Earth totally unprepared for surprise asteroid or comet strike, warns NASA scientist (Watch video)

New Delhi: The Earth, our home planet, is due for an “extinction-level” event like a comet or asteroid strike, but apparently humans are vastly unprepared at this point of time to deal with the situation.

As per reports, an award-winning NASA scientist has warned that human race at this moment remains ill-prepared for any such threat from outer space - especially the kind that has the potentical to wipe out humanity just as how it did to dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago.

Dr Joseph Nuth, of the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told attendees during Monday’s annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco that there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” The Guardian reported.

“But on the other hand, they are 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,” Nuth added.

Nuth noted that, while these kinds of cataclysmic collisions are rare in Earth’s history, they aren’t unrivalled.

Video credit: News 247/YouTube

There had been two near misses of an asteroid hitting a planet in the solar system - when a comet whirred into Jupiter in 1996 and the other in 2014 which passed perilously close to Mars. During this time, mankind did not have enough time and the appropriate technology to potentially avert it.

Urging policymakers to start preparing for such a possible cataclysmic strike, Nuth suggested that NASA needs to build at least two spacecraft - an interceptor rocket and an observer spacecraft - to mitigate such a threat.