You're More Likely to Die From an Asteroid Than Rabies, Scientists Find

If you have ever found yourself staring at the ceiling at 3 am, trying to work out the odds of dying in an asteroid impact during your lifetime, a newly published study has done the sums for you.

Researchers led by physicist Carrie Nugent at the Olin College of Engineering in the United States have estimated not only how often an asteroid is likely to strike Earth within an average human lifespan, but also how the chance of dying from such an event compares with several other rare yet avoidable causes of death.

The uncomfortable headline is that dying in an asteroid impact is more likely than dying from rabies. The even more uncomfortable follow-up is that dying in a car accident is more likely than dying in an asteroid impact.

The reassuring part is that all of these probabilities remain very small, so you can probably get on with life without constant dread (even if wearing a seat belt is still a wise move).

Why compare asteroid impact risk with other preventable deaths?

Setting the risk of death by asteroid impact alongside other preventable hazards is useful for more than curiosity. Pinning down the precise danger is hard, because there may be many more potentially hazardous asteroids than have been identified so far-but an asteroid impact could, in principle, be preventable too.

NASA provided a real-world demonstration in 2022, when it intentionally rammed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to alter its trajectory. The result exceeded expectations: the asteroid’s orbital change was substantially larger than predicted.

However, missions of this kind are expensive and require extensive preparation. When the risk of an asteroid impact is placed next to other risks, it becomes easier to weigh potential spending on asteroid-deflection efforts against the costs of other interventions-for example, a rabies vaccination programme or improvements in car safety features.

Carrie Nugent’s asteroid impact calculations (near-Earth objects over 140 metres)

To estimate the frequency of large impacts, Nugent and colleagues drew on available observations of near-Earth objects, models describing these populations, and earlier risk assessments focused on asteroids larger than 140 metres. Using that information, they derived an expected impact rate for objects in this size class.

They then gathered data on various causes of death and compared the probability that each event would happen during a typical global human lifetime, defined here as 71 years.

"Chapman and Morrison (1994) previously placed an asteroid impact in context with other causes of death such as murder, fireworks accidents, and botulism. In that work, they considered the chance of death due to an impact alongside the chance of death due to other factors," the researchers write.

"This work addresses a slightly different question; we place the chance of an impact occurring anywhere on Earth relative to the chance of other events of concern happening to an individual. This work is therefore intended to provide context to those who wish to know the probability that a greater-than-140-meter impact will occur, anywhere on Earth, in their lifetime."

The nine other fatal events included in the comparison

Alongside asteroid impacts, the team compiled figures for nine other potentially deadly events:

• Dry sand hole collapse (for instance, when someone digging a hole on a beach has the sand cave in on them)
• Elephant attack
• Lightning strike
• Skydiving accidents
• Carbon monoxide poisoning
• Injury-causing car crash
• Rabies
• Influenza illness

For each hazard, they first estimated how likely it is that an individual would experience the event, and then how likely it is that the individual would die as a consequence (since many people, for example, catch the flu and recover). The researchers note that these risks vary greatly by region; someone living in Australia, for instance, is far less likely than someone in the United States to die from a coyote attack or rabies.

The outcomes are presented in the paper’s graph. Influenza is roughly as deadly as an asteroid impact but occurs far more often; as a result, simple averages imply that it ends up killing more people than asteroids do. A dry sand hole collapse, by contrast, is usually fatal, yet the chance of it happening to a person within a lifetime sits at close to one in 1 million.

What these probabilities mean in real life

Even so, risk calculations like these need grounding in reality. Despite its rarity, more than three people a year die from dry sand hole collapse, with a tragic average age of 12. As far as we know, no humans have ever died from an asteroid impact. As the dinosaurs might tell you, the toll from a single strike could more than make up for a history of misses.

That leads to the obvious questions: is Earth “due” for another asteroid? Should we treat this as a genuine case for caution and prevention, or are we simply overthinking it? And does seeing the numbers make you feel better-or worse?

It is difficult to say. But if nothing else, it is probably sensible to keep your distance from sand holes.

The study will appear shortly in The Planetary Science Journal. For now, it can be read on the arXiv preprint server.