It wouldn’t be 2020 if there wasn’t some absurd, potentially apocalyptic news to deliver. And as it turns out, there is. It’s actually now been confirmed by NASA that there’s an asteroid headed in the Earth’s direction – and it has a possibility of hitting us the day before the election.
The asteroid is named 2018VP1, and was actually discovered at Palomar Observatory in California in 2018. It seems that the asteroid might just have the possibility of hitting us on November 2, one day before the United States’ presidential election is due to begin. What perfect timing, and with the way this year gone so far, I’m sure we all would expect nothing less. Here’s what NASA’s announcement also included, as reported by CNN:
“Asteroid 2018VP1 is very small, approximately 6.5 feet, and poses no threat to Earth. If it were to enter our planet’s atmosphere, it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size,” NASA said in a statement. “NASA has been directed by Congress to discover 90% of the near-Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters (459 feet) in size and reports on asteroids of any size.”
With that said, the asteroid only has a 0.41% chance of hitting us, and NASA insists the asteroid probably won’t have a deep impact “based on 21 observations spanning 12.968 days.” At least the percentage is incredibly low, albeit anticlimactic. But let’s be honest, who would want to see a high number reported for such a potentially dangerous event?
Nevertheless, let us just hope there isn’t some kind of asinine cosmic complication involved that somehow turns this asteroid into a fatal time bomb. Or rather, with the way this year has been, it’d probably deliver some kind of microscopic alien bacteria that would force us all to relive scenarios depicted in John Carpenter’s The Thing. Let’s just hope that isn’t how this particular asteroid turns out.