Eighteen Hours: How Close We Came to Catastrophe

At midnight Greenwich Mean Time on August 10th, 1998, an object designated ML 14 crossed Earth's orbital path at the exact point Earth itself had occupied just 18 hours earlier. That margin is worth sitting with. Had the timing been different by less than a day, had ML 14 arrived at that point around 6 a.m. the previous morning instead, the consequences would have unfolded with brutal speed. An area the size of France would have been completely devastated within minutes. By 8 a.m., most of the world's vegetation would have been burning. And by late October, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the human race would have been dead or dying. An event of that scale did not happen, but the margin between it happening and not happening was 18 hours, and that is the kind of number that ought to put the broader conversation about near-Earth objects into proper perspective.