If you’re the type to worry, don’t click here — especially if
the type of worrying you do is about things that sound really,
really scary and that you have absolutely no control over.
Clicking on that site you really shouldn’t click on will take
you to a page on NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program website, which
lists every comet or asteroid of any size at all that will be
passing through Earth’s orbital neighborhood in the upcoming
days, months and years. The fact is, there are a whole lot more
of them than you likely know: from Feb. 5 to May 5 of this year,
no fewer than 77 space rocks that could, in theory have Earth’s
name on them, will be whizzing by. On March 20 alone, when you
may have been planning to celebrate the first day of spring,
there will be seven. Errant space rocks, of course, can do a lot
of damage. Our moon is believed to have been created when a
Mars-size planetesimal sideswiped the Earth 4.5 billion years
ago. The dinosaurs were all but certainly wiped out by a direct
hit by a far smaller p