I spotted a news item today posted on the CNN website with the following headline:

“Near-Earth asteroid Bennu could hit Earth in 157 years and set off a global ‘impact winter,’ study says”

At first blush it seemed like an article worth skipping, as I expect neither my wife nor myself to be alive in 157 years. But it then occurred to me that my offspring might well be around so I started to ponder the math.

After just a moment’s consideration I concluded that neither my daughter, her husband, nor their children will be around in 157 years either. And so I returned to the thought of skipping the article.

But then I began to wonder whether my grandchildren’s children might be alive then? So I ran the numbers: Nope.

Well, what about their children? Assuming they eventually have kids when they’re around 30 years old, and that these great-great-grandchildren of ours live to the ripe old age of 100? Nope, they’d still miss the asteroid collision by another 30 years or so. But wait, then what about their children?

Okay. Now I was finally getting somewhere. Not sure quite where that somewhere might be, but it got me thinking of a somewhat related question: How far into the future do I really care about the future?

It’s an interesting question. The farther (further?) into the future I go, the less I feel burdened by worrying about it. But this left me feeling pretty crummy about not caring about my grandchildren’s great-grandchildren. If my own ancestors had that attitude, who knows where (or if) I’d be now.

So, to dodge feeling like an insensitive ingrate I decided to actually read the CNN article. What follows is what I learned…

First of all, the scientists put the odds of this asteroid (named Bennu) from actually hitting the Earth at 1 in 2700 (i.e., a 0.037% chance). Clearly this headline was clickbait. Not terribly surprising given (1) it was on the web, and (2) it was CNN. But still.

What’s more, the size of Bennu is measured at about 500 meters wide. This compares favorably (if you’re pro-human survival) to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, which clocked in at over 6 miles wide (10 kilometers). Again, my anxiety is further eased.

The scientists went on to conclude that, although such a collision would be expected to cool off the planet considerably from the resulting atmospheric debris, humans would still likely survive.

Well, now I am actually rooting for the asteroid. It may well give the humans alive at that time (including my grandchildren’s great-grandchildren) some respite from global warming – a cosmic climate mulligan of sorts.

I’m not entirely sure how an extremely unlikely event like Bennu hitting the Earth – perhaps a good thing – but taking place 157 years from now – is something I really need to worry about.

Nonetheless, I’m certainly now wishing my grandchildrens’ great-grandchildren the very best of luck. Which is more than I was thinking about them before spotting the article. And now I don’t feel so badly about not having given them much thought from the outset.

In short, I’m clearly a better man for having been alerted to this breaking news from CNN.