President Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren, said Earth is not fully prepared for a possible asteroid strike.
According to reports from DailyMail, he warned that an impact of the strike could do a potential damage to Earth and that people would have to be "smarter than dinosaurs" when such event comes.
"We are not fully prepared, but we are on a trajectory to get much more so," the chief science advisor said in a statement at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center regarding their talks about the agency's $1.4 billion Asteroid Redirect Mission.
He said that people should take matters like these seriously and cited the two catastrophic events in history - the February 2013 meteor explosion over the Russian City of Chelyabinsk and the 1908 Tunguska airburst.
The 2013 Chelyabinsk strike, injured about 1,200 people and was caused by an object that is thought to be about 20 meters wide. The Tunguska event, on the other hand, was believed to be much more massive because a space rock 40 meters exploded over a mostly unpopulated region of Siberia, which flattened 2,070 square kilometers of forest.
The 1908 and 2013 events were extremely rare, according to Holdren, with the Chelyabinsk strike to occur once every hundred years and the Tunguska airburst believed to occur every 1000 years. But no matter how rare these events happen, he stressed that people should have enough knowledge about these.
However, Holdren stated that if we are going to be as capable a civilization as our technology allows, we need to be prepared for even those rare events, because they could do a lot of damage to the Earth.
"This is a hazard that 65 million years ago the dinosaurs succumbed to. We have to be smarter than the dinosaurs," he said.
The chief advisor also added that if we are going to be as capable a civilization as our technology allows, we need to be prepared for even those rare events, because they could to a lot of damage to the Earth.
