Your Chances Of Being Hit By A Meteor?

The sky is falling, the sky is falling we've certainly heard a lot about that subject this week haven't we?

With the amazing video of a meteorite crashing to Earth in Russia and the subsequent damage it inflicted it is no doubt that people are a little worried. Don't be.

What if I told you your chance of being hit by a meteor would be about the same chances as you winning the lottery, twice. Your chances of being hit by a meteor are also about the same as you flipping a coin and having it come up heads, 44 times in a row.

If you want the official big number statistic, here it is, around a one in 20,000,000,000,000 chance of any particular person sized place on Earth actually being struck by a falling space object. NASA says if you include the population of the Earth into the equation the actually chances of any person being struck by a meteor is 1 in 3200. But the odds of you being that one person is 1 in 6,700,000,000.

Are there more objects falling from the sky than usual? Well according to American Meteor Society  in the past 45 days there have been reports of 345 fireballs reported. Compare that to last year for the same 45 day period when there were 2219 fireballs reported. The Earth is not under a meteor attack, nor is there a sudden up tick in astronomical activity. There was just a substantial sized piece of space rock that roared through the atmosphere and happened to be caught on video.

It's the joy of the internet, everything is instant, every thing could happen and most of it doesn't. So if you don't mind I'm going back to flipping my coin and playing the lottery from underneath a really strong table that should be able to withstand a direct impact.