A 10-kilometer planet-killer strikes Earth roughly every 100 million years. Humanity has not beaten the odds; at barely 300,000 years old, the species just has not been playing long enough.
Dinosaurs roamed the planet for 165 million years, giving probability millions of chances to deliver a catastrophic impact. In contrast, Homo sapiens arrived just a geological second ago. The odds of a civilization-ending rock intersecting with Earth's orbit during this brief window of human existence are exceptionally low.
Space debris still strikes Earth constantly, but the planet is well-protected. About 100 tons of dust, sand, and small rocks burn up in the atmosphere every day. When larger objects arrive, the atmosphere acts as a formidable shield. A car-sized asteroid hits Earth about once a year, detonating as a spectacular fireball rather than reaching the ground intact. Even an object the size of a football field—which strikes roughly every 2,000 years—would cause significant regional damage but fall far short of an existential threat to humanity.
The solar system itself has settled down considerably since its chaotic early days. Most large debris was swept up, consolidated into planets, or ejected billions of years ago. Jupiter’s immense gravitational pull acts as a stabilizing force, often deflecting long-period comets and rogue asteroids away from the inner solar system or absorbing them entirely, as it did with Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994.
Humanity is now actively altering its planetary odds. Astronomers have cataloged more than 95 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than 1 kilometer in diameter, and none are on a collision course with Earth for at least the next century. Rather than relying entirely on probability, space agencies are developing active planetary defense strategies. Missions like NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) have demonstrated the ability to alter an asteroid’s trajectory by colliding a spacecraft into it, proving that if a threat is discovered, a deflection mission is technologically feasible.