete? Or restored us to our factory setting the way it did when the dinosaurs were running the planet into the ground? Mammals have had our chance. And it was a heck of a nice run for a while there. But it would be the height of arrogance to assume that, say, insects or fish or whomever wouldn't do better if a huge, cosmic mass extinction finally came zizzing our way and declared it Game Over. 

But on a positive note, since this is just going to be a near miss in the grand scheme of things, at least we'll get to see how House of the Dragon turns out. To watch Drake Maye and Jerod Mayo restore the Patriots to their former glory. And find out of the Celtics can go back-to-back for the first time since the Bill Russell Era. So it's not like we're totally irredeemable. 

Just know that if the worst should happen, the calculations were wrong, or the scientists lied to us because there was no chance of shooting a ragtag group of oil well drillers up into space to blast this thing into gravel, I died as I lived. Not contributing anything to humanity except stupid blogs. So let God's will be done.