Will the earth be destroyed..?

The short answer is : Yep. Odds are that a huge asteroid or speeding comet will slam into earth and destroy all life and perhaps the planet too. Even if that doesn't happen , our sun will swell into a big red giant star above five billion years from now. It will evaporate the oceans and end all life on Earth. Yikes!

But the long answer is more complicated - and more hopeful. Most asteroid burn up in the atmosphere without reaching the ground. But there are notable expectations. On June 30, 1908, a comet or an asteroid exploded in the air over Siberia, Russia. It flattened a forest for miles in all direction, leaving a Paul Bunyan version of a "crop circle". Plenty of people witnessed the fireball. About 50,000 years ago,  an asteroid about a football field in diameter created Meteor Crater in Arizona. The mile- wide hole dwarfs tourists who flock to see it. On average, objects as big as this hit earth roughly once in several thousand of years.

These two impacts are nothing compared to the last really big impact. To kill of species, an asteroid needs to be at least half a mile( about a kilometer) wide. These medium- sized smashers tend to visit Earth about every 300,000 years or so. They can create monster tsunamis or flatten plenty of miles of real estate.
Really big asteroids, about 6 miles (10 km) in diameter, strike roughly once every 100 million years or so, causing mass extinctions. They kick up so much dust and debris in the atmosphere that little sunlight can get through. Plants die and, soon, some animals that eat the plants die too. The space rock that many scientists think helped kill off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was probably about 10 miles (16 km) wide.

When will one of these killers hit.?
No one knows. In a minute, or not for millions of years. Meteoroids don't fall on schedule. But they do fall on the earth. Even though wind, rain, and volcanoes have worn away traces of most of the Earth's impact craters, scientists have pinpointed where they've landed. Usually, they find rocks that only a high- speed impact can create. For example, tektites form when molten rock is tossed into orbit and then solidified into glassy rock on the way down. Also, some asteroids contain an element called iridium that's rare on Earth.

The first challenge to saving Earth from a meteorite is to see it coming. Astronomers are scouring the skies for big and medium asteroids and comets that cross Earth's orbital path. Really big near- Earth's asteroids are rare, but hundreds of medium- sized ones exist. The next step is to avoid or deal with the impact..


A FINE MESS
A scientist has discovered that a killer asteroid will hit the Earth in a matter of  weeks. But no one knows exactly where. What would you do if you were in charge of preparing the world for the hit...?